Warning: Major spoilers ahead. Dont read until youve watched the finale!

Before the ruthless assassin known as Villanelle was Villanelle, viewers learn in the penultimate episode of BBC Americas Killing Eve that she was Oksana, a precocious student from a broken home who developed a fixation with her married teacher, Anna.

We were told a new student was coming, the gentle-mannered Anna (Susan Lynch) retrospectively tells Eve (Sandra Oh), the intelligence officer currently and desperately trying to track down Villanelle (Jodie Comer). History of violence, antisocial behavior. Her mother was dead, her father was a drunk. She arrived at the school and everyone stepped back. Everyone. So I stepped forward. Extra time, extra lessons, extra love.

The teacher and pupil became close. So close that Annas husband, Max, grew jealous. The unfortunate fellow Maxie, as Anna tearfully calls him eventually became Villanelles first victim. She murdered him in the home he shared with the object of her affection, and chopped his dick off for good measure.

She said the only reason I loved him was because he had a penis, Anna recounts to Eve. I told her she might be right.

The procedure castration, of course becomes one of the charming psychopaths signature moves. In fact, cock-chopping is not only a key plot point in the Phoebe Waller-Bridge-created assassin show, its also an apt metaphor for the series overall.

With Killing Eve, Waller-Bridge takes the typically male-centric genre of cat-and-mouse thrillers and hacks its phallic baggage right off. She detaches the genres prototypical machismo by placing female characters in not one but nearly all of the series primary roles: Deranged psycho assassin Villanelle, doughty intelligence officer Eve and unflappable MI6 head Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) are by far the most fleshed-out characters in the shows universe.

The latter two are on the hunt for Villanelle, but as the shows name suggests, the killer hunts back; a mutual obsession between Eve and the subject of her investigation somersaults into the crux of this show. Of course, there are central male characters too: Bill, Eves fedora-sporting boss; Konstantin, the burly Russian kingpin; and Frank, the insufferable mole.

However, by the end of the season, all aforementioned gentlemen wind up dead, as do the many nameless dudes with the grave misfortune of being on Villanelles to-do list.