KILLING EVE - SEASON ONE RETROSPECTIVE
GOOD: There is plenty of good to take from this series. For one the MVP easily is Jodie Comer. Portraying a role that perhaps frees her more so than any other role she’s done so far. It’s colourful, funny, sinister and complex. The accent range is a fun challenge that Comer conquers with little effort, and the fun of killing innocent people with a scary smile just adds brutal danger to her role. The variety of foreign cities and locations is also great. The mixture of cityscapes just makes this series feel international in nature. That these characters can go anywhere within the rules of this story. And the acting quality across the landscape is great. Sandra Oh and Fiona Shaw, in particular, are strong, giving performances that make their characters real and relatable people with uncut brutal opinions and ideas that go against what you may usually see in a TV series.
MIDDLING: The overall pacing of the story could be better. Some episodes are stronger than others, but it feels lacking of sorts of any true juice. It would’ve worked better as a film, given that the conclusion was changed perhaps to be more final. The work environments while realistic got irritating. There were one or two characters that just felt unattractive in the roles that they were in, and just made things a little so leisureable in settings like MI6 which we are meant to believe are very serious and focused places of work. Instead they are portrayed as the opposite.
BAD: There is a lot of unrealistic use of language. One of which is the Russian characters using English in places not UK based. I find it hard to believe that Russian assassins would use the English tongue so loosely when the Russian language seems to be more secretive and easier to disguise their true intentions. Then there is the use of scatty characteristics. As much as I love Sandra Oh’s performance, the scatty element of her character annoyed me a lot, especially in this first season ( I get a bit more used to it later on). I also found the music style unnessacary and distracting. Indie music for the sake of it, not really adding any significance of the story, and just taking me out altogether.
OVERALL: Killing Eve I is a good but not great start to the show. Elements obviously make this show stand out but at the same time flawed and problematic to those who aren’t as enthused or bothered by the show’s marketing of a duo female series which while a nice twist on an established sub-genre, isn’t as clever or innovative as the media has made it out to be.
RATING - 77% - B+