S03.E05: Are You From Pinner?

[TimWil]

I was, to be honest, a tad disappointed that Villanelle didn’t track down and murder the truck driver who almost ran her down in the opening scene.

I was amused to hear the conspiracy theorist stepbrother mention British conspiracy theorist David Icke. Icke, a former professional soccer player and sports broadcaster,  has most recently claimed that the current pandemic was a cover for a supposed global world order to purposefully crash the economy, end the use of cash payments and track every individual.

Edited May 12, 2020 by TimWil

[MDKNIGHT]

The thing I find the most unrealistic is that professionals would put up with V.  Isn't the best way to be an assassin to make everything look like accidents and only kill your targets?  

 

Also felt bad the bros will have to find a place to live and support themselves.  I don't think they will be able to use the money for a concert.

[Rickster]

On 5/10/2020 at 11:41 PM, rur said:

This practice is starting to irritate me. Since they always have time to show them as omitted scenes while not exceeding the one-hour broadcast window, then why aren't they just incorporated into the show?  Is it so we won't notice how many commercials there actually are? 

I’m pretty sure they do this to try to stop people who watch these shows via DVR from zipping past all the commercials. They hope you stop to watch the scene and catch a commercial or two as a bonus.

Count me as one who got pretty bored with this episode. I didn’t mind the trip to Russia, but I thought they could have kept it to about half the episode and used the rest of the time on the other characters. After all, there are only a few episodes left this season.

 

[buttercupia]

Oksana on the train wearing that thing her mother made for her and fighting to understand her emotions was incredible.

[rur]

2 hours ago, Rickster said:

I’m pretty sure they do this to try to stop people who watch these shows via DVR from zipping past all the commercials. They hope you stop to watch the scene and catch a commercial or two as a bonus.

That's a reason I can understand, but dislike. I've been muttering to myself, "Geez, guys, three seasons in and you haven't figured out how to cut a show to fit the timeframe?"

[enoughcats]

10 hours ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

I wish that Villanelle's reaction to the Flat Earth comments weren't spoiled by previews/commercials.  Then it would have had so much more comedic impact on me.

Are the fast entry into the commercials so we'll replay the commercial as we are trying to get the show content to be separate?  Same with the less than a minute long left-out scenes?

Are TPTB charging more for commercials that may get replayed by the audience?

[ElectricBoogaloo]

Ha, OF COURSE Fyodr and Yula are flat earth conspiracy theorists who think the moon landing was a hoax.

I didn't expect Konstantin to actually give Villanelle her family's contact information. I thought he would say they were dead or have her meet a fake family to appease her (maybe agents who were told to pretend to be her family). I was really surprised that he found the info and had her go visit them. 

I loved when Villanelle got into the shell game. The different festival activities cracked me up, but the dung throwing was by far the best. Villanelle was so excited to win. Yula's "performance group" was hilariously bad.

The most I liked Oksana's family was when they were all singing Crocodile Rock. I would bet that at first they just kind of rolled their eyes at Bor'ka's Elton John obsession but over time they have come to embrace it, which I found sweet. 

It seemed like Villanelle was letting down her wall and letting herself be a part of the family, but once her little brother told her what their mother had said to her, it was over. I found it telling that Villanelle said, "I think I have to kill you." It wasn't so much that she thought it would make her feel better but that she felt she HAD to kill her, partly to free Bor'ka and Pyotr from her. She knew that their mother made Pyotr feel like he had to stay (he said she NEEDED him, despite the fact that she also had a husband and a stepson around the house to take care of things), and she didn't want Bor'ka growing up with any more of their mother's emotional manipulation. 

[MicheleinPhilly]

14 hours ago, nameless slob said:

 

This reminded me that Villanelle cried during an episode on season 1, I believe it was season one.

In the end of the episode, the one where she beats up a woman on the bathroom of a club and Konstantin drags her out.

I remember she was crying looking in the mirror and smiling as well from the fact she was indeed crying and actually  feeling something.

That was in season 2 in Amsterdam after Eve didn't come to "see" her pig kill. Carolyn sent Jess instead.

But she also did shed tears in season 1 (at Eve's kitchen table and with Konstantin when she broke into his house). With Eve there was a certain amount of manipulation with the tears but I think some of them were genuine. Which is why I find her expressions of emotion when taken as a whole across 3 seasons to be so fascinating. Thus far we know the only people to "get to her" are her family, Konstantin, and Eve.  

[Ms Blue Jay]

1 hour ago, ElectricBoogaloo said:

It seemed like Villanelle was letting down her wall and letting herself be a part of the family, but once her little brother told her what their mother had said to her, it was over. I found it telling that Villanelle said, "I think I have to kill you." It wasn't so much that she thought it would make her feel better but that she felt she HAD to kill her, partly to free Bor'ka and Pyotr from her. She knew that their mother made Pyotr feel like he had to stay (he said she NEEDED him, despite the fact that she also had a husband and a stepson around the house to take care of things), and she didn't want Bor'ka growing up with any more of their mother's emotional manipulation. 

That's interesting.  I took it as something inside her pushing her, "forcing" her to kill her mother.  Like I said earlier, she needed to do it to resolve something inside herself.  She didn't say it right after the Bor'ka incident, but rather, after having a conversation with her mother, trying to get to the bottom of things.  She also was very emotional when she said it, as if she didn't really 'want' to kill her or even bother doing so, but something inside was forcing her.  She seemed to be resisting something or going through an emotional struggle.  That's just how I took the scene.

Villanelle knew she had to kill her mother, but she also practically wanted to make sure Bor'ka and Pyotr were safe and separate from it.  The rest, who cares.

[ams1001]

1 hour ago, ElectricBoogaloo said:

I didn't expect Konstantin to actually give Villanelle her family's contact information. I thought he would say they were dead or have her meet a fake family to appease her (maybe agents who were told to pretend to be her family). I was really surprised that he found the info and had her go visit them. 

I thought about that, too, but I didn't realize V was old enough to remember her family when she was sent to the orphanage, so I guess a fake family wouldn't have worked.

1 hour ago, ElectricBoogaloo said:

I loved when Villanelle got into the shell game. The different festival activities cracked me up, but the dung throwing was by far the best. Villanelle was so excited to win. Yula's "performance group" was hilariously bad.

I don't know what the actual words were, but I loved the woman clearly telling her to get the hell away from her table before she won all the prizes (not sure if it was real money or tickets to be used for stuff at the fair or something like that).

[tennisgurl]

I admit that I really wanted to see more of the fall out from Niko being killed, and that this seemed like another weird tangent episode that this show has been doing a lot, where its more about the style than the substance, but I did find getting more into the psychology of Villanelle and meeting her family to be quite interesting. At times I think this show gets too obsessed with Villanelle to the point that they make her too much of a cartoon or that they spend too much time on her to the detriment of Eve, who is needed as the more normal perspective to the madness of Villanelle, but this is the stuff about her that I find interesting. 

Villanelle is a sociopath, or possibly more of a psychopath, but I think that she wants to be more of a "normal" person, she wants to have normal relationships with people, she wants to feel the way other people do, but she just cant quite get a handle on it. Its just not what makes her tick, she isn't fully capable of it. She has this emptiness in her that she cant fill. She tries to fill it with luxurious clothes, beautiful apartments in beautiful cities, lots of nice things, as well as trying to keep herself from getting bored by killing people in new and exciting ways, but it just never fills her void. She wants connections with people, but she doesn't really know what a healthy relationship looks like, so instead she gets these obsessive crushes and other such things, which usually still ends with her trying or succeeding in killing them or people around them, and I think meeting her mom really explains a lot about her. Its a real combination of both nurture and nature with her. Her mom is also some variation of sociopath, but she is more of a "normal" sociopath, someone who just doesn't have empathy for others, and while they have emotions, they are muddled and usually filtered through a rather narcissistic lens, but they dont run around killing people and eating livers, they just kind of float through life and depending on how they are brought up, that can sometimes lend to them being very successful, as their ruthless nature can take them far up the corporate ladder, or it can just lead to them kind of just going with the flow, uncaring about most things beyond the next thing that can hold their interest. The actress playing the mom did a great job, she just had these dead eyes, especially when Villanelle was confronting her about her being a bad parent, and I think that she knows about her own darkness, and that she saw it in Villanelle, and just didn't want to deal with it. She couldn't imagine being stuck with a tiny version of her, so she cut and ran. While tiny Villanelle was certainly born like this, I also think that she was also with people early on that nurtured that darkness inside of her, that really encouraged her worst impulses and that also helped to create the Villanelle we know today. Her natural sociopath nature was the gun, but everything that happened after was the bullet.  

Villanelle isn't really a normal assassin, more like a serial killer who someone found and realized they could direct her murder urges somewhere that could benefit them. Like if Dexter was raised by a spy master and not a cop. 

Her scenes with Bor'ka and Pyotr were quite interesting, and while I figured that the rest of the family was dead the second Villanelle walked inside, I spent a lot of time wondering how they would end up, and she not only spared them, but left them her money, which, for Villanelle, is a pretty selfless action. It is also interesting that, while they have the same mom as Villanelle, they both seem to be pretty normal, albeit also being rather quirky. Presumably though, if their mom saw any of herself in them, she would have dumped them off somewhere as well, because raising a bad seed is hard when your also a bad seed. Really, the stuff with her brothers is probably as close as we have seen Villanelle really show what looks like empathy towards anyone, and maybe even some actual compassion, and not just the creepy obsessiveness or vague amusement she has towards most everyone. 

Its also interesting how she just refuses to speak Russian unless she absolutely has to, even when she is in actual Russia and speaking it would make things much more convenient for her, and she is clearly fluent. I guess speaking Russian ties her too much to Oksana, orphan girl from nowhere, while now she wants to be Villanelle, international woman of mystery, tied to no place in particular. 

[sugarbaker design]

31 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:

Its also interesting how she just refuses to speak Russian unless she absolutely has to, even when she is in actual Russia and speaking it would make things much more convenient for her, and she is clearly fluent. I guess speaking Russian ties her too much to Oksana, orphan girl from nowhere, while now she wants to be Villanelle, international woman of mystery, tied to no place in particular. 

I thought that was the most distracting plot point.  "Can we all speak a different language while I'm here?" was just so bizarre!  It would've been less distracting to have the TARDIS translate for everyone.

[Arkay]

3 hours ago, sugarbaker design said:

I thought that was the most distracting plot point.  "Can we all speak a different language while I'm here?" was just so bizarre!  It would've been less distracting to have the TARDIS translate for everyone.

I thought it was jarring that everyone in a working-class, very rural part of Russia would be so fluent in English. I've long taught English in NYC, in a neighborhood that has morphed into an overwhelmingly Russian and Ukrainian enclave. My students are 13 and 14 years old, and a great majority of them do not speak English at all. Not even the children from major cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. It's a lot to learn our alphabet when they are accustomed to Cyrillic. Generally they need at least a year of immersion in English before they can read, write and speak rudimentary English, and fluency takes about two years. 

It is possible that the step-father, step-brother and mother could know some English. I can't see them being so fluent unless they work for an international company, which doesn't appear to be the case. Yes,  TV and music (like Elton John) helps a lot, but I couldn't at all see Bor'ka being able to read Villanelle's note about the barn, written in English.

As to why Villanelle opted to speak exclusively in English, there could be so many reasons. She wants to be difficult, or she wants to feel superior, or it amuses her, or Jodie Comer isn't able to communicate in Russian to that degree.

Edited May 12, 2020 by Arkay

[Loandbehold]

On 5/11/2020 at 1:20 AM, mxc90 said:

Nice planning for the writers to have Oksana kill her mother on "Mother's day".

It actually was serendipity of a kind. Due to the pandemic, The Walking Dead wasn't able to finish it's last two episodes. So AMC moved up Killing Eve by two weeks. But for that, Sunday night's episode would have been Episode 3.3 instead of 3.5.

[TimWil]

I like to think that when Villanelle eventually gets around to finishing off Dasha she’ll say to her “You want to know how I killed my mother? I did it LIKE THIS...”

Edited May 13, 2020 by TimWil

[catrice2]

19 hours ago, MDKNIGHT said:

The thing I find the most unrealistic is that professionals would put up with V.  Isn't the best way to be an assassin to make everything look like accidents and only kill your targets?  

 

Also felt bad the bros will have to find a place to live and support themselves.  I don't think they will be able to use the money for a concert.

I think it depends on whether or not you are trying to send a message to someone else or not.  There are different types of assassins 

[Loandbehold]

12 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

It is also interesting that, while they have the same mom as Villanelle, they both seem to be pretty normal, albeit also being rather quirky.

Pyotr did have that scene where V sees him taking an axe to a sofa and he says it's b/c of his anger. While that doesn't make him a psychopath, it does reflect some darkness in him. 

[gatopretoNYC]

Why did Pyotr sleep in the barn, rather than the house?

And of course Villanelle would nail the shell game. 😁 

[sugarbaker design]

3 hours ago, gatopretoNYC said:

Why did Pyotr sleep in the barn, rather than the house?

So Villanelle didn't have to write two notes and set two alarm clocks!

[ElectricBoogaloo]

6 hours ago, Loandbehold said:

Pyotr did have that scene where V sees him taking an axe to a sofa and he says it's b/c of his anger. While that doesn't make him a psychopath, it does reflect some darkness in him. 

They have both found ways to channel their darkness and violence, but I found it telling that Villanelle told him that if he hurt people, he would feel better. I think for Villanelle, killing is similar to self medicating with drugs. It temporarily makes her feel good but it doesn't actually put a salve on what's really wrong.

[ams1001]

10 hours ago, Loandbehold said:

Pyotr did have that scene where V sees him taking an axe to a sofa and he says it's b/c of his anger. While that doesn't make him a psychopath, it does reflect some darkness in him. 

And Bor'ka bangs his head against the wall and punches himself in the head. At least Pyotr seems to have found a slightly healthier outlet.

7 hours ago, gatopretoNYC said:

Why did Pyotr sleep in the barn, rather than the house?

Must have been a starry night (he said he liked to look at the stars through the roof).

Edited May 13, 2020 by ams1001

[stealinghome]

I also got the sense that since he was "the stepbrother," he either got a little shafted and/or just wanted to escape the house with the asshole stepbrother (the episode made a point of showing the guy being a jerk to Pyotr) and his creepy mom.

[kieyra]

This should have been an episode that bored me, with a one-two punch of “the kooky, hick family back home” and “guess who’s going to die”, neither of which are story beats that I enjoy. But Comer’s performance kept me riveted. Emmy reel.

[ams1001]

I don't know if I missed something or what, but can someone explain the episode title to me?

[Ms Blue Jay]

20 hours ago, gatopretoNYC said:

Why did Pyotr sleep in the barn, rather than the house?

And of course Villanelle would nail the shell game. 😁 

Maybe he hates his mother and that's his, like, tiny semblance of freedom 😞

What do we already know about Konstantin and Dasha's connections to Villanelle?  No spoilers or anything, can someone recap what we ALREADY know?  I miss a lot of nuance.

Edited May 14, 2020 by Ms Blue Jay

[Ms Blue Jay]

1 hour ago, ams1001 said:

I don't know if I missed something or what, but can someone explain the episode title to me?

Bor'ka, that little sweetheart, is obsessed with Elton John.  I Google'd Pinner after the episode, and yup -- that's where Elton John is from.  So I forget how Villanelle introduced herself to him, but she certainly spoke English, so Bor'ka got excited and figured she might be from England, and she might know Elton John.

I *think* it was Bor'ka who asked her the question.

[kieyra]

8 hours ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

Maybe he hates his mother and that's his, like, tiny semblance of freedom 😞

What do we already know about Konstantin and Dasha's connections to Villanelle?  No spoilers or anything, can someone recap what we ALREADY know?  I miss a lot of nuance.

Just throwing it out there, but back in season 1 V pointed out more than once that it was weird that Konstantin had never slept with her. This seems like it could be a hint that he's her real father. This season he mentioned that he'd seen pictures of her when she was a baby. 

This episode makes it clear that V remembers her father, though--but I suppose there's no guarantee that the man she remembers was her 'real' father.

I haven't picked up much from Dasha about V's past. 

[ams1001]

8 hours ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

Bor'ka, that little sweetheart, is obsessed with Elton John.  I Google'd Pinner after the episode, and yup -- that's where Elton John is from.  So I forget how Villanelle introduced herself to him, but she certainly spoke English, so Bor'ka got excited and figured she might be from England, and she might know Elton John.

Ah, thank you! I did google Pinner but didn't come up with anything related to Elton John (though I didn't look past the first handful of results, either).

8 hours ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

I *think* it was Bor'ka who asked her the question.

Yeah, I think you're right.

[Ms Blue Jay]

56 minutes ago, kieyra said:

Just throwing it out there

Thank you, @kieyra !

[MicheleinPhilly]

1 hour ago, kieyra said:

Just throwing it out there, but back in season 1 V pointed out more than once that it was weird that Konstantin had never slept with her. This seems like it could be a hint that he's her real father. This season he mentioned that he'd seen pictures of her when she was a baby. 

This episode makes it clear that V remembers her father, though--but I suppose there's no guarantee that the man she remembers was her 'real' father.

I haven't picked up much from Dasha about V's past. 

I've always been under the impression that Konstantin recruited her from prison and Dasha trained her. 

But I do think there is more there in terms of her relationship with Konstantin. I mean, why would you see a baby picture of an assassin you recruited? And how would he have gotten access to it? Perhaps from the orphanage? *shrugs* 

I'm cautiously optimistic that we are going to get some additional insight into her relationship with Konstantin in these last 3 episodes. 

[roughing it]

2 hours ago, MicheleinPhilly said:

But I do think there is more there in terms of her relationship with Konstantin. I mean, why would you see a baby picture of an assassin you recruited? And how would he have gotten access to it? Perhaps from the orphanage? *shrugs*

I would think that Constantin would have "vetted" Villannelle if he was recruiting her for an assassin career.  And for such an assignment, he (or The Twelve) would look all the way back as far as they could, even to childhood.

I don't get that he's V's father, but he's definitely a father figure, and any mention of him sleeping with V is eewy squicky.

[Joimiaroxeu]

Guess I'm one of the few people who didn't much enjoy this episode, though I was impressed with Jodie Comer's acting.

I didn't feel a whole episode was needed to show why Villanelle turned out like she did, and that she was likely better off having been abandoned as a child by the woman who birthed her. But at this point, now that the scales have fallen from Villanelle's eyes about the family and bucolic lifestyle she missed growing up in, I feel like she has no more excuses to keep killing.

[enoughcats]

I don't think this has been talked about, yet.  

Vil. approached her step-father and asked him about his previous wives.  He (IIRC) blew off her inquiry and said something like "I'm with your Mother now and I love her."

Was Vil. after info that her Mom might have eliminated the other wives?  

Trying to put a time line into birthing of Vil and her siblings and half sib.

Vil.

Her step brother

Her full brother

*******

Mum changes husbands

Her younger half Brother. 

At what age did Vil. get taken to the orphanage? Did her full brother remember her or just that he heard about her because he was so young when she disappeared. He seemed to remember her face, and she definitely knew his name. So the asterisks above indicate her trip in relative time to the orphanage. 

[Milburn Stone]

On 5/10/2020 at 10:41 PM, rur said:

This practice is starting to irritate me. Since they always have time to show them as omitted scenes while not exceeding the one-hour broadcast window, then why aren't they just incorporated into the show?  Is it so we won't notice how many commercials there actually are? 

My theory: They know people zap commercials, and the signal to stop zapping is that little TV-14 in the upper left corner. So something comes on with that, and you stop zapping. And then it turns out it's a fakeout. But you watch it and then the next commercial because you figure you're almost there.

[ElectricBoogaloo]

Villanelle's Game Night

 

[chaifan]

I liked this episode and the focus on V.   I do wish she also saved the father, as he seemed to be a decent guy. 

I'm confused by V's mom.  Her emotions when she first saw V seemed real.  (And I loved V's expressions as her mom was hugging her crying.  It was so "can this be over with now?")  But then she later seemed to know that V wasn't actually killed in the orphanage fire.  Otherwise, why would there be -0- response to the "I've killed a lot of people" line?  Same for no response to "I'm going to have to kill you."  I don't think her mom was a killer, I think her putting V in the orphanage was probably a combination of knowing she wasn't right, even at a young age, and maybe the insistence of husband #2.  But she didn't seem to be remorseful at all about it.

The fair was hilarious.  I'm glad they put in a scene like that, to break up all the darker moments. 

I think Pytor was sleeping in the barn so V could have his room.  I thought it was hilarious that the step brother thought they had rented his room out as an air bnb (again), though. 

 

ETA:  My Roku has an option on closed captioning where you can choose it to play just on rewinds.  So you don't have to watch an entire episode on CC.  I just discovered this, and it's great for episodes like this where there were a few things I couldn't catch.

 

Edited May 26, 2020 by chaifan

[Ms Blue Jay]

You can find who designs most of the outfits on @villanellecloset on Instagram.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Ms Blue Jay

[chaifan]

I'd love to know how V could fit (at least) 2 whole outfits, including a pair of hightops, in that little bitty backpack.  That's some good Mary Poppins-esque packing skills!

[lcarolynl]

I loved this episode! So much character development for V!
Meeting her mother with the unkind words and the dead eyes. Her step brother and his girlfriend provided great comic relief, that festival dance and the moon landing/flat earth/lizard people scene slayed me!
And we got that laugh we've been waiting for.

Her brothers by blood were basically good people with darkness themselves. She formed attachments (such as they were) with them both. She could be genuine with them. I liked to see that 
When she was at the fair having so much fun? I loved seeing her like that! So smart in the shell game, and winning the dung throwing contest? She was a child again, a happy child.
Again as a child, she had that heartbreaking scene with her mother and the tomato paste eyes. When she asked to be treated like a child I wanted to sit her down, clean her face and call her my silly little girl. That scene got me and is why I watch this crazy psychopath serial killer with the great soundtrack
But her mother gave her her moment, and then V asks her mother to say that she (V) is her mother's daughter. Even if ol' Dead Eyes won't say it, V knows it, and I wonder if and how it will change her?
As someone said above, Emmy Reel material right there.

I agree with V, her mother had to die.

I wonder if Elton John is a fan of the show. Getting the rights to Crocodile Rock would cost a lot, right? 

[MicheleinPhilly]

9 hours ago, lcarolynl said:

I wonder if Elton John is a fan of the show. Getting the rights to Crocodile Rock would cost a lot, right? 

I know he posted on Instagram after the episode aired praising the show and Jodie Comer.