The Boys TV Series — Season 5 Review

The series The Boys received a reputation as one of the industry's biggest events right from the start. Ruthless violence, mockery of mainstream superhero media, and frightening realism became a breath of fresh air for viewers. The project quickly built up a loyal fanbase, including many people who had never even read the original comics. Eric Kripke, the creator of another major hit, Supernatural, who took the helm of the new show, once again seemed to have struck gold. That lasted for three seasons, and then something happened. The fourth season came dangerously close to the phrase "a dog’s dream", while the fifth and final season unexpectedly repeated the fate of Stranger Things or, more precisely, turned out far worse. Before release, the creators actively mocked the controversial ending of Netflix’s flagship series and openly hinted that they would never make the same mistake. Let’s break down just how badly we were all deceived.

Before discussing the finale, it’s worth diving a little deeper into the original source material. Comic creator Garth Ennis is a fierce opponent of spandex-clad superhero stories. The author has repeatedly spoken negatively about characters who keep doing the same thing over and over again and whose stories can never seem to end. Which, amusingly enough, did not stop Ennis from finding work at Marvel. At the same time, the writer has always adored the Punisher and created numerous stories about the character, including one where Frank Castle wipes out every hero and villain in the Marvel Universe on Earth. To Ennis, the Punisher always seemed like an interesting character with clear motivations that ordinary people could understand.

It’s easy to guess that Butcher’s image was completely inspired by the grim avenger with a skull on his chest. They even look alike. The Boys itself became a mockery of superheroes and the entertainment industry, with its endless parties, creation of projects out of any tiny thing capable of making money, and constant backstage scheming. There was little politics in The Boys, and even fewer happy endings, because no bright future was ever intended for superhumans in this universe. The author not only supported the Boys’ point of view, but also poured his own emotions into Butcher.

The The Boys TV series was radically different from the original comic. Apparently, Kripke simply could not allow the story to develop according to such a relentlessly grim scenario, so he began softening the edges. Naturally, this led to numerous changes both in the characters themselves and in the major story beats. To be fair, that was not always a bad thing. For example, the heroes in the series turned out far more textured and memorable than in the comics.

Then someone decided that The Boys should become a brand, and announcements for various prequels, side stories, and spin-offs began pouring in. One of them, Gen V, even managed to see the light of day. Before its release, Kripke constantly talked about how important the story about a university for supes would be to the overall plot. That was enough to attract viewers to the first season of Gen V, though not for long, since the second season became the show’s last. The impression grew stronger and stronger that The Boys was slowly transforming from a satire of modern Marvel and DC into a direct example of something very similar. For a look at what that genre can still achieve when done right, check out our article: Invincible — Season 3 Review. Classic Superhero Storytelling.

The blame here lies not so much with the story itself or its expansions, but with Kripke, who apparently decided to make more money while also using the show as a platform for his personal political opinions about what is good and bad. Needless to say, that sort of thing rarely ends well.

The plot of the finale revolves around the V-1 compound, which was once injected into Soldier Boy and other old-school superheroes. Besides granting powers, it somehow also provided immortality and immunity to the supe virus developed by the Boys. Let’s ignore the fact that the earliest versions of any medicine or drug are usually far weaker than later ones, not the other way around. What matters is that Homelander desperately wants to obtain V-1 in order, first, to remain unchanged like his father Soldier Boy and, second, to protect himself from Butcher’s weapon.

At the same time, the fourth season gave us several key setups. Butcher suffers from a split personality and progressive cancer, while the rest of the team has been captured by Homelander’s supporters and sent to a correctional camp. Only Annie and Kimiko remain free.

The final season immediately changes the rules of the game and throws many of its predecessor’s developments straight into the trash. Suddenly, Butcher is perfectly stable, still has his powers, and his health barely seems to matter. His cancer is not mentioned a single time throughout the entire season. Frenchie’s strange romantic preferences, which threw many viewers off balance, are also erased. The chemist is once again hopelessly in love with Kimiko. Gen V gets tossed into the same trash heap — a fate that turned out to be somewhat prophetic, as we covered in our material: Failing to Meet Expectations? Amazon Cancels The Boys Spinoff Gen V.

I didn’t mention Kripke’s words about the spin-off’s importance for no reason. It was in the story about the university for supes that we were introduced to an entirely new heroine: Marie Moreau. According to the spin-off, she is not merely important, she is literally the only person who accidentally turned out to be stronger than Homelander himself. The girl controls blood. She can literally revive corpses or destroy V directly inside someone’s body. A perfect counter to someone immune to bullets and fists. Many viewers, including me, the author of this review, believed the showrunner’s claims about the importance of Gen V. There seemed to be no doubt that Marie spent the entire second season training in order to help the Boys, right? Turns out, no.

Kripke pompously stated that anyone expecting the girl to participate in the finale was forgetting that she is only 19 years old, and therefore Marie, suddenly, is incapable of standing against Homelander. Meanwhile, his son Ryan, who is even younger, apparently can. Just take a moment to process this nonsense. The creators first outright tell us they have a character capable of defeating the main antagonist, and then they refuse to use her because she trained, trained, and somehow still did not train enough. That is like introducing Luke Skywalker in Star Wars Episode IV, only to leave him studying with Yoda on Dagobah all the way until the finale of Episode VI because he is supposedly incapable of defeating the man who destroyed the entire Jedi Order. Absurd.

What makes the situation even worse is the fact that Marie actually appears in the final episodes, but spends her time doing complete nonsense. Even the character herself logically asks Annie why she is being kept in reserve, yet no coherent answer is ever given.

By the fifth season, there is an entire trainload of similar storylines supposedly waiting for their moment, so there was hope that Kripke would at least resolve the main ones over the course of eight episodes. Well, you could say he resolved them. The problem is that the end result can only be described as lazy hackwork. People spend years building story arcs only to throw them into the trash. A true monument to modern serial obsession. Content for the sake of content, like fast food, except instead of heartburn you are left with the feeling that your time was wasted. Humanity truly invented infinite streaming libraries just to emotionally meal-prep disappointment.

The storylines viewers cared about most suffered the hardest. I already talked about Marie, but Soldier Boy also played an important role in the plot. Homelander’s father participating in the finale excited many people because it fundamentally contradicted the original comic, and besides, Jensen Ackles clearly was not finished enjoying his new role. In the end, Soldier Boy changes his attitude toward Homelander several times almost on the fly over a few episodes, becomes responsible for his empowerment, and then simply ends up back in cryogenic storage. That is the end of it. The character is not merely different from the Soldier Boy we saw in season four. This is an entirely different person. For a long time, we were aggressively sold the image of one of the crudest and most brutal supes as a morally ambiguous and at times even fair figure. All of it done to justify his leading role in the already announced spin-off. Needless to say, in the fourth season Soldier Boy was, to put it mildly, awful.

The situation with Ryan is similar. Before the premiere, the internet was flooded with speculation about the fate of Homelander’s son. Throughout all the previous seasons, the first naturally born supe slowly drifted toward darkness step by step. Forget all of that. Ryan is no longer a character. Some random Firestarter or a super-priest whose name I cannot even remember anymore apparently deserves more attention in Kripke’s eyes. Ryan gets maybe ten minutes of screen time in total. He fights his dad twice, and that is it. All doubts about the path he chose were resolved entirely off-screen.

There is much more I could say about this, but I would rather not dump massive spoilers on you. As the episodes were released, the finale began receiving criticism for filler-heavy episodes where essentially nothing happened. And honestly, if you think about it, the story could easily have ended around episode five. The Boys reunite, the Boys search for V-1, the Boys find V-1, Homie gets it, the Boys find a way to kill Homelander. The end.

The runtime gets stretched out through long and exhausting explorations of secondary characters’ backstories, only for those characters to be killed off immediately afterward. Once again, the great master Kripke decided to comment on the matter. The audience had many questions, so several behind-the-scenes explanations appeared. Once again, the showrunner refused to acknowledge any responsibility or flaws in the project he himself oversaw. Instead, viewers were blamed for expecting who-knows-what, the budget was blamed, and we were told the characters deserved proper development. And yes, they absolutely did deserve that. During the previous four seasons. If the creators could not organically flesh out secondary characters over roughly forty hours of runtime, then there is no point doing it in the final season. A finale should always focus on the central characters without distracting itself with anything else. By the final season, I genuinely do not care about Firecracker’s tragic life story. Judging by public opinion, many people agree with me.

As for the actual ending itself, it probably demonstrates the problems of the show in general and this season in particular more clearly than anything else. If you followed the project, then you know how many theories were floating around online. People genuinely spent time thinking about the finale because it promised something completely different from the comics. Sadly, most people were wrong — including us, as we found out after writing our article: The Boys season 5 finale: who will survive, how it will end, and who the real villain is. Even the craziest or, conversely, most straightforward theories ultimately turned out to be more complex, deeper, and, most importantly, more logical than what we actually got. If you still have not watched the season, I will explain briefly and without major spoilers.

In Kripke’s hands, Homelander has finally stopped being a character and become a caricature of the current American president, Donald Trump. There is no subtle satire here whatsoever. The viewer is literally being force-fed the showrunner’s political stance. Everyone gets dragged into it, including even Elon Musk, who, last time I checked, has absolutely nothing to do with superheroes. And if, for some strange reason, you imagined that American politics does not interest you, then enjoy yet another advertisement for the upcoming Soldier Boy prequel, along with heavy-handed homages to the antichrist Homelander/Trump. According to the creators of the series, the president is terrible no matter what, and his mere existence should already horrify you. If only these creators knew what goes on in other countries...

Still, you may reasonably ask: what does any of this have to do with the story itself? Are we at least getting an epic final battle? A perfectly fair question, because fans of the show have every right to expect a proper resolution to this long-running conflict. The posters promised massive events, Homelander floating in space while watching total destruction, and plenty of other things that definitely do not fit the phrase small budget.

Let’s be honest: shows with small budgets do not get spin-offs. The Boys is funded by Amazon, and these are the same people still pouring money into the thoroughly disastrous The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — a project whose uncertain fate we covered in this article: Amazon will finish The Rings of Power: insider reveals the future of the most expensive series in history. Personally, I noticed one interesting detail. The visual quality of the final season is dramatically worse than the first. According to available information, Kripke almost completely replaced the original production crew that launched the series. Why? A mystery. The show itself now takes place either in forests at night, the favorite location of cheap productions, or inside studio sets. There are virtually no on-location shoots. By the way, you can easily find the approximate cost of each season online. Spoiler: they are roughly identical and hover around 100 million dollars. So perhaps the problem is not only the budget? Maybe if we knew the answers to all these questions, we would understand how the show ended up where it did. Unfortunately, I do not know them. A classic industry story: mountains of money, yet it somehow feels as if half the budget was buried in the woods next to the sets. Possibly near those same night shoots.

The few remaining fans may object that the ending is very close to the comics, but in reality the resemblance is about as strong as the resemblance between Butcher and Hughie themselves. In some sense, the author of the original comic could be called the real Butcher, while Kripke is definitely Hughie. The comic and the series share only a few scenes in common, and even then only visually. Their actual meanings are 180 degrees apart, not even remotely close.

If you never read the original comics, then you should know that Homelander was not actually the completely deranged maniac everyone believed him to be. Most of his crimes, including the assault of Butcher’s wife, were committed by Black Noir, who was secretly a clone of Homelander himself. In the end, Butcher merely finishes off what remains after the clash between the two titans. In Garth Ennis’s version, Homelander is a character. In Kripke’s version, he is an opportunity to mock Trump. That is probably the clearest possible distinction between the two projects. Besides, Homelander himself was never the real problem. He was merely an experiment. In the comics, the Vought corporation shuts down the entire superhero project, while in the series it does not. Even the old CEO returns. Which means the Boys cured only the symptom, while the disease itself not only remained but will almost certainly continue progressing.

The fifth season is also overloaded with painfully inappropriate humor. At one point the absurdity reaches its peak, and characters begin discussing anuses during what is supposed to be a tragic funeral scene. It is not funny, it is wildly out of place, and it completely destroys any opportunity for emotional engagement. The writers seem to have confused satire with a teenage group chat at three in the morning. Though perhaps that really is how they write dialogue. It would explain a great deal. Civilization invented prestige television only to arrive at funeral butt jokes delivered with the confidence of Shakespearean tragedy.

There is barely any point even discussing the action scenes. The finale of such an ambitious story turned out so clumsy and timid that you could easily mistake The Boys for another cheap CW disaster. The visual effects and fight choreography match accordingly.

The greatest strength of the fifth and final season of The Boys is simply the fact that it actually happened. Eric Kripke can continue talking about how carefully everything was planned, but impressions like these cannot be undone. If the ending of Stranger Things felt chaotic and illogical to you, then this is an outright catastrophe. For those still nostalgic for that universe and what it once was, our review of Stranger Things: Tales from '85 might offer some comfort. It feels as if all eight episodes were edited in a rush, with nobody truly understanding what viewers actually needed to see and what was obviously unnecessary. I suspect we once again have the showrunner to thank for that. Rumor has it that the actors playing Butcher and Homelander had a serious conflict with Kripke regarding his vision of their characters. We will probably never know for certain, but honestly, I can believe it. Sadly, the true peak of The Boys remains the now-distant third season. I will probably still watch all the future sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, though not because I want to. Merely so you do not have to.