Sylvester Stallone Breaks Down Tulsa King's Brutal Season 4 Deaths: 'What's Going To Come Out Of It Is Sensational'

Warning: This post contains spoilers from "Tulsa King" Season 4, Episode 2. Please proceed accordingly.

Nope, that shocker at the end of the "Tulsa King" Season 4 premiere was no fakeout: Margaret Deveraux (Dana Delany) and Gov. Cal Thresher (Neal McDonough) are indeed very dead, as this week's episode confirms.

In Friday's hour, titled "Blind Rooster," a stunned Dwight (Sylvester Stallone) grieves the death of his girlfriend while the rest of his crew try to help their boss figure out a way forward. It's a far cry from where we found the crime boss last week, as he rode high on the combined success of his businesses and personal life.

"It's a cautionary tale," series star/executive producer Stallone tells TVLine. "In the business that he's in, there's always going to be something that disrupts it. What is that line from John Lennon? 'Life is what happens when you're making other plans.' This is a classic example of that."

The huge loss, he continues, originated from the question he and head writer/EP Terence Winter used as their guiding light for this season of the Taylor Sheridan series: "How do we make Dwight an underdog again?"

Manfredi's successes, they reasoned, made him "too successful," Stallone says. "The show is now becoming redundant and predictable. So, tragedy hits. It hurts." So he looked to his seminal character, Rocky Balboa, for inspiration.

The iconic fighter's wife, played by Talia Shire in "Rocky" and four of its subsequent sequels, died off-screen leading into the 2006 sequel "Rocky Balboa." "To have Adrian pass away, I went, 'Oh my God, this is really brutal,'" Stallone recalls. "But it was necessary, you know? Rocky now has to fight something that everyone in the audience fights: grief and loneliness. So in this thing, I said, 'Let's try to create that.' And what is going to come out of it is sensational."

The deaths were Stallone's idea, he says, part of a larger plan for the recently announced Season 5. "Dwight plays a dangerous game of chess," he previewed. "He's never in the moment, especially after what just happened." The General's singlemindedness might be successful, he says, but it'll definitely be painful. "It's not a good life. It's not a happy life. It's a life of paranoia... He's always gears and wheels and this Machiavellian kind of thing, especially this season."

At the same time, The General's desire for answers will have him seeking answers in new places. "He's become very superstitious and religious now," Stallone notes; viewers will recall his fixation on the cross jewelry in this week's episode. "[He's like] 'Did I cause this?'" he says. "He goes to church and literally questions — he even goes on AI and talks about God, kind of like survivor's guilt."

He adds: "He's quite tortured by his survival, and I thought that'd be kind of interesting."