Let’s just start by saying this post will absolutely spoil the seventh episode of Season 2 of The Boys, so if you haven’t gotten your weekly fill of superhero mayhem, maybe save this tab in your browser until you do. You’ve been warned.
The penultimate episode of the show’s second season had a lot of heads exploding once again, as the show continues to ramp up the brutality and shock in a variety of ways. But one of the more unexpected moments of the show was the death of a (former) member of The Seven. TV Line talked to showrunner Eric Kripke (careful: there’s also a spoiler in the story’s URL as well) about the episode and he detailed what the writer’s room was thinking when it decided that Lamplighter, who was introduced in the last episode, needed to go.
As Kripke noted, Lamplighter was removed from The Seven and was essentially on cleanup duty for Vought, killing off people who had been experimented on and reacted negatively. The role weighed heavily on him, though, and when we finally see Shawn Ashmore in action he’s not very positive about his lot in life.
“Our feeling was, in the writers’ room, that Lamplighter is suicidal,” showrunner Eric Kripke tells TVLine. “He pretty much straight up says it at the end of Episode 6. He says to Mallory, ‘Please kill me. I really want to be put out of my misery.’ So he’s pretty on record that he’s suicidal.”
Despite what Kripke had in mind for the character, the show’s creator admitted he had regrets about his ultimate demise, which came at Vought headquarters when he lit himself on fire after helping Hughie break in and create a diversion to rescue Starlight. Kripke credited Ashmore for his work with the character and how much depth he brought to a character viewers weren’t exactly expected to find sympathetic.
“We wrote all that before we cast Shawn, and once we cast Shawn and we saw how good he was and how soulful and weary and, in a weird way, sympathetic he made Lamplighter, I really regretted that we were killing him,” Kripke admits with a laugh. “If I could go back and do it again, knowing that I had Shawn and what he did with that character, I would have kept him alive for longer. But that was what that character was arced for from the beginning.”
It’s high praise for a character that was just introduced on camera in the previous episode, but Ashmore certainly did his best with the part. There’s a lot going on in any episode of The Boys, but he certainly did the most with what was just one of several deaths in another bloody episode.
[via TV Line]
