‘Deadly Class’: [SPOILER] Dies in “Saudade”

This week, the first major fatality of a recognizable character happened on Deadly Class. The series is based on one of Image Comics’s most deadly titles and, like The Walking Dead, you can be expected that meeting, loving, and then missing characters will be a fixture of the show for as long as it lasts…

…and it begins here, with a fatality that will change the entire direction of the series.

Spoilers ahead for “Saudade,” tonight’s episode of Deadly Class.

There are a couple of people who follow our heroes to Las Vegas: Chico (Michel Duval), Maria’s abusive boyfriend and the head of the cartel caste; and F–kface (Tom Stevens), Marcus’s former roommate from the boy’s home. Both of them were hoping to kill Marcus, and both of them come face to face with him.

So who makes it out, and who doesn’t?

If you have read the comics, you likely already know: after a harrowing experience on a bad trip and a brief conflict with F–kface, Chico tracks down Billy, Maria, Willie, Saya, and Marcus. When he finds Maria and Marcus in bed together, he tries to kill Marcus, and ends up squaring off with the whole group. After getting the better of Willie, he gets down to the business of trying to kill Marcus.

As with every other time they have fought, Chico quickly gets the upper hand, and he is ready to kill Marcus — until Maria uses her trademark bladed fan to slice her boyfriend’s throat, leaving him there to bleed out on the pavement.

“It was a scary time when I first read the comics, because you know what happens at the end of the first volume,” Duval told ComicBook.com during a recent interview. “I didn’t know if the first volume was going to be the first episode, or it was going to be the whole season. I didn’t know what’s going on, but a comic book has limited pages. You can only tell so much in such few pages, but now that we have an hour to go into the stories — we have ten hours because it’s ten episodes — I feel like the fans of the graphic novels are going to get to know much more about the characters….In the comics, you see Chico and he’s just a bad guy who does bad stuff. In the show, you know what drives him to become the way that he is, and we see way more of the way that he operates, the way that he manages different situations, and I really love it. I’m really proud of what we did with the character.”

The long, violent chase that Marcus had led Chico on through the streets of Las Vegas meant the police were hot on their tales, though, and the group left the body in the street so they could retreat.

That…may have been a mistake, since the next person in that alley was not a cop, but F–kface, who now has physical evidence he can use against Marcus and friends.

…What’s next? Well, time will tell.

Deadly Class airs at 10 p.m. ET/PT, Wednesdays on SYFY.