Chace Crawford as The Deep on season five of "The Boys."

Jasper Savage/Prime Video

Warning: Spoilers ahead for season five, episode six of The Boys.

Chace Crawford remembers doing the calculations and expecting The Deep to be killed off at the onset of The Boys.

Against all odds, and with two episodes remaining in the series, the narcissistic, dense supe has somehow managed to outlive characters like A-Train, Firecracker and Black Noir. But Crawford, who’s been part of Eric Kripke’s hit superhero satire series since the very beginning, promises that there’s more in store.

“I love Kripke for keeping us all to the bitter end, but it’s the curtain call,” Crawford said. “It’s time to pay the piper, you know?”

In the fifth and final season of The Boys, Crawford’s dim-witted aquatic supe desperately clings to his place in The Seven out of fear of being replaced, or worse, killed at the whims of Homelander (Antony Starr). In trying to stay in Homelander’s good graces and earn his approval, The Deep inadvertently becomes embroiled in a feud with fellow The Seven member Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell).

After repeatedly upstaging each other, their rivalry reaches a bitter end in episode six (“Though the Heavens Fall”). During the episode, The Deep proves his loyalty to Homelander and betrays his oceanic friends, the only creatures he truly cares for, by filming a damage-control PSA for Vought’s new offshore petroleum pipeline, claiming that oil isn’t bad for the environment.

To get payback for The Deep sending an eel to murder Black Noir’s acting mentor, Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne), in the previous episode, Black Noir punches a hole in the pipeline, causing an oil spill that kills 1.4 billion fish. A frantic and oil-covered Deep scrambles to help his sea friends and resuscitate a dying fish, but it’s too late.

“We know, Kevin,” a fish named Jeremy says. “We know it was you.”

Later, when The Deep talks to Black Noir before recording their podcast, he learns that his teammate caused the rupture and has no regrets or sympathy.

Before Black Noir has time to react and defend himself, The Deep strangles him with a cord and kills him by stabbing him in the neck with a knife from Noir’s suit.

“You were never my bro, bro,” The Deep tells Noir.

Crawford said that, from a character perspective, he liked that the confrontation “wasn’t a cheap shot or a trigger pull.”

“It was kind of a struggle, and you see how intense it is,” he said.

It was also a chilling reminder that The Deep is stronger than he may seem.

What makes Crawford’s performance so pitch-perfect and ripe for meme glory is that he plays The Deep with seriousness. Whether The Deep is filming a commercial for an anal wellness product developed “for bros, by bros,” driving a Cybertruck (because, of course, that’s the vehicle he’d be behind the wheel of), or contributing to the manosphere with his Manhandled podcast, Crawford is always in on the joke.

Don’t expect a redemption arc for The Deep in the remaining episodes, though.

“It just gets sadder and sadder for The Deep, to be honest,” Crawford said. “I think he’s realizing that The Seven is going to be over and he’s not going to really have a place in it. He’s even losing his identity as The Deep.”

“It’s a really sad downward spiral that is probably much needed, and it’s going to be a welcome thing for the viewer to see him finally get his comeuppance,” the actor added. “He was always irredeemable. It’ll be fun, it’ll be funny, it’ll be weird and hopefully explosive by the end.”

When The Boys concludes its run later this month, Crawford said he’s most going to miss participating in the press tours with his costars, opening the scripts to see what the writers cooked up and being in The Seven meeting room, making his castmates laugh with his ridiculous lines.

It’s a role undoubtedly more off-the-wall than his work on the popular teen drama series Gossip Girl, one that has produced memorable, and oftentimes appalling, sequences involving a dolphin, a whale and an octopus — and Crawford doesn’t take any of it for granted.

“I’ll never do something as weird and as fun as The Deep ever again,” he said. “It was a one-off, that’s for sure.”

The first six episodes of season five of The Boys are streaming on Prime Video. New episodes release weekly on Wednesdays, culminating in the series finale on May 20.