Spoilers below!
Killing Eve used to be one of my favorite shows. Entertaining, hilarious, glamorous, superbly acted, and gay as hell. Sure, of course Sandra Oh could only be paired with white people, and the writers play with their queer viewers every moment, teasing us. But so does every TV show, right? The buildup is like, half the romance. Changing the status quo is a big job in TV, after all. I did not peg it until the finale. That finale. The finale that changed everything — that made me realize what the show truly is. Queerbait.
I thought we’d started to move away from Burying Our Gays. Why must every queer couple have a devastating ending? Why are we never represented finding peace after all we have gone through?
The thing that gets me about that ending is the complete lack of explanation. While I can understand leaving it up to the imagination, and that Carolyn wanted to get the full benefits of The Twelve’s assassination without Villanelle in the way. Villanelle becomes a loose end.
And yet, as person involved in queer content issues (and while I am queer, you don’t have to be to know this), I know of this trope. I have written about the responsibility of creators who have the privilege of mass viewership, and I believe understanding the Bury My Gays trope is mandatory when representing queer characters. That does not mean we shy away from representation. But if you’re “representing” badly, aren’t you just…appropriating and baiting?
To combat this trope, we can give our queer characters a magical, beautiful ending. Yes, the show is called Killing Eve, and I get that. But every season had a different writer. If you’re going to Bury Your Gays in this homophobic world, we deserve a very, very, very good reason. And we didn’t get one. We didn’t get the courtesy of one at all, or something clear. I love leaving the audience to think, but not for thinking’s sake. Traumatizing your viewers and not helping them heal is just cruel. Killing Eve, ultimately, displayed that cruelty.
Laura Neal, the fourth season’s writer, seems to me to have been hell-bent on the characters not ending up together. So…what is the reason?
Killing Eve furthered a homophobic trope and did absolutely nothing for us except spend our exploited dollars on glitzy outfits and possibly accent training. It baited us — for years. Weeks of my life, gone. I learned a lot. But I will never forgive this. All of that time together, stolen away from them and us. Why? For what? So Laura, you can kindly fuck off unless you give me a damn good reason not to.
We never do get closure in life. I suppose I will get over this one day, in another life. But our gays will still be in their graves. May they finally rest in peace.