Killing Eve is back for its concluding season on BBC. The thriller caught our attention for being the darkly funny, surreal and sensual creation of Fleabag's Phoebe Waller Bridge. It follows Sarah O as the flawed but brilliant M15 detective Eve Polastri as she tries to pin down the enigmatic and volatile assassin Villanelle, played by the brilliant Jodie Comer.
What follows is some twisted Romeo and Juliet meets Bonnie and Clyde tale of obsession, lust and danger. It's deeply evocative, with plenty of strong characters, but we don't blame you if you can't remember the finer points of the series.
Here's absolutely every important plot point from season 1 to 3, so you can brush up on the wild ride so far before heading into the finale.
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Season 1
The season opened with M15 agent Eve Polastri starting to work on the case of a murdered Russian politician. Soon, they have a string of international assassinations on their hands. Eve is the only one who realises that the assassin is (shock) a woman, Villanelle.
Eve and her boss Bill are plucked from obscurity by Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw), a brilliant no-nonsense M16 spy, to join a super-secret team on the hunt for Villanelle. This is where we meet Kenny, Carolyn's son, the technical brains of the operation and an all-around sweetie.
For most of the season, Villanelle kills people in increasingly inventive and violent ways (poison hairpin and deadly perfume? Check). We meet one member of The Twelve, Konstantin, who serves as Villanelle's handler and a twisted father figure for Villanelle (who later kidnaps his daughter and tries to kill him. It's a complicated relationship.)
It's never truly clear where his loyalties lie, since he does the Twelve's bidding but also has a history with Carolyn. As the cat and mouse chase intensifies, Eve and Villanelle become progressively more obsessed with each other. We are shown just how deadly Villanelle is when she kills the lovely Bill in a crowded Berlin nightclub to stop him tailing her.
Even in grief, Eve can't shake her fascination with Villanelle, who starts sending Eve little gifts and turning up at her house. Villanelle picks off Frank next, Eve's seedy former boss who moonlighted as a double agent for The Twelve, the super shady organisation that employs Villanelle.
The tensions reach a climax in Villanelle's Parisian apartment. There's a very romantically charged moment where Villanelle thinks the pair will kiss, but Eve stabs her instead.
Season 2
Season two kicks off right where we left it in Season one. Eve is traumatised by, well, stabbing Villanelle, who's recovering in hospital.
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There, she befriends a boy in the next bed, telling him that her girlfriend stabbed her to show her how much she cares. The boy gives Villanelle pjs and medicine, and she repays him by snapping his neck.
Eve is hired again, with a brand new team. She keeps her long-suffering husband in the dark but confides in Kenny about stabbing her favourite assassin, who's still in London recovering from her infected knife wound. But the Twelve aren't happy with her, giving her a new handler, Raymond, who is the polar opposite of the complicated teddy bear Konstantin.
Konstantin offers her the chance to be a freelance assassin for him. Seems that the whole kidnapping and shooting thing is forgotten. On her first freelance kill for hire, Villanelle is desperate to get Eve's attention.
Dressed in a pig mask, she hangs and guts a man in a window of Amsterdam's Red Light District. But Eve is too busy finding The Ghost, a new assassin on the scene who poses as a cleaner to pick off her targets, including Alistair Peele.
She's tortured into talking by Konstantin and Villanelle on behalf of M15, forcing the deranged kind of lovers to work together again. M15 also hires Villanelle to find out more about Alastair's psychopathic billionaire son, landing them in Rome. Eve rushes in when she thinks Villanelle is in danger, blowing her cover and the whole operation.
Villanelle kills Peele for Eve, then manipulates Eve into killing Raymond with an axe to the head. It's a classic Killing Eve scene, darkly funny and weirdly erotic.
It gets a bit Bonnie and Clyde then as the pair run off through some ruins, with Eve certain that Carolyn played her like a puppet. But Eve has a change of heart at the last minute, telling Villanelle she can't go with her. Feeling betrayed, Villanelle shoots Eve, leaving her for dead.
Season 3
Eve is reeling from being shot, working in a kitchen restaurant. Villeniele is working with her original trainer, Dasha. Villanelle wants to be a keeper, a higher responsibility than Konstantin or Dasha but it's safe to say that Villanelle doesn't take well to management when she kills her first trainee for making a mess on their first kill.
We catch up with Kenny, who is now working as an investigative journalist at a website called The Bitter Pill. He's looking into the Twelve, but supposedly jumps from his office block before we learn anything. Eve - certain that Kenny was murdered - steals his phone, reaching out to his former colleagues to finish what Kenny started: tracking the finances of the elusive Twelve and a missing 6 million pound.
Villanelle is given a job in London, where she tracks down Eve on a bus for a fight that turns into a kiss. Meanwhile, Niko is discharged from the hospital he was staying in for treatment with PTSD, and escapes to Poland. Eve is unravelling with Villanelle being nearby, while Constantin enlists her help to tie up some loose ends with the Geneva account (i.e. kill the wife of that accountant, Kruger).
Dasha, tasked with driving a wedge between Eve and Villanelle, drives a pitchfork through Niko's neck, just when the poor guy was getting used to his quiet life in Poland. We get to see how psychopaths are made when Villanelle returns to her home in Russia. Turns out her mum dumped her in an orphanage, which Villanelle tried to burn down, landing her in the Twelve while her mother and brother thought she died in the blaze.
Her homecoming doesn't go as planned, and Villanelle ends up killing her less-than-perfect mother, irritating stepbrother and his girlfriend. We see a glimmer of humanity as she saves her brother and younger half brother and seems genuinely moved by killing her mother.
One minute she wants out of the killing game, the next she's smacking Dasha with a golf club rather than killing the target, leaving her knocked out in the forest. Ice queen Caroyln is butting heads with a new manager at work, Paul. Carolyn suspects he's a double agent (who isn't?), and her assistant is killed by an agent of the Twelve for finding out.
Konstantin, who had been dipping into The Twelve's honeypot, has a heart attack from all the stress of double-crossing. As luck would have it, he ends up in the same hospital as Dasha, who soon croaks it since Eve crushed her under her foot. Villanelle and Eve share a tender moment in the Royal Albert Hall, before the moment is crashed by Villanelle's rival assassin.
She suggests she will replace a distracted Villanelle., who responds by beating her and pushing her in front of a tube. The season ends with Carolyn confronting Konstantin about his involvement with Kenny's death. He says he warned him that the Twelve were after him, and Kenny fell backwards out of fear. Who knows what happened!
Carolyn ultimately shoots the double-crossing Paul, though, as Konstantin declares his love for her. Our favourite toxic lovers run off to London Bridge, sharing an emotional goodbye. Villanelle says the pair should never look back, but of course they do.
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