Killing Eve books vs show: the author says the TV finale punished Eve and Villanelle — his novels don't
Luke Jennings created Villanelle, and he thinks the show lost its nerve in its last five minutes.
Killing Eve ran for four seasons on BBC America, from 2018 to 2022, with Sandra Oh as MI5 officer Eve Polastri and Jodie Comer as Villanelle, the assassin she becomes obsessed with. Phoebe Waller-Bridge adapted it from Jennings' Codename Villanelle novellas, first published as ebooks in 2014, and each season after that had a new head writer. Laura Neal ran the fourth. Jennings had no official job on the show, but every episode credits him as the creator of the characters.
How the show ended
Spoilers for the series finale and the books ahead.
In the April 2022 finale, Eve and Villanelle finally get together. They kiss, track The Twelve to a wedding on a riverboat on the Thames, and Villanelle kills the people at the top. While the two celebrate on deck, a sniper hits Villanelle with several bullets. She falls into the river, Eve dives in after her, and the current takes her body away. Eve comes up screaming. The order came from Carolyn Martens, the MI6 spymaster who put Eve on Villanelle's trail in the first place.
Neal said the team did think about a happier version, "domestic Villanelle and Eve, like eating pizza together on the sofa." They dropped it.
"That happy ending just wouldn't last very long," Neal told BuzzFeed.
"It felt right that Eve has this rebirth," Neal said. Villanelle, in her words, "just sort of ascends to a higher place."
What Jennings said
Jennings answered in a Guardian column on April 22, 2022. "The final series ending took me aback," he wrote, and he called it "a bowing to convention."
His main charge was in one sentence: the finale was "a punishing of Villanelle and Eve" for "the bloody, erotically impelled chaos they have caused." He pointed to the long TV habit of killing off same-sex couples right after they get together, the one fans call "bury your gays," and said "a truly subversive storyline would have defied the trope."
The ending he wanted was the one he had already written, the pair walking off together. "Spoiler alert, but that's how it seemed to me when writing the books," Jennings wrote.
How the books end
The third novel, Die for Me, came out in 2020. Eve and Villanelle, whom she now calls by her real name, Oxana, are a couple on the run from The Twelve, and they cross from England to St. Petersburg hidden in a shipping container.
The climax is at the Bolshoi Theatre, during a performance of The Nutcracker attended by the American and Russian presidents. Both are murdered. Oxana, caught and unarmed, is shot in front of Eve.
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So the books shoot Villanelle too. What's different is what happens next:
- Who's behind it — on TV, Carolyn. In the book, FSB general Tikhomirov, who cut a deal with The Twelve and becomes Russia's next president.
- Villanelle's fate — on TV, she sinks into the Thames. In the book, Tikhomirov keeps Oxana alive, as a way of keeping Eve quiet.
- The last scene — on TV, Eve alone in the river. In the book, the two of them together, a year later.
That last scene is the pizza-on-the-sofa ending the show passed on. Eve and Oxana live in the suburbs of St. Petersburg. Oxana studies linguistics, Eve works for an online translation bureau, and a monthly payment covers most of what they need. Nobody takes any notice of them.
The book leaves them as "just two women gazing out over the frozen Neva river."
Villanelle comes back
Jennings ended his 2022 column with a message for upset fans: "Villanelle lives." Then came the promise: "And on the page, if not on the screen, she will be back."
She was, in June 2025. In the fourth novel, Killing Eve: Resurrection, Eve and Oxana are still living off-grid in Russia when The Twelve recruit Oxana back. Then Eve disappears, and the hunt for her runs from St. Petersburg to Paris to London.
The quiet life lasted one book, which is roughly what Neal predicted. Resurrection opens its blurb with Oxana: "I haven't kept her safe. Someone's taken her."
Previously we wrote: Sacred Games' ending, explained by its own writer — and he gives two answers, not one