Tedious and trite do not even begin to describe the final season of The Boys. Blind to his own biases, showrunner Eric Kripke has taken every element that made the penultimate season such a slog and doubled down, turning what began as a darkly comic superhero spoof into something resembling Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show laced with lewd language, exploding heads, and gratuitous male nudity.
The underlying problem with the series was always structural. Its chief villain, Homelander (Antony Starr), is effectively a deity with the emotional maturity of a toddler and the moral compass of Candace Owens. His principal purpose is to cultivate engagement and adoration. Yet the show has spent five seasons contriving reasons for his sole challengers, Butcher (Karl Urban) and company, to remain alive while Homelander, for no rational reason beyond the need to keep the show going, refrains from killing them. He could have ended the conflict in the first episode. Instead, the series keeps inventing new delays and magical workarounds to preserve a cat-and-mouse game that has long since become stale.
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Season 5 returns to find the titular crew trudging from one plot device to another. First, there is the Supe-ravaging virus. Then, after learning Homelander may be immune to it, the Boys pivot to Soldier Boy’s (Jensen Ackles) power-siphoning blast as the latest deus ex machina. All the while, Homelander consolidates power, taking over Vought and the United States government before proceeding to assert himself as literal God.
While some of this is in keeping with Homelander’s established pathology, much of the season’s political material feels clumsily contrived to suit Kripke’s broader objective of haranguing Republicans rather than telling an actual story. In one scene, Homelander demands that America “pull the Supes out of Ukraine,” smarmily asking whether it is Ukraine’s fault for being invaded and insisting that American Supes should protect American interests. It is intended to be a perfunctory riff on Trump’s Ukraine policy, but not only is it closer to Tucker Carlson’s isolationism than anything enacted by Trump’s administration, it further muddles Homelander’s character, reducing him from a veritable monster into a superpowered amalgamation of “scary right-wing views” culled from X.
Kripke’s problem is not merely that his partisan zeal has politicized the series — it was always political. Early seasons cleverly poked fun at broader cultural targets such as corporate diversity campaigns, performative male feminists, public relations polling, and Trump’s inflated ego. Admittedly, Trump does himself no favors by posting AI-generated memes depicting himself as Jesus Christ. But Kripke’s partisanship has made him so myopic that he cannot even distinguish the fringe lunacy of Tucker Carlson’s podcast universe from the mainstream conservatism driving Trump’s actual policies.
In another scene, for example, the “world’s richest man” asks Homelander to discuss “white fertility rates.” Elsewhere, Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a Homelander mouthpiece animated by the depths of conspiratorial social media, declares, “We are working with our friends in the Kremlin to root out those sneaky traitors in Ukraine.” The Deep (Chace Crawford) then adds, “Turns out Russia isn’t our enemy. They’re a strong family-first nation who don’t put up with trans bathrooms.”
Make your own conclusions about what Kripke must think of his audience’s media literacy when he has Homelander mandate policies completely unrelated to his character, in another scene ordering the president to “issue an executive order banning abortion,” seemingly for no reason except to give the writers another opportunity to jab at their right-wing strawman. It is this attempt to cram every conservative-coded grievance into Homelander that makes the character feel overwrought rather than terrifying.
There is still the occasional trace of what made the show compelling. Starr remains unnervingly good as Homelander — with a mere eye twitch, he can shift his countenance from that of a wounded child to a homicidal maniac. But even the stronger elements are stranded in a series that no longer knows what to do with them. I suppose you either die a villain or live long enough to see the franchise die around you.
It is not only Homelander whose character is afflicted. The show has no idea what to do with Soldier Boy, whom it revives for a scant few scenes in service of the plot before shoving him back into a cryobox. Meanwhile, Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), whose silence gave her a distinct femme fatale disposition, can now speak — only to be reduced to a vulgar, porno-obsessed caricature with no filter.
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Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) continues to be the most annoying character in the series, though Hughie (Jack Quaid) often makes a strong bid for the title. The difficulty with writing a character presented as “the smartest person in the world” is that she can only be as smart as the people writing her. In the case of The Boys, this amounts to the intelligence of a Reddit moderator who proffers such cutting theological insights as, “Oh no, I don’t believe in your magic sky god.” She is not even the smartest character on the show. That distinction still belongs to Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito), whose demure and calculating demeanor keeps him several steps ahead of everyone else.
For a series to offer compelling political commentary, it must first understand the political landscape it seeks to lampoon. The Boys, in its final season, does not. It reminded me of the scene in Kill Bill when Uma Thurman’s Bride plucks out Elle Driver’s remaining eye, leaving her screaming and flailing blindly in the trailer. Through its final stretch, Kripke’s series is doing much the same — thrashing about in a fountain of blood and gore, unable to see the target it thinks it is hitting. I watched through the final season for closure, but unless you are desperate to see how it all ends, there is little here worth your time.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com