She’s definitely up there in my top ten. Just the sheer weight of the tragedy of her story alone is enough to put her there, because as much as I hate thinking of it like this, it’s clear that as far as Eve is concerned, Juliette Silverton died during the events of “Cry Havoc” or shortly thereafter, and Eve was resurrected from her ashes. And although the place she’s in at the finale is strong, it isn’t necessarily happy. 

What I love most about her, I think, is the way that each “iteration” of Juliette is made stronger through addressing the issues that the previous iteration had.

Juliette Prime, or season one Juliette, was already intelligent, resourceful, and compassionate…but she was also far too trusting and completely naive about what the world she lived in was really like (though to be fair, Nick was working pretty hard to keep her that way).

Amnesia Juliette, or season two Juliette, was much more wary of the motivations and intentions of those around her, and much more pointed and resolute in her questioning of things. At the same time, though, she was off-balance and reactionary for most of the season…again, mostly because the people in her life were working too hard at “protecting” her to actually give her any useful information.

Team Player Juliette, or the Juliette we get in season three and half of season four, is less reactionary, more measured and careful and considering of everything. She’s still intelligent and kind, but she’s less credulous and more apt to question Grimm things beforehand instead of just reacting to them later, because she finally has enough information to do so. At the same time, she’s still extremely selfless to the point of often ignoring her own needs and burying her own emotions in favor of helping her friends with what she sees as their more important problems.

Jujubiest, or “my guilty favorite Juliette,” that we get in the back half of season four is basically a raw, exposed nerve. Every need Juliette ignored in favor of helping her friends, every motion she buried, all just came pouring out in bouts of uncontrollable rage and pain, directed at the very people who she once would have willingly died for. I could write an entire meta on this Juliette alone (and I kind of have) but the point is that she was no longer selfless to a fault. But the hexenbiest magic caused her to lose all control, leading to destruction and despair rather than the acknowledgement and healing she so desperately needed.

Eve, on the other hand, is ALL control. Or all controlled, really, since she doesn’t really seem to have any will of her own. She was so traumatized and horrified by her prior actions that the only way to deal with them was to shut off her emotions all together, to bury them even more deeply than they were before. HW helped her do that, but they also trained her to focus only on their mission and nothing else…which basically meant that she had control over her own emotions, but not her destiny.

And then we finally get to my precious Julieve, who is as kind and compassionate and intelligent and dedicated to her little found family as she has ever been, but who also knows how to set healthy boundaries for herself. She gets space from Nick and chooses not to pursue the connection they still have any further because she knows it would not be good for her. She is able to feel things again without letting it consume her, and she’s able to control her powers without having to shut out all her emotions.

She’s much more balanced, and while she may still be horrified by her past actions she is able to deal with it and move on from it. But she still isn’t ready to fully accept her former identity, professes that she never will be in fact, and to some extent she has given up on the notion of ever being happy, convinced herself that it doesn’t even matter whether she’s happy or not.

So while I love her arc SO MUCH, I also hate that this is where it ended…in a place that’s much more healthy but not remotely happy, in a place that’s resolved but also a little resigned, not fully healed from her past wounds and with very little in the way of hope ahead of her. I hate to think of Juliette or Eve (because really, they’re one and the same) in that situation forever. I mean, everyone else got their happy ending…I feel like Juliette deserved to get one as well.

I’d like to think that if we’d gotten another season, it would have involved more character development for Eve, more healing, more resolution with Nick and the rest of the team…and that eventually, she would have fully found her way back to Juliette Silverton, and been able to look to the future with hope for happiness the way the rest of them could.

Honestly, I don’t think anyone who watched the show could think that, unless they just had hate-blinders on for the character. Yes, she said she wouldn’t change any of what happened…but saying you wouldn’t change something doesn’t mean you aren’t sorry for your mistakes. For one thing, in context she wasn’t excusing herself. She was comforting Nick, who was thinking she must wish she’d never met him, never loved him, because of the grenade his presence threw on her old life. She was trying to absolve him of some of his guilt for what happened to her.

For another, just look at her actions. She has done nothing since she came back but help the team, help Nick, try to protect him. Her very first on-screen act in season five was to save Nick and Co. from Black Claw operatives. And sure, you could argue that was on HW’s orders…but what about telling Adalind she’d better not hurt Nick? What about the way she basically kicked a swath of ass across Portland to rescue Nick from Black Claw? What about the way she literally collapsed trying to use her powers at the start of season six, and then apologized to Nick for not being strong enough to protect him? What about rushing at Zerstorer barely-armed and without any magic, basically putting herself between it/him and Nick?

She does everything possible to protect her friends. She never bristles or even contradicts anyone who brings up her prior actions as Juliette; she just stands there and takes it. That is not the behavior of someone who considers themselves guiltless, who has nothing to be sorry for.

She finds her prior actions so repulsive and unforgivable that she literally had to become someone else to cope with them.

She has never forgiven herself, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t sorry. Quite the opposite.

Granted…I find the handling of her story deeply unsatisfying on a narrative level. I mean clearly…others who have done things just as horrible or worse can be forgiven, so I see no reason why Juliette couldn’t have been, eventually. There were other ways to handle her redemption arc that would have better served her character and held Nick and the rest of the team more accountable for their part in what happened to her.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand that Eve–who was Juliette and still is parts of Juliette–is sorry for the hurtful things she did when she was first turned into a hexenbiest. I mean…you would have to seriously be looking for reasons to hate the character with no regard for what’s actually done and said in canon to think otherwise.