This post contains spoilers for Killing Eve Season 2, Episode 4, “Desperate Times.”

Typical gestures of courtship include, but are not limited to: flowers, chocolates, love poems, and, for the bold, mixtapes and custom playlists. But Killing Eve’s Villanelle (Jodie Comer) decided to go to the next level in the latest episode of the BBC America series—attempting to woo the object of her affections, Eve (Sandra Oh), by staging a showy murder.

Sunday night’s “Desperate Times” saw by far the show’s most theatrical killing so far. Villanelle walked into Amsterdam’s red-light district wearing a cherubic pig mask and a traditional Bavarian dirndl—pink, of course. She lured a john into a room facing the street, with a floor-to-ceiling window. Before he knew what was what, she’d trussed him up, suspending him upside-down from the ceiling. His wife, horrified, happened to be among the onlookers on the street. Then, with a captive audience convinced this was all a show, Villanelle gutted her prey like a fish before calmly exiting the room, leaving him dead and bleeding. If Eve had not been paying attention to her before, Villanelle seems to reckon, she certainly will now.

For this delightfully depraved character, committing a flamboyant homicide to get attention makes a twisted kind of sense. Swiss director Lisa Brühlmann, who helmed the episode, said that of all of Villanelle’s murders, this one needed to be extra special. “For Villanelle, this was like a love letter for Eve,” she said.

“Desperate Times” is a fascinating follow-up to last week’s “The Hungry Caterpillar,” which reunited Villanelle with her former handler, Konstantin. Although Villanelle was thrilled to see Konstantin, he has wasted no time in manipulating her—specifically, by telling her that Eve is no longer interested in Villanelle or her murders, something he knows is patently untrue. At first, Brühlmann notes, Villanelle didn’t buy that Eve had spurned her for a newer, shinier woman assassin. “But then she actually starts to get really insecure,” Brühlmann said, “because she hasn’t heard from Eve in a while . . . So from that very romantic moment they have in Episode 3, if she has a heart, she’s really heartbroken in Episode 4. So she goes to a very dark place.”

While scouting locations for the episode, Brühlmann visited Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, which is dedicated to Dutch arts and history. There, she saw a painting titled “The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers”—which displays two male bodies hanging upside down, cut open just like Villanelle’s eventual victim. Brühlmann took a picture of the painting and brought it to Eve show-runner Emerald Fennell, who liked it a lot—and adapted a scene between Konstantin and Villanelle so that Villanelle would see the painting herself and draw inspiration from it.

In performing her murder, Brühlmann said, Villanelle is staging her own vaudeville show—“to make really sure that Eve will learn about this. Soon. And come after her and look for her.” The red-light district proved a ripe source of inspiration, but for practical reasons, the show was unable to film there. (As Brühlmann noted, “The sex workers don’t want to be filmed—and there are so many tourists, so we couldn’t create what we wanted to . . . and it takes several hours to shoot.”) The solution? The show built its own red-light-district simulacrum nearby. “We just had a street and similar windows, and decorated them . . . from scratch,” Brühlmann said. “They often look very sterile and not cozy at all, so we wanted to create something similar . . . but still a bit edgy and a bit weird.” Another creation made special for the scene? “We built a rig in so the man could actually hang down.”