Since its inception, BBC America’s Killing Eve has been generally lauded for its depiction of strong female characters and breaking stereotypes while centering a character with Asian heritage — the show’s eponymous Korean protagonist (played by Korean Canadian-American actor Sandra Oh). Season 3, which aired in April through June 2020, brought the greater introduction of Eve’s cultural background as a sort of support and comfort — what she falls back on when she’s at her lowest. At the beginning of the season, Eve surrounds herself with Korean comfort food, works in a Korean restaurant, and lives in New Malden — one of Europe’s largest Korean communities. Yet, the show’s writers’ room is apparently devoid of Asian or any non-white writers altogether, and these new character tidbits all quickly disappear when work shows back up in her life.

In a recent discussion, Oh recounts pitching more active inclusion of Eve’s (and her own) Korean identity on the show and in past roles, including her longtime fan-favorite stint as Cristina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy. Yet all signs point to a strong avoidance of this when it comes to Eve, instead dwelling heavily on her identity in relation to other characters like the more exhaustively explored Villanelle and her explorationally exhausted husband Niko. With the show renewed for a fourth season, many viewers are left asking: When might we see more of what makes up Eve’s Korean identity outside of the vaguely alluded tokenization of it?

During Season 2, Eve is supposedly talking on the phone with her Korean mother before she homes in on the Ghost, a hired assassin who she discovers is also Asian. The show makes an effort to point out that the Ghost is Asian and an immigrant mother, yet quickly moves away from any sort of deeper, character-driven investigation. Eve is also the one to piece together that the Ghost is someone who is frequently dismissed, someone who goes unnoticed in society — a small seemingly self-aware fragment that quickly disappears once the Ghost’s narrative role plays out. With the show’s primarily white cast — all non-white supporting actors in Seasons 1 and 2 departed while one in Season 3 was unceremoniously killed off — the Ghost’s inclusion as a plot device is even more jarring to think about.

Although Eve gratefully defies conventional depictions of Asian and Asian American characters that still plague contemporary media, the inclusion of the very smallest of touches about her cultural upbringing continue to puzzle (we love you but we’re looking at you, Shin Ramyun). Despite this, we’ve already seen much more time taken out to explore the family and heritages of other characters, including an entire episode devoted to Villanelle’s family in Russia. There’s also been a return to cultural roots for Eve’s now-estranged husband Niko, who goes to Poland as a way to escape trauma tied to Eve and his fraught life in England.

So even as the central character, the motivations and desires behind Eve are almost exclusively rooted in her work life. Viewers know little to nothing about Eve’s life growing up — a narrative that could be rife with anything, including alienation from her Korean roots and the subsequent demonstration of such on the show — let alone her present place as a Korean professional amidst a predominantly white bureaucratic workplace. On the flip side, Villanelle’s motivations and personal influences are thoroughly explored, especially rooted in cultural and familial identity. She is given the room to be investigated from both a character and a narrative perspective. As such, Villanelle is granted a season of remarkable growth while Eve is much more stagnant, having mostly exhausted the majority of the personal and professional angles of her life — Niko and MI6, respectively.

Season 1 of Killing Eve excelled by fixating on Eve’s place as an outsider who defied stereotypes: an Asian American woman, underestimated and undervalued, someone with a dark side and a bizarre fixation on psychopathy. Yet in an attempt to keep topping its material, the show has found ways to explore many aspects of other characters’ identities, including bringing in relatives and family members not previously introduced, like Carolyn’s daughter, Geraldine. But Eve is curiously left out, the show’s writing emanating a dull unwillingness to dive into her identity, whose representation onscreen could arguably be relatively groundbreaking given the show’s place and status.

Olivia Popp

Writer and chaotic Midwesterner with a penchant for exploring. Fond of perfectly crafted expletive combos for dramatic effect. Speculative fiction + passionfruit devotee. @itsoliviapopp

Killing Eve: The Curious Case of Eve's Tokenized Identity