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The Boys Showrunner on [SPOILER] Heartbreaking Death, Finale Impact

The Boys Showrunner Eric Kripke breaks down the series' latest heartbreaking death and what it could mean for next week's series finale.

The dominoes are about to fall, and the stakes are raised even further in the latest turn of events of The Boys with the latest episode, "The Frenchmen, the Female, and the Man They Call Mother's Milk." As blunt as the title is, it's not as visceral as you might think, but there is major development as far as the series finale. Creator Eric Kripke spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about why it had to go down the way it did. The following, obviously, contains major spoilers.

How [SPOILER'S] Death May Play into The Boys Finale

As far as The Boys' major final season deaths, we have A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Firecracker (Valorie Curry), and Black Noir II (Nathan Mitchell). Not all were killed by Homelander (Antony Starr), surprisingly enough, as Noir was killed by the Deep (Chace Crawford) after the pipeline explosion aftermath that saw him kill his podcast partner after his smug showing of revenge for killing his director. The latest comes in the form of a plan concocted by Seven defector Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) trying to reverse engineer how Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) got his anti-V supe powers by experimenting on Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), using her healing powers to absorb nuclear radiation, which has been proven useful in Vought's experiments to torture and repress supe powers as indicated earlier in the season when Soldier Boy locked Homelander in such a chamber.

After Hughie (Jack Quaid) unwittingly revealed the trio's location to the psychic supe Synapse (Steven Yaffee), Homelander has a tracker activated to locate Sage's whereabouts. As Sage gets herself and the recovering Kumiko to the zinc-lined HVAC, which Homelander can't see with his X-ray vision, Frenchie locks them out and goes into hiding, only to later bait him into his radiated trap, which doesn't buy that much time with both exposed to radiation, temporarily subduing Homelander but fatally injuring himself in the process with the parting words, "I bet you never danced a day in your life."

As Homelander flies off, not getting what he wants, Frenchie crawls himself out in a stream of blood with Homelander putting him even closer to death as Sage and Kumiko are out to meet him, reunited with Hughie and Butcher (Karl Urban). As Kumiko and Frenchie share their final words together, he utters his final words, retorting her words back at her, saying, "No, you saved me" before dying in her arms. "We knew we had to kill off one of The Boys," Kripke said. "You can't have a shot at victory unless it costs your heroes something that's really hard. I always think 'The Lord of the Rings' was so good at that, and 'Game of Thrones' was so good at that. For narrative momentum, your heroes have to pay a steep price — because that's how it works in the real world."

As far as how Kripke came to that decision, "So it was going through each character and deciding what was going to be the most heart-wrenching," he continued. "I think we knew early on it was going to be Frenchie. In so many ways, Frenchie and Kimiko are the heart of the show. Despite what killers they are, they're both so emotionally sweet. We knew this would have real maximum destruction, and I think it had to happen. They would not have a chance of winning if Frenchie doesn't sacrifice himself." The Boys finale "Blood and Bone" premieres May 20th on Prime Video and in select Regal Cinemas in 4DX on May 19th.

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