“Gen V” team saw Golden Boy twist as their “L.A. Confidential” moment

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Gen V's premiere episode.

Similar to how The Boys kicked off the first season with its purveyor of righteousness Homelander (Antony Starr) shooting a politician and his family out of the sky with laser vision, spinoff series Gen V came out the gate hot.

Patrick Schwarzenegger's Luke Riordan had been played up as one of the crucial characters of the show alongside Jaz Sinclair's Marie Moreau, headlining trailers and marketing materials. The top-ranked supe at Godolkin University with super strength, flight, and the ability to set his entire body on fire, Luke lived up to his moniker as the campus Golden Boy, who was all lined up to be the newest member of the Seven. Then the final minutes of the premiere pulled the rug out from under viewers.

Luke killed his supposed mentor Professor Brink (Clancy Brown) in an unexpected display before attacking Marie and his friend Jordan Li (played by both London Thor and Derek Luh), believing they had somehow been sent by unseen forces to keep him muzzled. In the end, Luke realizes the very public display he put on and flies high into the air to explode himself, kicking off a season-long mystery.

"It's that great first thing to happen that indicates, 'Oh! There's something bigger going on here,'" showrunner Michele Fazekas tells EW in an interview with executive producer Eric Kripke, who's also the architect behind the expanding universe of The Boys. "We referenced LA Confidential a lot. It's like, there's the Nite Owl Massacre. Why did it happen? It gives you a great first layer to peel back."

Similar to Marie's traumatic moment with her period at the start of the episode, the death of Golden Boy was part of the initial treatment for Gen V, developed by The Boys writer and executive producer Craig Rosenberg.

"I think Michele and I live in a multiverse of this show where Golden Boy has killed himself for a dozen different reasons, but he always killed himself," Kripke says of all the different ways in which they experimented with the character committing suicide. "You have this character who is the anchor of the school and going to the Seven and really setting him up to be a main character. Then once he blows himself up, you create this incredible power vacuum. It's just good for drama, right? Everyone's rushing into, 'Oh s---! The one person we were all counting on to carry the show forward is now gone.' Now who's going to step into that place?"

Prime Video Patrick Schwarzenegger smolders (literally) as Luke Riordan, a.k.a. Golden Boy, on 'Gen V'

The reason for Luke's demise that they ultimately landed on was his sibling Sam (Asa Germann). Viewers learn in the subsequent episodes that Golden Boy's troubled lil' bro is not dead as he once thought. He's alive and being held captive beneath Godolkin in the Woods, a secret facility that conducts dangerous, illegal experiments on young supes — and the staff, including Brink, have known about it all along.

"I loved setting up what you think the show is going to be and then immediately at the end of the pilot blowing that out of the water," Fazekas says. "I know that everyone [in the writers' room] wanted there to be a mystery in addition to establishing this world and what is a superhero college? What is it like for superheroes who are coming into adulthood? We didn't have a handle on, what is the mystery? So we had to build that out. It launched us into both what happened leading up to this and what is it going to mean in the future."

The mystery continues as Gen V season 1 continues to stream on Prime Video every Friday.

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