Karl Urban has a warning for fans of The Boys: nobody's safe when the show returns for its fifth and final season.
"Fatalities right from the get go," Urban told IGN in a new interview. "We're not messing around. This is the end, and it's going to be brutal."
For a show that has never been shy about killing characters in creative and disturbing ways, this is saying something. The Boys has built its reputation on subverting superhero tropes and delivering graphic violence that makes Marvel executives clutch their pearls. If Urban says Season 5 starts with major deaths, believe him.
The question is: who's on the chopping block?
Urban's character, Billy Butcher, has been living on borrowed time since the end of Season 4, his brain tumor giving him months to live. That feels like the obvious answer, but The Boys rarely goes for obvious. Showrunner Eric Kripke has a track record of killing characters audiences assume are safe (RIP to several fan favorites across four seasons).
What makes the "right from the get go" comment particularly ominous is that The Boys typically uses its season premieres to set the stakes. Season 1 opened with collateral murder. Season 2 started with a whale explosion. Season 4 began with political assassination. Season 5 promising immediate fatalities suggests Kripke is going scorched earth on the series finale.
The final season will wrap up storylines involving Homelander's increasingly fascist grip on America, the corruption of Vought International, and the question of whether superheroes can be held accountable for their crimes. Those are big thematic swings, and has never been subtle about using character deaths to underscore its points about power and accountability.
