“I Have a Thing About Bathrooms” – aired on May 6, 2018
Writer: Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Director: Jon East
Grade: 4,5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
“I Have a Thing About Bathrooms” picks up exactly where the previous episode ended, with Villanelle approaching Eve, Elena, and Frank in the car and taking a hot at them, as Eve is about to drive away. As I mentioned in my review of “Sorry Baby,” it was one of the best cliffhangers on TV in recent years, featuring the two leads coming face-to-face for the first time since becoming aware of each other’s identity. We spent four episodes leading up to this moment and writers cleverly teased us with that electrifying cliffhanger prior to making us wait for a week to see it unfold.
It starts with Villanelle missing the mark and Eve driving away in a rush. Villanelle continues to shoot as she runs after the car. Then, in a seemingly foolish move, Eve stops the car a hundred meters later and informs a horrified Frank and Elena that she wants to “talk to her.”
Frank, the ultimate scaredy cat concerned only with himself, has a far more tenable reaction: “Are you insane? She has been trying to kill me!”
Elena concurs: “Wake up Eve!”; “Stop being a dick!”
As an audience member of the show, I exclaim: Excuse me?
Never mind that Eve is endangering the lives of two other people in the car. Her inconceivable decision to engage in a chat with the assassin who just took not one, not two, not three, but a total of eight shots straight at her and the car she is driving, not only pushes the boundaries of plausibility but defies them. Furthermore, we know that Villanelle will not kill her anyway, although Eve walks right in front of her so that she can take that ninth fatal shot, because we know that Eve cannot die in the beginning of the fifth episode of an eight-episode-long season, in a show that carries her name in the title – “killing” is not pertinent at this point, obviously.
Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer perform well in the scene – we have come to expect nothing less – as they stare at each other. Villanelle toys with Eve for a few seconds, feigning to shoot herself, laughing, and then shooting at the ground by Eve’s feet, before she disappears. Yet, the acting alone is not enough to save a defectively formulated sequence with no apparent endgame. If the idea was to put on display a stare-into-each-other’s-eye moment, we saw plenty of that later in the episode in the most terrific face-to-face scene of the season. So why push the envelope so far – too far – to have one here? Eve is a psycho in her own way as I have noted before, but she is definitely not an idiot. Unfortunately, this scene goes to great lengths to make her appear as one.
Eve and Elena eventually take Frank the buffoon to a safe house where Carolyn Martens awaits them in a stance that only Fiona Shaw can make look that bland and imposing at the same time – kudos to director Jon East for the shot. Frank is not forthcoming with information at first – he claims to be hyperventilating, too weak to talk – but Martens has a remedy: “I know exactly what he needs,” she says to Eve. She hugs Frank to comfort him and the infantile head of MI5 begins to spill it all out with his head nestled on her shoulder and neck.
Time for me to go on a tangent. Thank heavens, we are done with Frank! I questioned more than once how a clown like him ever came to helm such a high-profiled intelligence agency and feared that he would be reduced to Killing Eve’s comic-relief pill. It happened just as I feared, and I found myself almost cheering for Villanelle as she was getting ready to eliminate him forever. Darren Boyd portrayed him formidably – just see how he delivers the line “Priorities!” – but by the fifteenth minute of this episode, it was clear that Frank the buffoon has long outlived his usefulness and was becoming a distraction for the team, as well as a nuisance to the show’s narrative.
Eve and Carolyn learn that the people behind Villanelle call themselves “The Twelve.” These well-connected people knew everything about the condition of Frank’s wife and used it to lure him into their web. Frank’s contact agent is Russian and he refers to them as “Russians,” but he cannot be certain that they are indeed Russians. “They are interested in the big picture,” he says. They are also proud of Villanelle, and Frank adds that there is “a pattern to these kills. They’re destabilizing from the ground up” – whatever that entails.
Eventually Eve leaves the safehouse to go home, not before she breaks the glass at a bus stop for no apparent reason other than being annoyed by a crack on it. Oh’s powerhouse performance elevates the enigma of this solo scene, hinting at the existence of a space hidden deep within her psyche in which a yearning for bliss through violence is brewing.
Dispersed within these initial twenty minutes are wonderful lines dropped here and there, pointing to other developments. Kenny is particularly – and affectionately – concerned about Elena who, for her part, is concerned with Carolyn’s perception of her. As she is leaving the safehouse, she specifically turns to face Carolyn and say with a bitter tone, “Other than that, Carolyn, I had an amazing day.” She turns back on her heels and leaves as Carolyn and Eve, both stupefied, stare at each other. We know Elena is infatuated with Carolyn, but is there something more than that here?
Carolyn, meanwhile, seems to be overly preoccupied with Kenny’s well-being. Eve is confused by that but she reassures Carolyn that she will keep an eye out for him. Little we know, at that moment, that Kenny is her son. We, along with Eve, discover that fact later, after she walks into Carolyn’s house and finds Kenny eating dinner with the family.
In an important background development for Villanelle, we learn that her real name is Oksana Astonkova – I’ll continue referring to her as Villanelle, thank you very much –, that she is either Russian or Ukrainian (not clear), that she was born in 1993 and supposedly died in 2014, and that she was at the time serving a prison sentence because “she chopped [some guy’s] knob off,” all courtesy of the resident tech wiz Kenny who manages to dig up her records somewhere in the depths of Russian and Ukrainian data files.
We finally understand how Konstantin knew instantly what the team was up to when Frank the buffoon tells Carolyn and Eve that he told the Russians about it because he suspected it. For once, Frank’s intuition was correct. It’s a solid pay-off to the nagging mystery of them’s instant awareness of the existence of Eve’s operation since the second episode, one that would have turned into a major plot hole had it gone unexplained (see my reviews of episodes two and three). It would not have even worked if Frank revealed that he simply told them, because he did not know for sure that it existed. By inserting Frank’s line “I thought you were still investigating after you interrogated me,” the writers are making it clear that Frank was simply speculating about the existence of Eve’s team (although he was right) when he told the Russian agent, thus bringing this lingering question to a close, Their attention to detail should not go unnoticed. Well done, writing room!
Apparently, police found only one body where Villanelle seemed to have killed her two assassin-colleagues in the last episode. We will find out later, from Konstantin, that Nadia somehow survived Villanelle’s rolling of the jeep over her twice.
All these tidbits of information are well-paced in their delivery and help overcome the hangover lasting from the baffling opening scene, before the episode peaks with the extraordinary face-off segment between Eve and Villanelle.
This powerhouse scene featuring tour-de-force performances by Comer and Oh deserves to be seen, several times, rather than read in a review. Therefore, too fearful of not doing it justice by a detailed recap, I will simply say that it starts with a petrifying chase scene within the house that finishes in the bathtub, continues with a witty dialogue by the dinner table followed by a stare-down, touchy-feely, knife-to-the-trachae stand off by the refrigerator (not to mention the evocative score), and ends with Villanelle meeting the rest of Eve’s family as she leaves the house. Trust me folks, my summary is only ten percent of all the meaningful messages conveyed in this thrilling 12-minute-long sequence. No wonder why the promos for the show have repeatedly included parts of this scene since they began airing before the show even started.
Remember the following one?
Eve: “Are you a psychopath?”
Villanelle: “You should never tell a psychopath they are a psychopath. It upsets them.”
Eve: “Are you upset?”
[Villanelle purses her lips and nods]
Yes, that one. It’s there. Get to it.
The last third of the episode largely tackles Frank’s doomed fate. Villanelle toys with him for a while before finally, you guessed it, “chopping his knob off.” The special-ops team naturally arrives too late to save Frank who lies dead on the bed with Villanelle’s dress spread on top of his body, the same one that Eve wore earlier, before Villanelle busted into her house.
The hour ends with Villanelle having a conversation with Konstantin. The name Anna, that we heard back in “I’ll Deal with Him Later,” comes up again. She is surprised to hear that Nadia survived but that is nothing compared to the shock that she delivers to Konstantin’s system when she asks him what number he is out of The Twelve. Apparently, they were unknown to her too. Konstantin can only respond with “Oh dear,” as one last shot focuses on Villanelle looking menacingly straight into his eyes. She is a threat to anyone and everyone, and that appears to include Konstantin.
What better way to finish the review than with one of Killing Eve‘s strengths? Here is yet another brilliant one-liner:
Carolyn informs a bewildered Eve that Kenny is her son and adds:
“We have no time for you to react to that, so don’t feel that you have to.”
Until next episode…