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The Boys creator and showrunner Eric Kripke has long been vocal about not holding back in the Prime Video show's final season.
The premiere episode made good on that promise, bumping off one of the most prominent characters across the five-season run – even if Kripke didn't originally want it to happen so soon.
Major spoilers for The Boys season 5 follow.
The final season's first episode came to a close with Starlight, Butcher, and Kimiko willingly walking into a trap at Vought's concentration camp so they could free Frenchie, Mother's Milk, and Hughie.
With Homelander quickly getting wind of those plans, it falls to former Seven member A-Train to tip the scales in The Boys' favor, soon zipping off at the speed of sound with Homelander in pursuit.
In a neat bookend of the series' first shocking moment – which sees A-Train literally run through Hughie's then-girlfriend – the speedster swerves to avoid a woman in the road, finally giving Homelander the upper hand. Despite telling some particularly harsh truths to the de-facto POTUS, A-Train was swiftly dispatched by his former Seven leader.
"I was initially resistant to killing him off that early. It was a little scary to kill him off so soon," Kripke told The Hollywood Reporter. "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."
As the scriptwriting process sped into sight on the final season, the writers' room were adamant that A-Train had to be the first to go.
“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.’" Kripke recalled.
He added, "I thought it was a winning argument."
A-Train may be the first to go, but we can be certain that's not the end of the bodies being stacked up high as The Boys reaches its brutal, bloody endgame.
For more, check out The Boys season 5 release schedule and everything that's new on Prime Video this month.
