'The Boys' Creator: Why A-Train Was Killed Off in Season 5 Premiere
Jensen Ackles (Soldier Boy) and Antony Starr (Homelander) in 'The Boys' season five.
Jasper Savage/Prime Video
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[This story contains a MAJOR spoiler from Prime Video’s The Boys season five premiere, “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite.”]
The Boys kicked off its final season with a major character death, as one of The Seven was mercilessly murdered by Homelander.
In the first episode of season five, A-Train a.k.a. Reggie Franklin (Jessie T. Usher) was killed off in the episode’s final minutes. Homelander chased down the Fastest Man Alive after A-Train, having newly grown a conscience, swerved to avoid killing an innocent bystander — a callback to when the character accidentally killed Hughie’s (Jack Quaid) girlfriend in the series premiere. Furious with A-Train’s repeated betrayals, Homelander executed his formerly close colleague.
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Series creator Eric Kripke has previously said that the final season would have a real death count, and we asked why A-Train had to be the first to go.
“I was initially resistant to killing him off that early,” Kripke tells 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,” he continued. “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 fucking 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.”
Previously, Kripke spoke to THR about the new season’s unsettling political similarities with our current moment, and his anxiety about landing the show’s final episode.
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