SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Marvel’s The Defenders, available now on Netflix.


Sigourney Weaver's Alexandra was long hyped as the main villain for Marvel and Netflix's The Defenders, so it's no surprise that viewers were massively shocked when she was killed off two episodes before the series' big finale.

As millions have already seen, Alexandra was abruptly murdered by Elektra -- the very person she brought back to life and cared for throughout the series. Perhaps the move shouldn't have had the shock factor that it did, considering Cottonmouth's premature death halfway through the first season of Luke Cage, but it still managed to catch fans off guard.

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In a new interview, Marco Ramirez, the showrunner for the eight-episode miniseries, explained how early on the decision to kill Alexandra came about, and why he decided to do it. "I don't know how it happened on Luke Cage, because I didn't work on Luke, but here, it felt like we wanted to surprise the audience," Ramirez told The Hollywood Reporter. "There's a certain expectation, sometimes, and one of the tropes of a lot of modern and specifically cable and basic cable TV is presenting one antagonist per season, and you watch them by the end of it where their story comes to an end, but one expects the "big moves" to happen in the first and last episodes. It felt like a cool idea if we could get away with it, especially since we already had Elektra in the world. It's not like we're introducing somebody completely new: "Ha ha! I'm the new big bad!

"It just felt like an interesting way to end our final act of our story. Of course, that's not to take away from any of the amazing work Sigourney did and how great she was to work with." the showrunner continued. "But even she, I think, was really excited about it: 'When do I die?' It was mostly about giving the audience something that was really unexpected."

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Available now on Netflix, The Defenders stars Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones, Mike Colter as Luke Cage, Finn Jones as Danny Rand, Elodie Yung as Elektra Natchios, Sigourney Weaver as Alexandra, Eka Darville as Malcolm Ducasse, Simone Missick as Misty Knight, Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson, Carrie-Anne Moss as Jeri Hogarth, Scott Glenn as Stick, Rachael Taylor as Trish Walker, Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple and Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing.