'The Boys' Creator Talks Why [Spoiler] Was First Kill In 5th & Final Season
WARNING: This post contains spoilers from the first episode of The Boys!
The first death of The Boys‘ fifth season came in the premiere episode.
The Prime Video series started off with a major death towards the end of the ep. Spoilers ahead.
Keep reading to find out more…
In the final minutes, A-Train, aka Reggie Franklin (Jessie T Usher) met his fate after Homelander (Antony Starr) executed him after being mad at his repeated betrayals.
Following the episode’s debut, the series’ creator and showrunner Eric Kripke opened up about killing off A-Train first, after previously teasing there would be major deaths in the final season.
“I was initially resistant to killing him off that early,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “It was a little scary to kill him off so soon. We had actually broken out [an alternate storyline] that was like: Where is he now, what is he doing, and how can he help The Boys? — all that stuff was in process, so it’s not like we didn’t have it. We knew that he was going to be the first big death. At the time, I think we were thinking maybe episode three.”
“And it was the writers who really campaigned for it — it’s their fault,” Eric added. “They campaigned. They were like, ‘You keep saying that nobody’s safe, and that it’s going to be a season where anything can happen at any time. So with all due respect, put your f-cking money where your mouth and show that you’re willing to drop a major character in the first episode. Because if you do that, then for the rest of the season, no one is going to feel safe.’ And I thought it was a winning argument.”
“So some of the storylines we were talking about — like reuniting with his brother and really choosing to be a hero after starting out as kind of Han Solo character — were this three-episode arc, and we did the greatest hits version to get it down to an appropriate sendoff in the premiere,” he concluded.
If you missed it, see the full release schedule for The Boys season five.