This post contains spoilers for Killing Eve‘s Season 2 finale.

Listen, I know it’s called Killing Eve—but Eve can’t . . . actually die, right? On Sunday night, the acclaimed drama’s wild ride of a second season ended on a stunning, if strange, cliff-hanger: Villanelle, angry that Eve doesn’t want to abscond to Alaska for a scenic, chilly life as felons on the run, shoots her. The final shot? A bird’s eye view of Eve, collapsed on the ground. With Season 3 already confirmed to be on its way, one has to wonder: why end on a probable fake-out death?

To executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle, the gambit was all about sending viewers, as well as Eve herself, a reminder: no one can predict or control Villanelle’s choices, no matter how well they might think they know her.

Villanelle and Eve have been in far more constant contact this season than they were in Season 1. And as one might expect, the further their lives intertwine, the worst things get—not just for Eve, but for both women. Villanelle spends the first few episodes of Season 2 recovering from the stab wound Eve gave her in last year’s finale, while Eve wrestles with the guilt she’s feeling over having stabbed Villanelle in the first place. Eventually, though, they find their way back to one another, working together on Carolyn’s latest mission.

Unfortunately for Eve, Carolyn had simply manipulated her to bring Villanelle on board while thinking it was her own idea—and Villanelle, one of the few people in Eve’s life who are even better at manipulation than her boss, tricks her into committing a murder. Eve stands up to Villanelle as they flee the scene of the murder, ducking through some Roman ruins—and Villanelle responds by shooting her.

Throughout the season, Woodward Gentle said, Eve and Villanelle have been circling one another in a sort of folie à deux, a shared delusion in which each of them perceives their relationship the way she wants to see it. “We wanted to make sure that you remembered that Villanelle is a psychopath and that there is only so long you can contain a psychopath before they will explode,” Woodward Gentle said. “So that was something we wanted to play with all the way to the end.”

Eve thinks she’s the only one who can contain Villanelle; Villanelle, meanwhile, thinks Eve belongs to her, body and soul—and that at her core, Eve is just like her. “We wanted to remind people that even though Eve might think she’s safe, we know she isn’t,” Woodward Gentle said. “And the other thing that we wanted to do was point out that even though Eve may commit a heinous crime, she is not a psychopath. She still has a moral core—and she will still be repulsed by what she has done.” Villanelle’s choice to shoot Eve, Woodward Gentle said, proves just how quickly the switch can flip on her empathy.

Is it a little strange that Eve, who works in intelligence, was shocked to find out that Carolyn had essentially handled her? Carolyn is, after all, the former head of MI6’s Russian desk. When asked about that, though, Woodward Gentle countered that Eve’s shock largely came from her own deluded bubble—the same one, presumably, that makes her think she has any influence at all over Villanelle. “When it turns out she hasn’t been brilliant and she's been artfully played, it’s [burst] that bubble, really,” she said.

When asked what she can tell us to expect in Season 3, it should probably come as no surprise that Woodward Gentle responded with a laugh. “Oh, I can’t tell you anything!” she said. But she did tease some of the questions that lie ahead—including, Have the scales dropped from Eve’s eyes? and Has she discovered something about Carolyn that she didn’t want to believe before? To Woodward Gentle, Eve taking a stand against Villanelle was a revelation, as she finally came to understand her own power. And the Roman ruins, she added, made for a beautiful backdrop with “slightly camp grandeur”—precisely the aesthetic she and fellow executive producer Emerald Fennell had been looking for. They have a point: what better place to end a season of Killing Eve than the ruins of an empire that fell under the weight of its own hedonistic dedication to pleasure?

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