Marie, a supe with the ability to manipulate people’s blood, discovers her powers when she gets her first period – and very quickly loses control of them, resulting in the tragic deaths of both of her parents.

Michele Fazekas, a co-showrunner of Gen V alongside Tara Butters, told Entertainment Weekly why this scene was a source of discomfort for show bosses.

“That was in the pilot script when I came aboard, and I think that there may have been some discomfort early on from maybe the executive side because it’s girls’ periods.”

Continuing, she added that far from putting herself and Butters off, the scene “gripped” them, and helped draw a contrast between the spinoff and its parent series.

“When Tara and I came on, it was one of the things that gripped us. I love that this is where her powers come from. It’s already, not necessarily a traumatic thing, but a very big thing in any girl’s life,” she said.

“To have that set off your powers [and] murder your parents really differentiates [from The Boys],” she continued. “It’s like, The Boys is about ‘the boys’ and this is about a girl, a woman. I felt like, out of the gate, this is what the show is.”

Eric Kripke, who is an Executive Producer on Gen V and a showrunner on The Boys went on to say that although there were many iterations of the script, the first time audiences see Marie always featured same tragedy.

“Sometimes the victims were different, sometimes it wasn’t her parents, but [it was] always the notion that with Marie’s puberty came this onset of adulthood in the most horrific way possible,” he explained.

“I think [that] was always really powerful. Sometimes there was some talk from higher up about: ‘Are we sure?'”

“‘Is this uncomfortable?’ Because I think people get uncomfortable,” Fazekas added. “And what I love is, let’s take the uncomfortable thing and dive right in the center of it.”

There are no shortage of uncomfortable moments in the gruesome spinoff; episode four’s ‘cockplosion’ sequence proves that, during which Marie – you guessed it – explodes the penis of a psychic character named Rufus that’s presumably about to assault her.

That’s also not the first time in the Gen-V-verse that someone’s had their penis exploded; season three of The Boys saw Termite (a supe with the ability to shrink and grow at will) crawl into his lover’s penis before sneezing and inconveniently returning to his normal size. Ouch.