Today, as I write, the second season of Killing Eve debuts on American television.

A Variety article online warns “a brutal killing changes our obsession with Villanelle”, the whimsical assassin played by Jodie Comer.

What could change our love for Villanelle? What could counter her playfulness, her venom, her charisma?

Villanelle is without question the best thing Killing Eve has going, and Killing Eve Season 1 is a cornucopia of good things.

Yesterday, nine years after its debut in 2010, I binge-watched Season 1 of the UK TV crime thriller Luther. Luther stars Idris Elba, who has had me in the palm of his hand (I wish!) since he co-starred in the 1998 UK 10-parter Ultraviolet, where we met him as a Desert Storm veteran hunting vampires in ‘90s London.

Idris Elba is a good thing. But the Luther character I love, my obsession, is Ruth Wilson’s Alice Morgan. Like Villanelle, Alice is a sociopath. She executes her parents and the family dog. And that’s just for starters.

The female sociopath on TV is compelling and unabashedly entertaining. She’s the female unconstrained by social convention, the disinhibited Id. She charms, she flirts, but she does not make nice. She’ll kill as readily as smile. She’s the female without fear, the female who turns the tables on men. The female who rejects expectations of kindness, courtesy, forgiveness, gentleness.

In the first episode of Luther Season 2, Abby, a beautiful young art school student out and about in London’s famed Petticoat Lane, is taking photos for an art assignment. Abby is accosted by a young man who persists in trying to monopolise her attention. At first he’s an interruption, then an irritation, then he’s harassing her: she wants him to desist but she cannot say outright “Stop. Go away.” And if she did, he – and any witnesses – would consider that an overreaction, an unnecessary aggression. So he keeps being in her face till she turns away, strides away, retreats to a quiet recess. Where he reappears and kills her.

Alice would not be caught dead that way.

Alice would entrap him. And gut him.

Be like Alice, we think, we women watching.

Like Season 1 Killing Eve, Season 1 Luther is sublime. It works as a brilliant ensemble piece – not only Ruth Wilson and Idris Elba, but Indira Varma, Paul McGann, Steven Mackintosh, Saskia Reeves – and also as a contemporary reworking of Othello, with plot twists. It takes the familiar tale, with its emotionally volatile hero and his doe-eyed wife who ends up dead, and turns our expectations inside out. And it adds in Alice. Perfect.

After Season 1, in my opinion Luther lost the plot. There is no storyline as compelling as the false friend and the slain wife to drive the narrative forward. There remains only increasingly pointless “psychosexual” nastinesses and, infrequently, Alice. Not enough Alice. And even Alice seems adrift.

Luther’s creator and showrunner, Neil Cross, has said he sees Luther as having a touch of the Sherlocks. That’s interesting, though arguably C21st television features a surfeit of Sherlocks. Obviously, there is Benedict Cumberbatch’s eponymous Sherlock, which offers a version of the female sociopath: Lara Pulver as “the woman”, Irene Adler. Then there’s Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary, where ‘Irene Adler’ is uncovered as Sherlock’s traditional archenemy Moriarty, recast as Natalie Dormer. Most recently the Cumberbatch Sherlock has been revealed to have a sociopath sister, more brilliant than the Holmes brothers Sherlock and Mycroft: the evil genius Eurus, played by Sian Brooke.

Eurus seems to me in direct line from Luther’s Alice Morgan. Eurus was a freakish intelligence from the outset, terrifying in her freakness. She has the ability to manipulate almost anyone into doing almost anything. Alice was a child prodigy, at Oxford by age 13, at 18 a PhD in the astrophysics of dark matter. Alice explains to Luther she is fascinated by Black Holes:

This is a black hole. It consumes matter, sucks it in, and crushes it beyond existence. When I first heard that, I thought that’s evil in its most pure. Something that drags you in, crushes you, makes you nothing.

It doesn’t take a “psychosexual” expert to figure that a “black hole” is a metaphor for woman. For Alice, her definition of a “black hole” is almost a mission statement. (Reminding me of the wonderful British columnist Lynne Truss, who in the ‘90s referred to a character in the long-running BBC radio soapie The Archers as “Jolene Rogers, not so much a name as a mission statement”.)

One of the promo straplines for Luther is a quote from Season 1, “What if you were on the Devil’s side without knowing it?”

Alice is, arguably, the devil in female form. She’s seductive, beautiful. She’s charismatic. She charms Luther, and they form an alliance. But Luther believes in the value of life, and in love. Alice’s modus operandi is to take what matters and crush it to nothing.

Luther is all stamping bull, stomping forwards, foregrounded. Alice is absence, negative space.

Eurus, likewise, is an absence, physically “missing” from Sherlock’s life, erased from his psyche.

Villanelle is a kind of absence in that she is the mystery Eve seeks to expose. Eve’s job is to trace her, to track her, to entrap her.

I saw a film on TV this week centred on a female assassin and briefly I wondered where she sat in relation to Alice, Eurus, Villanelle, Adler and Dormer’s Moriarity. The film was Atomic Blonde, starring Charlize Theron as a triple agent in a comic strip (graphic novel) version of Cold War Berlin. Theron is wonderful to watch, with her action goddess physicality. But the character is intentionally all surface. There’s no mystery there. Face it, a M16 superagent named “Lorraine” lacks all credibility. We know this Atomic Blonde is American, a male fantasy, Debbie Harry as action figure toy. She doesn’t charm, she does not delight, there is no real intrigue.

The Theron character operates through force, not manipulation. She lacks the black hole power to suck us in.

Once we’re truly sucked in, it’s hard to imagine what fictional misdeed could change our obsession, our crush.

The female sociopath crushes it.