The Boys is a Prime Video show about a world where superheroes are real…and they’re awful. Most of them are just out to make a buck or become famous. And then there are real monsters like Homelander (Antony Starr), a sociopath with the powers of a god. Our heroes are a group of people called the Boys dedicated to bringing him down.
The Boys was a hit when it premiered in 2019, but now that the series finale is almost here, there’s been a shift in chatter among fans online. I came into this fifth and final season hoping the show would go out with a bang, and at first it looked like it was acquitting itself well amidst stiff competition. But now it feels like we’re headed for an epic backlash, and fans think they know why.
Too many “filler” episodes
You’d expect a lot more momentum going into a series finale
One complaint I’ve seen a lot about this final season is that it’s been full of “filler,” that is, episodes where the characters run around a lot but not much of consequence happens.
Generally, I think that’s true, but it didn’t have to be that way. The season actually got off to a very strong start in the premiere, “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite,” which ended with the superhero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) helping to spring the Boys from one of Homelander’s Freedom Camps (basically concentration camps). In the fracas, Homelander chases A-Train down, A-Train looks Homelander in the eye and says he’s not afraid of him, and then Homelander kills him.
At the start of the show, A-Train was an antagonist working with Homelander at Vought International as a member of the Seven. Over time, he got fed up with Homelander’s growing narcissism and finally abandoned Vought to take care of his family. So he dies one of the good guys, which is a great way to complete his arc.
I expected Season 5 would be full of satisfying character moments like that, but since that premiere episode, the show has settled into a pretty tiresome holding pattern. The plot has been driven not by the Boys and the Seven fighting in increasingly violent clashes, or by the characters growing as people; it’s been driven by a plot device. We learn early on that there’s a super-serum called V-One that can make a superhero immortal, so the season becomes a race to see if the Boys can find and destroy it before Homelander finds it and takes it. Parts of that race have been enjoyable — I enjoyed the cleverly structured “One-Shots” episode, although I know not all fans did — but it’s a very thin premise to hang the final season of the show on. With four seasons of history behind them, you’d figure the writers would have been able to figure out something more substantive than this.
Too much time spent setting up a spinoff
And too much political allegory
The third season of The Boys introduced us to Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), a World War II-era Supe and Homelander’s biological father. He’d been on ice for decades and is thawed out, Captain America-style, to help fight his son…and then goes back into deep freeze at the end of Season 3.
Homelander thaws him out again in Season 5, this time to help him achieve his dreams of world domination. Considering that the show needs to service a full cast of characters who have been around since the beginning, it’s surprising how much time the fifth season spends on telling us about the supreme acts of sexual decadence Soldier Boy got up to in the 1970s, or developing his relationships with other heroes from way back when.
But it starts to make sense when you realize that Prime Video is prepping a prequel series to The Boys called Vought Rising, starring Soldier Boy and a bunch of his superhero pals. The Boys Season 5, then, is serving as something of a backdoor pilot for this new show, which wouldn’t be so annoying if it wasn’t actively cutting into time better spent making this current show as good as it could be.
I’ve also seen fans complain that the show has been too heavy-handed with its politics, although I’m less convinced by that argument. Since the start, The Boys has never been subtle about its political leanings; it’s always been a satire primarily of President Donald Trump and his political movement. In fact, it’s been entertaining to see how this fifth and final season has lined up with some political events happening in the real world, like how Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself taking on the role of Jesus Christ right around the time that Homelander decided that he was a literal god. With this show, that stuff is just par for the course.
The Boys has aged itself
AKA Kimiko needs to take a breath
Now that we’re near the end, there’s a sense that The Boys has failed to build upon itself as a show. For instance, the series has always been known for scenes of extreme violence and depravity, much of it so extreme that it goes right past unsettling and into the realm of campy and funny. But what used to get audiences to laugh now feels old hat, because it’s just more of the same. The gross-out scenes were always sophomoric, but now they feel like it.
Likewise, the characters talk in ways that feel contrived; Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) has always had an English accent that sounds almost like a put-on, and it’s descended further into self-parody as the years have gone by. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) is a deadly Supe who was silent for the first four seasons. She can talk in Season 5, which is a new development, but she talks in a kind of rapid-fire quip-speak that recalls the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with some curse words sprinkled in to remind us that this is The Boys.
“Superheroes are done”
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The series finale of The Boys, “Blood and Bone,” airs on Wednesday, May 20. The show has left a lot for itself to tie up in that last episode, so much that I have a hard time believing it can do it all in a way that will satisfy people. The Boys may become another one of those beloved series with endings that everyone hated.
Although “everyone” is likely a stretch. While fans online have a lot of thoughts about The Boys, it’s hard to know if that reflects the feelings of the viewing public at large. I’ll be curious to take the temperature of the room later this week.
Release Date
2019 – 2026-00-00
Showrunner
Eric Kripke
Directors
Erin Moriarty, Karen Fukuhara, Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Eric Kripke
Jack Quaid
Hugh Hughie Campbell
Antony Starr
John / Homelander
Erin Moriarty
Annie January / Starlight
