If you’ve been keeping pace with Who Is Erin Carter?, you’re likely breathless by now. The high-octane thriller series stars Evin Ahmad as Erin Carter, a British expat teacher in Barcelona with a dangerous secret and an arsenal of tough moves. When Erin singlehandedly fends off a pair of gunmen during a supermarket robbery, she chalks it up to protective maternal instincts. But how can she explain away the violent threats that keep surfacing from her past? Read on for a look at the stunning finale of Who Is Erin Carter? and the answers to all your burning questions about the show — including whether Season 2 is on the way.

What happens in Who Is Erin Carter?

To her ER nurse husband, Jordi (Sean Teale), Erin Carter is his strong, beautiful, and mysterious wife. To 10-year-old Harper (Indica Watson), she’s the mother who swears she’ll do anything for her daughter — yet is always sneaking away unexpectedly at odd hours. (And is that a real gun she’s unpacking in their attic?) To her neighbor Emilio (Pep Ambròs), a police detective, she’s the wife of his best friend — that is, until he sees the security camera footage of her fighting off attackers in the grocery store holdup that sets the series in motion. It’s Emilio who discovers her in a classroom one night in hand-to-hand combat with a woman Erin kills in self-defense.

Suffice to say, Erin Carter contains multitudes — in some ways, like any woman juggling very different multiple lives and responsibilities. And in other ways, well, she’s like no one else. “I think it was the juxtaposition of an action heroine embedded in suburbia,” executive producer Rob Bullock told Netflix about Erin’s story. In a nutshell, he continued, Erin’s the “mum, teacher, and wife wrestling with all the trials and pitfalls of suburban life and then playing that off against her jumping off terraces into the sea and having shoot-outs.” 

Sam Taylor/Netflix

So many shoot-outs, in fact, that Emilio and Erin never have a chance to fully get into the particulars of who Erin really is or even who the woman is that he witnesses Erin killing (Margot Müller, played by Ana Ularu, also from the grocery holdup and a key to Erin’s black hole of a past) — they’re too busy burying the body that night. As payback, Emilio enlists Erin’s help in his own shady investigations — and then things really get rolling. Suddenly Erin’s on the radar of the lethal gang Sangreda Unida, and Emilio impulsively hits the gang’s fearsome consort Benicio Agustín (Rodrigo Poisón) with his car just after Agustín’s snapped a picture of Erin that he threatens to make public. Whatever happens to Erin, we’re coming to see, she can handle on her own; but when it comes to her family, her protective instincts go into maximum overdrive. Blowing her cover would mean the ruin of her family, and Erin will fight tooth and nail for them.

An epic shoot-out on her lunch break sends Erin fleeing gunfire off a rooftop and plunging several stories below into the sea — and showing up alive, but late for a big interview, drip-dried, and wearing a beach T-shirt from a tourist stand near where she made her getaway. To Erin’s friend, school secretary Olivia (Susannah Fielding), it’s just another sign that perhaps Erin’s not quite ready to be a full-time teacher. To Penelope (Charlotte Vega), a realtor and neighbor whose son Harper beats up after he makes fun of her vision problem, Erin’s just another thorn in her side. Harper has actual physical vision issues, but ever since the holdup, she’s plagued by sightings of a creepy, animal-like figure; in the drawings Erin finds in her notebook, the being is eerily familiar, calling up memories Erin isn’t ready to acknowledge. 

That is, until after yet another gunfight with Agustín’s men at an isolated motel. Erin jumps off a bridge onto a flatbed truck and rolls into a ditch where, bruised and dazed, she lifts her head to see the same figure, a vision that splinters into a series of flashbacks that unspool throughout Episode 4: Erin abandoned as a little girl; then as a hardcore police trainee recruited by a detective for an undercover operation; Erin infiltrating the gang and bonding with member Lena (Denise Gough) and her 5-year-old daughter… Harper. And finally, the gang donning animal masks for a gold heist that goes very wrong — and Erin fleeing with Harper (and some of the goods) when she presumes Lena dead.

What happens to Erin at the end of Who Is Erin Carter?

After she wakes in (and escapes from) a hospital following the bridge jump, Erin returns home to face Jordi and Harper’s ire. Neither of them believe her anymore. On the family tree homework assignment that Harper’s drawing, Erin’s side is a vague green except for a branch showing “Aunt Lena.” Erin wants to come clean with them, but first she has to save Emilio, who’s wading into more danger, this time in the middle of an actual bullring late at night. Erin tracks Emilio there, finding him held at knifepoint by Daniel Lang (Douglas Henshall) — who Erin knows as a parent of a kid at school, and Emilio as a powerful Agustín associate. When Emilio refuses to spill the name of his informant, Lang stabs him before Erin can reach them. She’s just witnessed the death of Jordi’s best friend, and she still can’t tell him the truth.

Meanwhile, in England, Lena is very much alive –– she survived her injuries from the botched heist. She’s on work release in prison when she learns first of the death of Margot and then sees a photo of Erin, the woman she knew as Kate Jones, online, in news of Erin’s supermarket heroism. Lena manages to escape to Barcelona, where she shows up at Olivia’s house disguised in a wig and trying, in increasingly menacing and creepy ways, to get info on her “old friend” Erin and mainly, to find her daughter. But after Emilio’s funeral, Erin sends Jordi and Harper on a father-daughter trip, in hopes of giving her and Jordi distance to heal their frayed relationship, and time for her to patch up a few things. Erin agrees to attend a fireworks festival that night, where Lena, drunk and ballistic with rage, finds her in a bar and, at gunpoint, forces her to drive them to where Harper is. They’re still on the road when Erin admits they’re going out of the way — to the site where she’d buried the gold bars she took from the heist. It’s a brutally hot hike up to the spot, and Lena isn’t about to accept a payoff for her daughter. 

Sam Taylor/Netflix

Lena grabs the bag of gold and shoots Erin in the stomach, leaving her for dead on a blazing hot mountaintop while she returns to wait for Harper at the house. There, Lena’s caught by Lang’s men instead. When Lang learns from Lena that Erin is Kate Jones, the undercover cop who ratted out the Harwich gold heist job and, simultaneously, hears from his spies that Erin has managed to survive and return home, he orders a kill team. Desperate, Lena offers him the gold from the mountain in exchange for Harper’s safety. 

Jordi redresses Erin’s wound, and she orders him to take Harper somewhere safe; meanwhile Lena’s texting Harper from an anonymous number and finds out where they’re going. She approaches Harper in Olivia’s garden but Harper refuses to recognize her, referring to Erin as her mother. “You said you’d help my mum,” Harper repeats. “Are you going to help my mum?” Meanwhile, at the house, her mum is helping herself in all the ways she knows how: injecting herself with adrenaline from Jordi’s triage kit so she can fight off Lang’s men, whether with a cast-iron pan, sending them through glass, or in yet another martial arts-shoot-out combo, her specialty.

Does Erin save her family?

Yes. Throughout the series, every single one of Erin’s actions — whether it’s pawning her mother’s necklace, going into the line of fire among notorious gangsters, or conceding to play a tennis doubles match against her neighborhood nemesis — is motivated by her unshakable conviction to protect her loved ones from danger. “Stay away from my family,” she tells Lang in no uncertain terms. By the time Lena and Erin meet again after Erin’s survived the shooting, they’re bitter and embattled, yet there are traces of their earlier bond, which they realize has always been about Harper. (“I think, in another world, Erin would have run away with Lena,” Ahmad told Netflix.) 

They agree to forge an alliance if only to rescue her. Lena saw Lang’s men take Harper and Jordi, so they head to Lang’s boatyard, where they’re outnumbered and running out of ammo. Lena’s been in Erin’s house; she’s seen the life she’s made for her daughter. She sacrifices herself, running into the line of fire, shooting at an oil drum that engulfs Lang’s enforcers in flames  — which allows Erin to run unseen into the side office, where she finds Lang pointing a gun at Harper and Jordi.

Did Erin kill Daniel Lang?

Yes, though not when she first had the chance. In Episode 6, while at the fireworks festival, Erin is incensed after hearing from Emilio’s widow, Ana (Núria Deulofeu), that Daniel Lang has offered to pay for their child’s education. Ana has no clue that Lang is Emilio’s murderer, and Erin can’t tell her of course, but storms off to find him. In a long black lace dress with her eyes ringed in mask-like carnival makeup, Erin nimbly defends herself in fierce combat with one of Lang’s security men, but when she’s pointing a gun at Lang, he appeals to her as a mother. If she kills him, his son Dylan (who she’s gotten to know as his teacher and tutor) will be left alone. For once, Erin loses her iron grip on the trigger. 

The next time, Lang isn’t so lucky. Somehow, Lang escapes death in the final Episode 7 showdown that claims the lives of most of his army of security, as well as Lena’s. But Harper and Jordi are now in Lang’s clutches, and Lang is bleeding from his stomach as he trains his weapon on them. Then Erin bursts in, without wavering, ordering Jordi and Harper to leave. Lang’s so irate at Erin for what went down in the Harwich bust, he wants to kill her out of spite. He reaches for his gun — but Erin’s faster. Dylan will be left fatherless — but then again, Lang wasn’t much of a dad to him anyway, from what we’ve seen so far.

Sam Taylor/Netflix

So, Who Is Erin Carter?  isn’t based on a true story? 

No, it’s fictional. As series creator Jack Lothian told Netflix, his inspiration was drawn in part from the feeling of classic film noir and from the primary setting itself, Barcelona. “I was thinking of a story about a town where everybody has a secret and those ’50s noir movies of a woman with a hidden past and wondering what an updated version of that might look like,” Lothian said. “And Netflix were saying rather than setting it in a fictional city, why not just set it in Barcelona where we were filming. That way we can feature more of Barcelona.” 

The setting enhanced the feeling of the film for the actors too. Henshall said of filming in the now-disused bullring, “That’s one of the fantastic things about being an actor. You’re so lucky to be able to walk back in time and in history. That bullring isn’t used now because in Catalonia they don’t kill bulls anymore. The place is basically a museum, but it hasn’t been touched since it shut. It’s exactly as it was when it closed. We were doing night shoots and when you walk into the middle of it all the ghosts are still there. You can feel everything that’s happened there. It really is quite spectacular especially given the nature of the scene we were shooting. It really added to it.”

Who plays Erin in Who Is Erin Carter? 

Erin is played by Evin Ahmad, star of Snabba Cash and Call Mom! and winner of a Berlin International Film Festival award. Thirty-three-year-old Ahmad speaks several languages including her native Swedish as well as Kurdish, from her parents’ roots. “I have never actually seen a woman like this in a show before,” Ahmad told Netflix. “When you see female action characters, it’s mostly in a sci-fi context, but Erin is a seemingly normal woman who knows how to fight really well. She obviously has a past which she tries to hide, but I think she’s ultimately a person who wants to do right… [Erin] really loves her family and her new life, and at the same time, she has something dark within her. She isn’t the person who always follows the rules. She can get a huge kick out of doing some illegal things and sometimes her just being a substitute teacher gets a bit boring. It made me think, ‘Do you always have to be just the wife or just the teacher or just the mother or just a criminal?’ You can be everything all at once. There are multiple sides to Erin which I really enjoyed playing.”

As Bullock told Netflix, “When we were casting, [Lothian] really wanted someone who had star quality and the energy and charisma that the role of Erin Carter needed. That leading lady energy… She’s got that X factor. Evin has got that magic something that is so rare and so wonderful when you find it.” 

According to Lothian, choosing Ahmad was a no-brainer: “Evin has got a warmth to her and a sense of humor, but there is also a slight steeliness to her as well. You can’t quite tell what it is, what is going on behind her eyes, which is useful. It’s easy to play this kind of role being quite hard-edged, but Evin has this lovely warmth especially when she is doing things with Harper, her onscreen daughter.”

Sara Leal, whose other recent stunt credits include Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Terminator: Dark Fate, was Ahmad’s stunt double, but doing the scenes still required extraordinary physicality and martial arts skills. “I learned all the fights,” Ahmad said. At her audition, Ahmad showed the team proof of a recent sword fight she’d learned for a potential Hollywood job. “I came into the room and I’m short, skinny, and thinking, ‘They’re not going to buy that I can do any fights,’ ” she told Netflix. “So after my audition for Erin, I sat down with the producers, Jack and Rob and Nuala [O’Leary], and when they asked, ‘How are you with stunts?’ I showed them the video and hoped they would be interested in me.”

Will there be another season of Who Is Erin Carter?

TBD whether Who Is Erin Carter? will be continued. Several key characters are gone, and by the finale, the body count is stacked high. The strongest hint that points to a potential Season 2 of Who Is Erin Carter? comes right at the end. Erin, Harper, and Jordi are finally on a seaside vacation. But can we believe Erin will be satisfied with a normal life? As Lang tells her just before she shoots him dead, “I should’ve saw you for what you are. You’re not a teacher or a mother or police. You’re this.” In the last scenes, one margarita sip in, Erin realizes she’s left Harper’s goggles in the restaurant. When she goes to retrieve them, well, wouldn’t you know it, there’s her old boss Detective Inspector Jim Armstrong (Jamie Bamber) sitting at the bar, with a drink and a job offer. “All holidays must come to an end,” he says. There’s a knowing wink in his eye.