The Boys Creator on Final Season, "Anyone Who Dies in Season 5 Will Richly Deserve It"
What? Violence on The Boys? Perish the thought.
The Boys is a show where almost everyone on the screen might be an absolute monster at any given time. There are fairly few truly good characters, and the ones that are there tend to have the hardest life. So when TV Guide asked the cast to lay out their ideal deaths for their characters, some of the results were pretty interesting. Perhaps most interesting -- and potentially the most telling -- was series creator Eric Kripke, who seemed to imply that most of the "good" people will be okay, with the characters who suffer the most being those who deserve it.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean all of The Boys will make it out alive. Butcher in particular is hardly an angel. But it probably means there will be plenty of satisfying moments in the fifth and final season when it rolls around next year.
"Anyone who dies in season five will richly deserve it, I'll just say that," Kripke said, adding the season isn't fully written yet. "We have a certain sense of who lives and who dies. We don't have it all totally figured out, but you get to do the final season of the show, and you get to go out on your own terms, so not everyone's making it through."
The Boys, which was cancelled at DC after just six issues, went on to be a huge success for Dynamite, who published it from 2007 until 2012, when Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson felt the story had run its course (at 72 issues). Like the TV series, it was such a hit that it resulted in spinoffs and imitators.
"Three issues in, they started getting weird, and I started getting a lot of requests for changes," Robertson said in a 2017 oral history of WildStorm. "I was trying to stay on track with my schedule as well as accommodate the changes, so I started penciling very aggressively up to issue 10, so everybody would have a chance to look it over before I inked anything and, as a result, I just woke up on a Friday, ready to work through the weekend, and found out, from [editor Ben Abernaty] and Garth, that we were cancelled. I did not quite understand what happened, but I went, told my wife—we had just bought a house, I said, 'I don't have a job.'… So, I drove to Disneyland for the weekend with the kids and decided I hadn't seen them in a while anyway because I've been working so hard on the book. And on the way home my cell phone was going crazy. We got 17 offers from every other publisher in the business. Almost everybody had put their hands up to say, 'We'll take the book.'"
Prime Video describes the fourth season of The Boys as follows:
The world is on the brink. Victoria Neuman is closer than ever to the Oval Office and under the muscly thumb of Homelander, who is consolidating his power. Butcher, with only months to live, has lost Becca's son as well as his job as The Boys' leader. The rest of the team are fed up with his lies. With the stakes higher than ever, they have to find a way to work together and save the world before it's too late.
