The King’s Man: Why [SPOILER] Had To Die

Warning: Spoilers for The King’s Man.

In a shocking second-act moment in The King’s Man, Conrad Oxford is killed off, and there’s a very good reason that he had to die. The Kingsman prequel details the origins of the titular intelligence agency with a varied cast of characters, and at its core is Ralph Fiennes’ Duke of Oxford and his son Conrad. The relationship between the protective father and his stubbornly naive son is a key part of the film’s story, making Conrad Oxford one of the most important characters in The King’s Man‘s cast.

After defying his father’s wishes and heading off to war, Conrad finds himself in a situation where he’s impersonating another soldier on the front lines. After being sent into No Man’s Land to retrieve intelligence from a fallen runner, Conrad brings the man back to the trenches at great personal risk. Triumphantly presenting the intelligence, he is forced to falsely identify himself, which sees Conrad mistaken for a spy and shot by a fellow soldier.

It’s a shocking moment that sees the end of one of The King’s Man‘s main characters, but it’s also an important development in its story. While it’s a little disappointing that Conrad won’t be able to return for The King’s Man 2, his death absolutely had to happen. After all, Conrad’s death is actually the precipitating factor in the founding of the franchise’s titular intelligence agency. Ultimately, without his death, the entire history of the Kingsman would be entirely different, if not non-existent.

In life, Conrad was a major part of the Duke of Oxford’s motivations for being a pacificist. His death forces Oxford to reevaluate his stance on violence and on war, prompting him to personally involve himself and then form the Kingsman agency. Until then, Oxford had been far too preoccupied with Conrad’s safety to actually consider his ability to directly influence the tide of war. Once Conrad was killed in action, Oxford finally decided to put his vow of pacifism aside and consciously risk his life for the war effort, facing off against The King’s Man‘s main villain in an epic showdown.

The byproduct of Oxford’s choice to break his vow of pacificism was the founding of the Kingsman agency. Without Conrad’s death, Oxford likely wouldn’t have seen the need to form an official organization and would have instead settled for continuing to protect his son from the horrors of war. Conrad’s death forced Oxford into action in a way that nothing else could have, making the Kingsman agency the direct result of Conrad being killed.

It may have seemed as though The King’s Man was setting up Conrad to be one of the first Kingsman agents, but his shocking death was what galvanized Oxford into forming the agency in the first place, making it unavoidable. The King’s Man‘s ending also reveals the agency’s codenames to be in honor of Conrad’s fascination with King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, so his death even influenced the finer points of the Kingsman agency’s mode of operation. It was an abrupt and shocking twist for The King’s Man to kill off Conrad Oxford, but it was entirely necessary to see the formation of the titular agency.

About The Author