Warning! This article contains major spoilers for the series finale of Killing Eve.
A Killing Eve writer has revealed the show was not originally due to finish with its fourth season.
The hit BBC thriller came to a controversial end earlier this month, with fans and critics calling out the “lazy” and “unoriginal” ending.
However, Kayleigh Llewellyn has said that the show had been set to return for a fifth season, but the decision was made to end it with the fourth during the pre-filming stages.
Speaking to Metro, Kayleigh revealed: “Well, when I was hired, it originally wasn’t going to be the final season, there was going to be another one.
“That was a decision that was made during the process, so that was a big change.”
Due to the pandemic, filming of the fourth season suffered a number of set backs.
“A job that would normally have been eight months became kind of two years,” Kayleigh added. “The world kept changing, and filming constraints changed vastly, as well.”
The show wrapped up with main characters Eve and Villanelle finally getting it together, before the deadly assassin was shot on the orders of Carolyn Martens and bled to death after jumping into the Thames with Eve.
It was heavily criticised by fans and critics, who noted that the decision to kill a queer character played into the ‘bury your gays’ trope present in many works of fiction, whereby more queer characters – and in particular lesbian, bisexual female and transgender characters – die compared to their straight cisgender counterparts.
Last week, Luke Jennings – who penned the Codename Villanelle novels on which Killing Eve was based – hit out at the ending in a piece for the Guardian.
He wrote: “The season four ending was a bowing to convention. A punishing of Villanelle and Eve for the bloody, erotically impelled chaos they have caused. A truly subversive storyline would have defied the trope which sees same-sex lovers in TV dramas permitted only the most fleeting of relationships before one of them is killed off.
“How much more darkly satisfying, and true to Killing Eve’s original spirit, for the couple to walk off into the sunset together? Spoiler alert, but that’s how it seemed to me when writing the books.”