Killing Eve Season 4 Showrunner Laura Neal on Finding the Right Series Ending

BBC America original series Killing Eve has revolved around its central pair of two women who begin as foes but then evolve into something much more twisty and complex: MI5 analyst Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and skilled but psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Although Eve begins looking into Villanelle’s killings with a professional interest, their relationship inevitably takes a more mutually obsessive turn, and the two seem to be destined for a final collision course that could be as explosive as it is long-awaited.

With the series preparing to air its fourth and final season, Collider had the chance to speak with showrunner Laura Neal, who worked in the writers’ room on Season 3 and takes the helm on the show to wrap up Killing Eve‘s most complicated plotlines. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Neal discusses why Season 4 doesn’t pick up immediately after the cliffhanger of Season 3, what’s motivating Villanelle’s desire to seek religion, the glimmers of darkness that are starting to become more prominent in Eve, and the position that former MI6 section chief Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) finds herself in when the season begins. She also talks about the pressure to find the “right” ending for the series, how involved Oh and Comer were in story discussions, and which word she would use to describe the final episode.

Collider: You obviously have been involved with the show, you were in the writers’ room before now, but in terms of making the transition to steering the ship in the final season, what was that process like?

LAURA NEAL: In some ways, it was really helpful that I had experience on Season 3 because it meant that I really knew those characters and I could kind of hit the ground running in Season 4. I think it was always going to be challenging, regardless of how much I’d worked on the season previously, to craft the final ever season of Killing Eve. So I knew that it was going to be a big responsibility and a big job, but I was really excited to do it because I had such a good time writing Season 3, and I love writing for those characters, and for those actors. I was more excited than I was nervous about taking it on.

At the end of Season 3, there’s a bit of a cliffhanger, or maybe a bridge-hanger, and we don’t pick up immediately where we left off with Eve and Villanelle. What was the motivation behind putting in that time jump, and what does it say about where this relationship is when we find them at the start of Season 4?

NEAL: I felt like it was important to find the relationship in a different place at the start of Season 4, and a place that we haven’t seen it in before. It felt exciting to me that we jumped forward, and both of those characters are in extremely different emotional places to where we left them at the end of Season 4. I think you can see the thread that runs from the end of Season 3 to the start of Season 4, emotionally, for both of them. Villanelle has said that she wants out, she wants it to stop, and for me, it motivates her desire for change. [With] Eve, she wants it to stop as well, and actually, that’s motivating her desire for revenge. So, those felt like they were progressions from the bridge.

In terms of their relationship towards one another, I was excited by this idea that they’re now in a place where they can find each other very easily, that the cat-and-mouse game has moved on. It’s not like one of them is chasing the other necessarily. It’s almost like they’ve got each other’s phone numbers in their phone book, and the distance between them is a distance that’s been emotionally set by Eve. Because she understands the power that Villanelle has over her, and she knows that if she lets Villanelle in, in that way, she won’t get done what she needs to get done, and what she needs to get done is revenge on the Twelve. So that for me is a really interesting dynamic that we haven’t seen before, and a different iteration of the power dynamic between them.

RELATED: ‘Killing Eve’ Season 4: Jodie Comer & Sandra Oh on Eve’s Revenge and Villanelle’s Desire to Change

Villanelle’s journey, at least at the beginning of the season, starts with her having the intention of wanting to be a good person. Whether or not she’s successful in that is something that plays out [over the season]. Is it something that she’s doing for herself, or is it a little bit of her trying to get Eve’s attention in another way?

NEAL: We spoke about that a lot in the writers’ room and what the sort of ratio is of Villanelle doing this for herself and Villanelle doing this to prove something to Eve. In truth, there’s both of those elements in Villanelle. I do believe she is doing this at her core for herself. I do think she wants a different way of living, and I think she wants a different future for herself. That’s the overriding drive, but it’d be foolish of us to say that there’s not an element of wanting to prove Eve wrong in there as well, and that’s what pulls her back to Eve in that first episode.

Eve’s journey, meanwhile, is definitely laser-focused on this agenda of taking down the Twelve, cutting the head off of the snake. But we’re also seeing the darker sides of her that are starting to peek out. What kind of path is she headed on this season?

NEAL: I think that part, to be honest. I was really excited by this idea of an Eve untethered and an Eve who has finally done away with doing the right or the good thing, and now she’s just doing what she wants to do for herself. Konstantin says to her, “Whatever you’re doing, you’re not going to get out of it alive.” And she says, “Thank God.” That’s a really important line for me because it shows the depths of Eve’s nihilism at the very beginning of the season. Instead of that being a bad thing, for Eve it’s a really freeing thing. She doesn’t have any responsibility, she can act without fear of the consequences because she’s kind of burned everything to the ground in her life. That feels like an Eve that we’ve never seen before, and that feels really exciting to me. It kind of feels like she’s almost come full circle.

Another character we’re seeing in a place that we really maybe haven’t seen to this extent before is Carolyn. There’s something that feels a little bit sad to me about her this season and what she’s going through, where she’s ended up, cut off from a lot of things and having to rely on people that maybe she didn’t necessarily envision having to rely on. I’m curious about the decision to bring her to a place that we haven’t seen in seasons past.

NEAL: That was definitely a deliberate decision. The question of status and Carolyn is really interesting, and one we talked about a lot. She is somebody who is so used to being 10 steps ahead of everybody else, and that’s the place that she thrives in. She loves that. It’s essentially about having more information than anyone else and the power that lends you. Where we see her at the start of Season 4 is that’s been taken away from her. She doesn’t have the apparatus around her that she needs to maintain her hierarchy, in the way that she normally does. What I was interested in with Carolyn is: Can you watch this woman get back to that place? Can she scrabble her way back up when all of her resources have been stripped from her, and she has lost her son, and she hasn’t found out why or who ultimately is the cause of that? It’s watching her try and get back in the game, and for me, that’s the thing that Carolyn finds the most important thing in the world.

I love that we get more of what makes this show so good this season, which is the dark humor paired with some fairly intense moments early on. How did you try to walk that line between something that will make a viewer smile in one moment and then make their jaw drop, sometimes even in the same scene?

NEAL: That comes down a little bit to the sensibility of the writers. You know, most of the writers in that writers’ room are, to some extent, comedy writers, and they certainly all have comedy leanings. And that felt really important, actually, because comedy is so central to the show. Something we were really aware of is that, in Killing Eve, a character has to come first and comedy has to come second, and sometimes you have to remind yourself of that, because it’s very tempting to do gags for Villanelle, [or] do gags for Carolyn especially, and you have to kind of rein yourself in because it’s not a gag-based show. The jokes that work in Killing Eve are the ones that arrive from deep inside of these characters rather than situational. But in terms of the darkness of the humor, that’s just the personalities of the people writing the show, to be honest. For better or worse.

I feel like it’s not an exaggeration to say that there are a lot of eyes on how the show is going to end. Did you ever feel any pressure to get it right, to find an ending that felt right?

NEAL: Yeah, of course. It feels like a massive responsibility to get it right for the show and for those incredible characters, and we had a lot of discussion about it. We talked about it endlessly. Right from the very beginning in the writers’ room, it felt important that we needed to know where we were headed, and it changed, and it grew organically. Even at script stage, I must have written 10 different versions of that ending. So it was really important to sort of get it right and to make sure that the ending honored the journey that these women have been on.

[With] Sandra and Jodie, the show is built around that relationship, but also the performances that they bring in. How involved were they in any kind of story decisions in terms of the finale? Did they have any input?

NEAL: For sure. Yeah. It was constant conversation between me and Sandra and Jodie and the writers’ room, and they were very involved in those discussions. Of course, they’ve lived inside of these characters for four seasons. They really know them inside out, and it would’ve been amiss of me not to include them in those discussions because it’s so valuable where they think those characters are going.

If you had to describe the last episode of Killing Eve in one word, what would you say?

NEAL: I would describe the last episode as glorious.

Killing Eve Season 4 airs Sundays at 8 PM ET on BBC America, with episodes also available to stream Sunday on AMC+.

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