He Had It Coming Recap & Ending Explained: Who Is The Kill All Men Killer? 

There are smart shows, and then there are shows that know exactly what they want to be while staying sharp, confident, and utterly unpretentious. The Australian dark comedy “He Had It Coming” belongs to that rare second category. It delivers a compelling campus mystery that pulls you straight into its world and makes the chaos feel strangely inviting. In today’s social media-driven landscape, feminism is routinely mocked by large sections of the incels, and the violence women face is treated as an afterthought. “He Had It Coming” turns that dynamic on its head by putting men in the very position women have long been forced to endure. When a serial killer starts targeting male students, the campus erupts, and the show forces men to confront the safety they have always taken for granted. Alongside the central mystery, it tackles how women process sexual assault, exposes predatory professors, and critiques the way society judges women purely on appearance, illustrated by a chilling scene featuring a literal ranking board. The season ends on a gripping cliffhanger, and now it is time to dive into everything the first season sets in motion.

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in the series?

The show opens in a fine arts classroom, where a classicist, Professor Walters, is showing his students some classic nude paintings, including John Collier’s 1897 classic “Lady Godiva,” Henri Gervex’s controversial 1878 painting “Rolla,” and Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde,” which is basically a closeup view of a naked woman’s vagina with her legs spread. The students aren’t particularly thrilled by this slideshow of nude art, and in the middle of this, we’re introduced to Barbara, a student who’s also a very popular social media influencer. Barbara’s on-and-off boyfriend, Rory, a football player, barges into the classroom to apologize to her about his friends making fun of her in a video, and when she refuses to talk, Rory feels his friends are right and she can be a real pain, but he expresses the feeling with a much more derogatory word. We are then introduced to the other protagonist, Elise, a foreign exchange student from England who is mostly a socially awkward mess.  She meets Professor Phoenix, a pretentious snob who often champions feminist art for more popularity amongst his female students. When Elise comes looking for Professor Walters, Phoenix attends to her instead, and he reviews Elise’ take on the famous Manet painting “Luncheon on the Grass,” where she puts girly clothes on the naked woman in the painting. Phoenix thinks that even though Elise’ style is good, she needs to be more radical and loud in her work and basically calls her work mediocre. Sad Elise goes to the art room and finds Barbara, who’s even sadder and crying. Both of them couldn’t be more different than each other, but they end up chatting and drinking, thanks to the one common thread between them—they hate their professors. The drinks get a little too much for them, and they start feeling adventurous. Barbara decides to vandalize the statue of the founder of the university, and the girls do a great job at that. They also find the leader of the feminist faction of the Uni, Prue, passed out, and they put her in the art room while she’s covered in paint too. The next morning, Elise and Barbara wake up to the news that the captain of the football team, Scott, has been killed and castrated, and his body is found right on the vandalized statue. Both of them were present at the crime scene; the only difference is they didn’t kill the boy or write “kill all men” on the statue. 

Who are the prime suspects? 

Elise’ roommate, Nicole, tells her that Scott was a rapist and he had it coming. Meanwhile, Barbara feels that it’s best if they don’t get into this mess, and she simply orders Elise to get rid of the paint-stained pants she’s wearing. Barbara bullies a foreign student named Jenny into lending Elise her stockings, and Elise buries the pants near the campus. A famous detective known for taking down a huge crime family, Roach, is assigned to solve the case, and he has the student-police liaison, Shepherd, to help him with the investigation. Elise is worried about Prue, who’s innocent and detained by the cops for interrogation, but Barbara just lets it slide. But soon, she receives a note that indicates someone knows about their vandalism. But the blackmailer is Jenny, who doesn’t have a clue about any of this. All she wants is to threaten Elise and Barbara that she saw them in the bathroom, and she’ll tell everyone about their secret love affair if Barbara doesn’t advertise the crochet flower business she runs. Elise figures that Jenny will practically be cancelled if she does queer shaming like this, so Jenny crumbles, fearing deportation. She reveals that an agent scammed her into giving her tuition money, so Barbara decides to help her by offering to pay for her tuition. Barbara also sneakily returns the keys of the art supply room to Phoenix, who is head over heels for her. And Elise, with help from an eccentric student named Ivan, destroys the CCTV memory card. Just when the girls think they’re now bulletproof, the leader of the men’s rights faction, Lyle, is found dead in the women’s therapy room. His private parts are also butchered like Scott, and the killer has put a bra on him with the words “kill all men” inscribed on his chest. 

Why does the vice chancellor ban women on campus?

After a lot of drama between the characters, some new dynamics begin to form. Barbara and Elise have become tight after their initial troubles, and Barbara now knows that Elise has a stalking charge against her. Back in England, Elise had a friend who randomly ditched her one day for some popular girls, and when she followed her home for a few days, she was charged with stalking. But Barbara is chill enough to recognize that she can just tell Elise off whenever she’s being annoying. Barbara has also been ditched from becoming the doe, since Rory, the buck, didn’t show up after being treated poorly by Barbara. It’s a silly little tradition of the university, which basically translates to the most popular couple, usually the football team’s captain and his girlfriend, being the most powerful students, and so on. Barbara’s girly-girl friends ditch her to chase popularity. Meanwhile, a castrated tip of a male genital shows up in the tip-off box set up by the cops. Now the guess is the victim is still alive, but they don’t have any leads to make an arrest and find out the culprit. The men on the campus start protesting against the women, as they’re concerned about their safety. In a hilarious scene, Rory emphasizes how hard it is for the men to walk on campus at night and that the girls have no idea how unsafe he feels. Imagine saying this in front of a room full of women. A full-on gender war begins on campus, and Rory ditches the football team captaincy to take part in the men’s rights faction. Professor Phoenix, meanwhile, starts publicizing the kill-all-men murders by implying how female rage has birthed this primal art, practically taking the credit himself. In a drastic revelation, we also find out that Barbara once supported her friends, who molested and raped a student named Maya. Maya is somewhat okay by now, but she asks Barbara how she is doing, since she wasn’t the only one who was raped that night. Barbara is in complete denial over the fact that someone raped her as well, as she believes everybody was drunk and fooling around. When Rory gets to know about it, he understands the wall Barbara put between them, and he swears to change himself and catch the rapist. This helps Rory and Elise to finally be friends, and Barbara finally starts feeling the rage and anger when a therapy group of victims of sexual assault doesn’t serve its purpose. While the therapy group implies that it’s easier to talk and vent than to take an actual step, Barbara realizes that she has to do something about this horrible thing. At a party, Prue lets the men’s rights faction leader, Jared, sleep with her. When Jared proposes to her soon after, she obviously refuses him, which leads to Jared turning violent and breaking down everything in the room Prue is in. She’s traumatized, and the vice chancellor, who’s all about optics, decides that it’s best for the women to stay inside their dorms and off campus for the next 48 hours. The Federation games are about to begin, and the vice chancellor has to make sure they go ahead without any hiccups. In the same aforementioned party, Ivan, the innocent sculpture artist, turns up dead, and with three bodies on the campus now, the terror keeps on rising. 

Who is the Kill All Men killer? 

The vice chancellor also bans all forms of protests on campus, disbanding the men’s rights group. Prue finds Barbara slamming the washroom door, and she finally makes Barbara understand that she’s not someone who should feel like she doesn’t have any power. With over a half million followers, if anybody has a voice, it’s Barbara. She deletes all her social media posts, hoping to start off as a different person. Soon after, Barbara insults Elise for not shutting up about finding the killer, which deeply hurts her, and she decides to leave Australia for good. Meanwhile, the liaison, Shepherd, is dismissed by Detective Roach for being too close and personal with the students and not having a clear view of the case. But Shepherd isn’t someone who knows how to stop caring, and when the archaeology students dig up the evidence Elise hid earlier, Shepherd collects it before the cops or Roach. Shepherd finds Barbara’s bracelet in it, and she manages to get Barbara alone in a room. When Shepherd slams Barbara for saving Maya’s rapists just because they were her friends, Barbara confronts her, asking what exactly she has done for protecting women. Shepherd snaps and accidentally slips up by telling a massive truth. It was Shepherd who killed Scott, and a flashback takes us right at the beginning of the show. When a confrontation got out of hand between the men and the women, Shepherd detained Scott, who was behaving terribly with her. Shepherd used her taser on Scott, and he fell and hit his head on a rock. With a dead body in the back of her car, Shepherd found the perfect opportunity to dump the body when Barbara and Elise blinded one of the cameras of the campus, so she put Scott’s corpse right on the vandalized statue and added the “kill all men” graffiti. Barbara realizes she’s in trouble after learning the truth, but before she can escape, Shepherd tases her too. 

Who is the Piggy man? 

Jenny stops Elise before she can leave, since Barbara deleted her advertisement posts. Jenny secretly installed malware on Barbara’s phone earlier, so they find her pretty quickly. They find Barbara tied and locked in the maintenance room, and when they go looking for Shepherd, Elise finds a plate that says “Go Bucks, Boom.” Barbara figures out this has a connection with the football team, who hold a luncheon before the big game, and the boom implies that she’s going to blow them up all at once. What better way to smash the patriarchy than blowing up a football team and their dated tradition? Barbara and Elise do manage to save them in time, and Rory finally tells Barbara that he loves her, as he’s grown exponentially throughout this time, also criticizing the men for hosting the silly luncheon and looking down on women. Even though Barbara doesn’t have the state of mind to respond to him, when Elise tells her that she’s leaving, Barbara tells Elise that she loves her. She finally accepts that Elise is her best friend, and they chase Shepherd to a room. Shepherd reveals that she is not acting alone, as when she killed Lyle, someone caught her in the act. The same person also recorded her when she was putting Scott’s body on the quad, and we see the man briefly in a pig mask at the party where Ivan’s dead body was found. Shepherd holds Barbara and Elise at gunpoint, confessing that she had to kill Ivan, who was innocent, but before Barbara attempts to negotiate with her, the Piggy man stabs Shepherd and runs away. The series ends with Barbara and Elise caught red-handed by Detective Roach, and the girls finally find themselves in a situation where they have no more escape. 

The real mystery now gripping everyone is the true identity of the Piggy Man. Personally, I think the most compelling suspect is Professor Phoenix—a man notorious for hijacking credit for other people’s art. Elise even calls him out for this in the finale, and honestly, who can blame her? It’s not a stretch to imagine someone with his ego orchestrating murders in a deliberately theatrical fashion just so he can later bask in the “artistic” notoriety of it all. His questionable behavior toward Elise—and, presumably, many other students—only underscores the power imbalance he routinely exploits. Plus, Phoenix sits in the perfect position of authority to manipulate events from the shadows, ensuring everything unfolds under his control without ever placing himself at risk. If the show is indeed steering us in his direction, Season 2 could unravel some truly fascinating, twisted revelations.

...