This post contains spoilers for The Boys on Amazon Prime.
Look, the actual finale episode was not that bad. I kind of liked it. My real issue is with what happened to this show as a whole across this final season: the story, the power scaling, the budget, the character decisions, all of it. Because when you go back and look at where this show started and compare it to where it ended, the distance between those two points is painful to sit with.
The Boys is an Amazon Prime Video series created by Eric Kripke, who also created Supernatural, and it is based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. It premiered on July 26, 2019, and became the most watched series Prime Video had ever released at the time of its launch. Five seasons. Forty episodes. A premise that was sharp, specific, and genuinely dangerous in a way that superhero content rarely is: what if the most powerful beings on earth were not heroes at all, but brand assets managed by a corporation, and what if the only people trying to stop them were a bunch of deeply broken, barely functional civilians with no powers and no leverage and nothing left to lose?
That premise is extraordinary. And for two seasons it was executed with a precision and a nastiness that made it feel like nothing else on television. Then something shifted. And by the time Season 5 wrapped up, the show that had once felt genuinely revolutionary had become the thing it spent its entire run mocking: bloated, unfocused, and more interested in its own mythology than in the story that made people care in the first place.
What This Show Was at Its Best
Seasons 1 and 2 worked because they had a clear architecture. Hughie Campbell loses his girlfriend Robin in Episode 1 when A-Train runs through her at full speed while fleeing a crime scene. He does not even stop. She just ceases to exist mid-sentence. That moment is the entire thesis of the show in four seconds: to a superhero operating at that speed and that level of power, a human life is not even an obstacle. It is an inconvenience they do not register.
From that opening, the show builds outward with complete control. Billy Butcher pulls Hughie into a team of vigilantes called The Boys whose entire purpose is to hold supes accountable in a world where Vought International, the corporation that manages and markets them, has made accountability structurally impossible. Vought is the ultimate villain. Not just because of what the supes do under its protection, but because of how it functions: a media empire that transforms public relations into impunity, wrapping atrocities in branding and calling it heroism. Every corrupt thing that happens in Seasons 1 and 2 traces back to that corporate machinery. The show understood that the scariest thing about power is not the individual who wields it but the system that makes them untouchable.
Homelander worked in those early seasons because he was contained by the system even as he controlled it. He was dangerous but he was also constrained: by Vought's PR concerns, by the need to maintain public approval, by the fact that he needed the performance of heroism to sustain his actual power. The tension between what he was and what he had to pretend to be was the engine of everything. Antony Starr played that role with such precision that every scene he was in felt like watching a loaded gun that had not quite decided whether to go off yet.
The Identity Crisis: Who Is This Show Even About?
At some point, The Boys completely forgot that Hughie and Annie were the main characters and Vought was the ultimate villain. That is literally what the show was built on. Hughie and Annie (Starlight) are the emotional center: two people navigating a world that is trying to crush them from opposite sides. Their relationship is the human thread running through all the noise. When the writers lose track of it, the whole structure loosens.
Somewhere around Season 3, the show quietly became the Butcher and Homelander show. And because the writers became so fixated on that dynamic, everyone else got shortchanged. Starlight especially. By the final season she felt completely stagnant, like the writers had no idea what to do with her and decided the answer was just fewer scenes and more standing in the background looking concerned. This is one of the show's two protagonists. A character who spent four seasons fighting to carve out an identity inside a machine designed to erase it. She deserved a final season that matched that arc. She did not get one.
The deeper problem is that too many characters overstayed their welcome because the writers were too cautious to commit to actually killing anyone who mattered until the very end. Frenchie is the clearest example. His storylines had been running on diminishing returns since Season 3 and the show kept manufacturing new emotional arcs for him rather than letting him go when the story had finished with him.
And then there is Victoria Neuman. A head-popping congresswoman operating inside the system, using Vought's own methods against everyone around her, building toward what felt like the most interesting endgame the show had constructed since Season 2. Seasons of setup. Multiple storylines converging around her. And then at the end of Season 4, Butcher uses his new tentacle powers to tear her apart in a scene that should have been cathartic and instead just felt abrupt. A major political threat with real remaining potential, killed to clear the board for a final season that used that cleared board to set up spinoffs rather than deliver the payoff Neuman's arc had been building toward. What a waste.
The Budget and the Pacing Problem
The budget in Season 5 went completely off a cliff and I refuse to be talked out of this observation.
Go back and watch Season 3 Episode 6. Soldier Boy, Butcher, and Hughie going up against Homelander for the first time with actual combined force is the moment that entire season was building toward, and it delivered completely. The choreography, the stakes, the character beats embedded inside the action. That is what a big action set piece looks like when the writing and the production are working together properly. This is what Season 5's final confrontation should have been reaching for: that same integration of character and spectacle. By multiple accounts the finale delivered the deaths and the gore but not the emotional catharsis. The action felt under-resourced and the staging was constrained in ways that made the whole thing feel like it was filmed under limitations the show could not fully overcome. This was THE FINAL SEASON. The last eight episodes of a show that became a cultural phenomenon. The production scale should have matched that moment. It did not feel like it did.
The pacing collapsed in the same direction. Characters switching sides, major deaths, revelations that should have been given room, all of it piled on top of each other in the final episodes with no space between any of it. Butcher killing Homelander by driving a crowbar into his skull and pulling it out with enough force to destroy him entirely is exactly the ending that story deserved. But the sequence around it needed to breathe, and it did not get the room.
And while we are at it: Butcher's tentacle powers in Season 4. An eyesore from start to finish. The visual was wrong, the power set contradicted everything the show had built around the distinction between supes and humans, and it was clearly a creative choice made to give Butcher a way to kill Neuman rather than something that emerged organically from the story. It looked bad and it felt bad and using it to kill one of the show's most interesting secondary characters made both things worse simultaneously.
The Rare Wins: What Actually Worked.
To be fair, a couple of things actually landed.
A-Train had the best individual story of the final season and it ended in the most devastating way the show could have chosen. He started this show as the supe who killed Hughie's girlfriend without breaking stride. Literally the inciting incident of the entire series. His arc across five seasons is the long slow process of a man who chose power over conscience, then chose power over humanity, and then finally, too late to save himself, chose to become something worth remembering. He spent his last episode helping The Boys escape the Freedom Camps. Then Homelander killed him for it. He had finally, in his own eyes, become a hero again. And it cost him everything.
Firecracker had one of the most unsettling arcs of the final season, and it landed exactly where the show needed it to. She entered the series as the ultimate true believer, a woman who weaponized her own trauma and manufactured outrage to build a platform for Homelander. Her journey across the season is the slow, agonizing process of a woman who traded her soul for proximity to power, only to realize that the god she worshiped views her as nothing more than a disposable prop. She spent her final moments desperately trying to maintain her relevance while the walls closed in, tethered to a man who didn't care if she lived or died.
The Power Scaling Problem
This has been quietly unraveling since Season 3 and nobody on the writing staff seemed to notice or care enough to fix it.
Homelander is established across the first two seasons as someone with hearing so acute he can pick up a heartbeat from across a building. He clocks A-Train muttering under his breath. He registers Frenchie tapping a finger on a surface from another room. His powers are positioned as nearly absolute: super strength, flight, laser vision, near-total physical invulnerability, and sensory perception that makes hiding from him essentially impossible. The show establishes them clearly and repeatedly because they are the foundation of why he is so terrifying. He cannot be snuck up on. He cannot be lied to by someone whose heartbeat gives them away. He sees and hears everything.
And then, whenever the plot needs characters to have a private conversation or execute a plan without him knowing, those abilities simply cease to exist. Characters discuss things in rooms they should not be able to discuss privately. Plans are executed in proximity to him that should have been impossible to execute. The show switches his powers on and off based entirely on what the current scene requires rather than what the established rules of his character would permit. This is lazy writing and it is disrespectful to an audience that paid attention. If you build a villain whose powers make him almost omniscient, you need to write around those powers consistently, not ignore them whenever they become inconvenient.
The Gen V Crossover: A Lot of Setup, Very Little Payoff
Marie Moreau was built up across an entire spinoff series as this absolute powerhouse with the potential to fundamentally shift the balance between supes and humans. The show spent a full season establishing her abilities, her growth, her specific place in the larger war against Vought. The crossover into The Boys was supposed to be the payoff for all of that investment: the moment the Gen V world and the main show's world collided with real consequence.
She crossed over into Season 5 and brought a notebook and escorted some people to Canada. That is it. That is the complete summary of Marie Moreau's contribution to the final season of the show her spinoff was designed to connect to.
If you can skip an entire spinoff series, watch those characters appear on the main show, and still not miss a single thing that matters to the plot, then that spinoff should not have been positioned as essential viewing. The whole point of building out a connected universe is that the connections pay off. The Gen V crossover did not pay off. It was a waste of the audience's goodwill and a waste of a genuinely interesting character the spinoff had done real work to develop.
Did The Boys Stick The Landing?
The finale episode itself was okay. Butcher killing Homelander with a crowbar to the skull while saying "this is for Becca" is the right ending to that story. The epilogue earned some of its sentiment: Hughie and Annie expecting a child named Robin. Mother's Milk becoming Ryan's legal guardian. Kimiko moving to Marseille to honor Frenchie's memory. Those details feel right. The show remembering who these people are when the violence stops is always where it does its best character work.
But the season as a whole? Not even close to what this show was capable of at its peak. It is so frustrating to watch something that started this sharp and this grounded in its own rules slowly lose its identity over five seasons. The writing prioritized setting up future franchise content over delivering a satisfying conclusion to the story it had been telling. It let down characters that made people fall in love with it in the first place. It ran out of road for some characters two seasons too late and ran out of ideas for others two seasons too early.
The Boys at its best, Seasons 1 and 2, is some of the smartest, nastiest, most genuinely unsettling television of the 2020s. You can still go back and watch it. The finale does not erase that. But a show this good deserved a final season that matched what it was capable of. It did not get one.
It is what it is.
But enough of my rant. How did you actually feel about the finale?
Did it work for you or are you sitting there just as disappointed? What else pissed you off this season that I did not mention? Drop it in the comments, let us talk about it.
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