Killing Eve‘s Villanelle (Jodie Comer), the young, hilarious, cheeky, brilliant, soft, sharp, stunning, presumed-psychopathic assassin who longs for a normal life involving “someone to watch movies with,” is gloriously complete and vivid, with an agency that is always hers. Villanelle is a woman working in man’s world, as a hired-hand murderer, and also queer. Though Villanelle has a grisly career, she is not the villain of the series, per se, in the sense of being heartless and focused only on her own gain. The series follows two tracks for Villanelle — first, her individual exploration of selfhood, aka her impassioned query if she can be somebody other than a killer, and second, her exploration of self in a beloved relationship with former MI5 agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh). The heart of Killing Eve is the bold, graceful strength of Villanelle’s aliveness, so her death in the show’s Season 4 finale burns even more, like a massive, engulfing fire.

If we accept the experience of Villanelle’s floating body riddled with bullet wounds from a sniper in the Thames River as Eve tries to reach her in the last two minutes of the episode, it means we are saying goodbye not only to Villanelle but to the range of possibilities of what living can do, be, and feel like, which her character shows us throughout the series. Hers is an aliveness in all of its forms, especially those that are dissatisfied with parts of what one is or has become and crave to make changes to ameliorate the self. This is what Villanelle has embodied and aspired towards — by going to see her birth family, tracking down the Twelve, and so on. Her impetus for a positive bildungsroman is also part of what she represents.

While she’s alive in the series, Villanelle lives with everything she has, whether completing her kills or picking out perfect clothes for Eve or orchestrating a birthday party for Konstantin (Kim Bodnia), her handler and a familial love of sorts. Even through her gusto at eating, she is careful and wild; in other words, she is completely herself. What she is, and so, how she does, sparks the same intensity as do glimpses at a future Villanelle in a grounded partnership with Eve. These are moments that can exist only through their convergence, what Eve brings out in Villanelle, the places where Villanelle spills, softens, lets in, wants, cares. When Villanelle tells Eve, in response to Eve saying she always thinks about Villanelle, that she too thinks about Eve, or when she later kisses Eve on the cheek, she is as full in her desire for Eve as she is respectful of her space.

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Villanelle is open and comfortable about her queerness and also recognizes that Eve has never been with a woman before. There is an opening for Eve, in her innate attraction to Villanelle, to feel into the being-ness of sexuality as flow. The authenticity of their bond, as Villanelle and Eve experience it from the beginning and come to express with each other, successfully dismisses any discounting or exploiting what is between them. Theirs is a full experience of love and connection; it is also true that these are two women who are in love. It is their linkage, based on honesty, mutual understanding and still wanting the other, through all their displays of violence and betrayal, that prompts Villanelle to hold less that Eve has never been with a woman and more that Eve has never allowed herself to love and be loved, to let herself live with someone in the way that their longing makes them unable to hide from each other. Villanelle never does anything half-full, and the end of a character so alive, with a future to look forward to, is a pain that cannot be minimized.

The other part of what Villanelle represents comes from her remarkable attunement to the present and showing what paying attention to our lives, the world, and the people around us can achieve. Indeed, it is that fullness of life coursing through Villanelle as she embraces and kisses Eve, sharing mutually appreciated space at last, in the finale, that makes her death, a matter of minutes after we see Villanelle in this apex of grounded contentment, so gut-wrenching. Villanelle is, in part, a killer, and excellent at it, and so is her love; yet, Eve exists in ways Villanelle does not, which means that in Eve, Villanelle finds a partner who will challenge her growth while accepting her for all that she is. By the end of the series, Villanelle knows Eve is in her corner, devotedly, without an ulterior motive.

When you experience someone at their maximum self, life bursting from their orifices, and their experience is cut short, we feel not only the death of that individual but the death of infinite possibility. Even though Villanelle’s life was severed in canon and her vulnerable, joyful union with Eve was only beginning, we see in what becomes Villanelle’s final actions — from her swift rigor as she kills the Twelve to how she watches her lover on the dance floor — that she has found a kind of freedom. She trembles with the emotion of knowing herself, knowing Eve, thus knowing why she is living.

And Villanelle lives for all of it: the rage, the beauty, the incandescent streaming that separates the two, all while holding an acceptance of herself. Having found someone who orients as she does, she is ready to step forward in new, supported alignment. This is what it means to unionize in souls, to be in the world braver, and kinder, because of being loved and seen. Villanelle’s death — a brutal murder, at that — rakes over us as the death of hope and a rupture of age-old processes and potentials of the self and the heart becoming something more sound and giving. We mourn the beauty who is Villanelle, as we mourn the possibilities her life gave range to, how she and Eve could be together now, but also the versions and imaginations of living she provoked and challenged us with. We had the honor to watch Villanelle live, make sense of it all while owning the room, and clear herself out, so she could let herself love and be loved.