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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the final ever episode of The Boys, stumbling over the finish line after two underpowered wrap-up seasons.
The Amazon Prime series came out of the gate strong in 2019, with a starr – sorry, star – making performance and dark, subversive sense of humour.
It was as inspired by the first term of Donald Trump as it was by Garth Ennis’s comics, and quickly won viewers over as a bloody, crude alternative to the Marvel and DC Universes.
However, by series three, it became clear that the series was running out of steam, and showrunner Eric Kripke struggled to keep up the momentum for two further outings.
Series five promised to bring it all to a close, but even as it began, those wheels kept spinning – into a bloody yet uneven finale which struggles to pay off much of what has been set up.
Fans are already branding The Boys’ final episode one of the worst ever – but the truth is far worse than that.
‘The Boys has become the worst finale episode series,’ writes RR Empire on X, adding to an outpouring of disappointment and negativity.
‘The Boys is over….’ writes Super Cooked 32X, ‘and man it sucked.’
‘The Boys finale might be one of the worst episodes of a show I’ve ever seen,’ added, uh, Chewbacca on the social media site.
Sentiment so far is on a par with reaction to Game of Thrones, Dexter and How I Met Your Mother as a terrible ending to a once beloved series.
But was The Boys series five really that bad?
In truth… no. But what makes its failure especially galling is the wasted potential, both in what was (a promising first two series) and what could have been.
Titled Blood and Bone, the final episode of The Boys skews closer to the comics than much of what preceded it.
With Homelander (Anthony Starr) now an unstoppable force, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and his crew descend upon The White House.
There, a bloody confrontation awaits, involving Butcher, a crowbar and Homelander’s power-sozzled brain.
Those tuning in to see Homelander get his just desserts won’t walk away disappointed. Although the final fight sequences are a little on the limp side (they did it better in series three), it’s a gratifyingly cathartic final bust-up.
From there, there’s another confrontation on the cards – this time between Butcher and wee Hughie (Jack Quaid).
On paper, it all works, incorporating what worked in the comic while discarding that which didn’t (the whole clone thing, for instance).
However, it’s let down by almost everything which preceded it, leaving the episode feeling rushed, unsatisfying and unearned.
Coming at the tail end of a season which spent most of its time setting up its own spin-off (Vought Rising), most of its core characters felt like an afterthought.
The episode begins with an emotional tribute to the recently deceased Frenchie (Tomer Capone), but like most character moments, it feels flat and insincere – including a speech about the characters’ asses, which doesn’t sound like Frenchie at all.
After five series of struggling to win a single fight, Annie (Erin Moriarty) finally gets to show off in a dust-up with the Deep (Chace Crawford), which brings one plotline to a satisfying close, at least.
Elsewhere, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) is suddenly back! Homelander has a big announcement to make (nothing to do with the nukes or army of supes the series poster had teased, then)! And characters from Gen V… are also there.
It’s the best episode of the show in a while, but it’s going through the motions, ticking off plot points with little enthusiasm or innovation.
This is most deeply felt in the last twenty minutes, in a rushed confrontation between Hughie and Butcher, which really should have been its own episode.
In this, its last stretch, Butcher decides to commit genocide because… uh, his dog died peacefully in its sleep.
It’s a final act in which the actors struggle to convey emotions which we don’t believe to be true, based on behaviour we’ve rarely seen them exhibit.
But hey, at least it’s better than the baby-eating clone, right? …Right?
The Boys season 5 finale review
And so it all comes down to this.
Now essentially immortal thanks to a shot of Compound V1, there’s nothing standing in Homelander’s way of complete domination.
Except for The Boys, that is. Gathering for Frenchie’s funeral, the team realise that their last-ditch plan worked, and Kimiko now possesses Soldier Boy’s ability to depower Homelander.
And so the team converge upon the White House, where a showdown with the world’s most powerful man awaits.
Compared to the rest of the series, Blood and Bone is full of momentum, rarely letting up from the start.
The Boys’ biggest superpower has always been its signature shock factor, and that’s on full display here. This final hour is packed full of gore, filth and exploding heads (introducing Chekov’s Ball Gag).
After five series of The Deep and Homelander’s monstrous behaviour, Kripke doesn’t deny the audience the catharsis we’ve so craved. Its signs of brilliance are so pronounced, in fact, that it makes the seasons prior feel all the more disappointing in retrospect.
Let down by budget choices (there’s a reason almost every episode has been set in a series of empty rooms) and franchise-building, The Boys ultimately became everything it had mocked Marvel and DC for.
However, there’s no denying it gave us a villain for the ages in Anthony Starr’s Homelander and, like the series as a whole, this finale served as a showcase for that enormous talent… his final moments proving some of the character’s very best.
However, there remains a sneaking feeling that it could have been so much better; that The Boys could have ended two entire series ago and had the same impact.
An occasionally satisfying but mostly frustrating conclusion to a series which, like its own Sister Sage, could have achieved so much more.
Say what you will about Ennis’s comics, but the final stretch nailed its pacing, building naturally from confrontation to confrontation, right to the bloody end.
With the rest of the Boys sitting it out, this all comes down to a rushed showdown between Hughie and Butcher.
What should have been a heart-rending parting of the ways falls flat, partly because The Boys never really showed us much of a relationship between Hughie and Butcher in the first place.
Instead, it spent most of its last series on a Soldier Boy arc, which went nowhere (save for setting up Vought Rising) and subplots which achieved nothing (Annie and MM’s TV studio side-quest last week).
Like Frenchie and Kimiko’s relationship (by far one of the worst things the show ever introduced), it felt inauthentic and unsupported by the writing, story or actors’ chemistry.
There’s no denying that The Boys hit paydirt with Anthony Starr’s Homelander, and its ruthless political satire.
Unfortunately, once it realised that, the show became a victim of its own success, losing sight of what really mattered. You know, The Boys.
In the end, it became less about its core team and more about building the brand – cutting costs, setting up spin-offs and playing up Homelander’s weirdness for the memes / TikToks.
Vought would be proud.
It may have served as a showcase for Starr’s stratospheric performance, but in building the series around his talent, it failed him.
The Boys doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as King Bran or Lumberjack Dexter. Instead, it’s likely to suffer an even worse fate… ignominy, fading into the obscurity and irrelevance that Homelander always feared.
Says wee Hughie in his final send-off to Billy Butcher: ‘He was nothing but flaws and bad choices.’
Ultimately, the same could be said for The Boys.
All five series of The Boys are streaming on Amazon Prime now.
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