I fancy a good cat mystery like anyone, but Mindhunter‘s Season 1 feline brain-teaser had me clawing my eyes out. The curiosity was killing me, I tell ya! So I tracked down the woman at the center of the kitten cliffhanger — Mindhunter‘s leading lady Anna Torv — to get her purrrrrspective on the perplexing pussy plot.

To quickly recap: During the latter half of Mindhunter‘s engrossing 10-episode season, Torv’s serial-killer psychologist Wendy Carr frequents her apartment building’s laundry room on several occasions to leave whole cans of tuna fish for (what we’re led to believe is) a stray cat. In the finale, however, Wendy is aghast to find that her latest food offering not only went uneaten, but is now covered in bugs. And that’s where the storyline ends.

For her part, Torv initially dug deep into her psyche for an explanation behind Wendy’s pet project. “I always take things a little too [introspectively], so when I first read it in the script I was like, ‘Oh my God, wow, this is actually interesting,'” the Fringe vet recalls, before laying out her theory: “I thought, ‘This little kitten is representative of all these faceless [victims] and we only notice the ones that are dead because they have families that are looking for them. And then here’s this little abandoned cat that no one is going to care about. And if that was a person, it’d be the same thing.

“That’s what I first thought when I read it, but that’s just because I’m crazy,” Torv adds with a hearty laugh. “I was making it so deep when probably she’s just, you know, feeding a cat.”

The actress later ran her theory by Mindhunter exec producer David Fincher, who quickly informed her, ‘Oh… no, that’s not it,'” she guffaws. Fincher then explained to her that the cryptic series of scenes were, at least in part, suggesting to the audience that perhaps “there was a kid in the building who’s going around killing cats. And it’s a birth of a new sociopath that we don’t quite know about. Because that’s how it starts — with [inflicting harm on] animals.”

Regardless of the plot’s potential deeper meaning, Torv admits she was just “grateful” for the opportunity to pull the curtain back on tough-as-nails Wendy’s personal life. And perhaps humanize her a bit in the process. “I’m a believer that you should serve the show, first and foremost, and so [understandably] most of her scenes are [at work],” Torv notes. “There’s no space for her [personal life]; she’s always working. So I was grateful to have those sequences. To have this reprieve.”