Little Sound or Fury

The end of The Boys is upon us and with it comes… well, not much of a finale. It’s really more a sense of the inevitable. When the series started it was pitched as a send up of the superhero genre, an ultra-crass, ultra-violent answer to the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.. It played as an answer to everything Marvel was doing, taking the idea of family-friendly superheroes dominating all forms of mass media, and then showing what a seedy underbelly that kind of franchise would have if the superheroes were actually real. People are people, the series seemed to say, and you can rely on them to all be vainglorious, smarmy assholes.

For a time that pitch really did work. The first couple of seasons of the show were solid, blending its superhero sendup alongside decent storytelling. But as anyone that has watched the series (and the franchise as well) can attest, somewhere along the way The Boys seemed to lose its way. It seemed like at a certain point The Boys bought into its own bullshit, and while it maintained a certain air of parody, regularly falling back on over-the-top violence and dick-and-fart humor, it started taking its own story way too seriously. It wanted to both be a serious story and a parody and, by chasing both sides, it felt like the series flattened out and lost all sense of what it really was meant to be.

Which brings us to this fifth season, which should have been the culmination of all its storylines. It should have led to the destruction of the superhero team at the center of everything, The Seven, as well as the fall of Vought, the company that backed those heroes and who also controlled the drug that made superheroes, Compound V. it should have followed up on everything the advertising for the season promised, and all that the previous seasons had clearly built to: a glorious, bloody, and over-the-top finale that shook the foundations of the world to its core.

Instead it just… kind of ended without much change in the status quo at all. Oh, sure, there were confrontations and battles and the like but (mild spoilers) this is a franchise that Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader. has a lot built on. They have two upcoming spinoffs, Vought Rising and The Boys: Mexico, so the world changing events that were promised by the very concept of this show are nowhere to be found here. Amazon can’t screw up their mega franchise because then there’d be nothing to do with all this popularity after. So what we get is a final season that can’t really be a final season, with a group of characters that feel like they’re padding time until they can punch out so the next group of characters can take over. It’s all very lackluster.

The previous season ended on a cliffhanger, with most of the titular team of Boys either on the run – Butcher (Karl Urban), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and Annie / Starlight (Erin Moriarty) – with the others – Hughie (Jack Quaid), M.M. (Laz Alonso), and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) – captured by Homelander’s goons. The situation seemed dire, with Homelander (Anthony Starr) declaring himself, in effect, the ruler of America, turning the whole of the country into a police state dominated by his iron fist. However the team was going to get out of this mess, and take down Homelander, that goal felt further away than ever.

But then, at the start of this season, the show functionally returns to the status quo. After the premiere, where Butcher, Kimiko, and Annie break the rest of the team out of a Homelander re-education camp, it’s back to working on a way to take Homelander down. The team comes up with the plan of making a virus that could take down Homelander… but it would also kill every other super-powered person in the world. Meanwhile, Homelander had a vision, making him think he was a messiah sent to be the new God for this world. As Homelander’s grip tightens, can the Boys actually find a way to kill him… and if they do, will they end up ending the world as well?

There’s promise to this season in some respects. The idea of a virus that could kill Homelander, but that would also kill all super-powered individuals in the world, could be an interesting ethical conundrum. It could force the characters to reckon with what they’re doing and if their ends justify their means. Except the series at this point isn’t really capable of engaging with that kind of material. It raises the issue, yes, but then keeps puttering around, never really forcing the issue, always struggling to find some loophole so that the characters can both work on the virus but still act like good guys. They don’t want to cause a super-genocide. They just have to find a way around it.

Really, the super-virus is meant solely to cause a confrontation between Hughie and Butcher in the end because Butcher, being Butcher, is willing to do anything to rid the world of supers. It just so happens that the series long since lost sight of that being the whole motivation for the story, such that Butcher now feels out of place in his own story. The confrontation feels inevitable, but the conclusion (which I won’t spoil) feels rote and unearned. It’s the kind of story that should have been tackled two or three seasons ago, when the series was firing on all cylinders and not here, when the series lacks all of that vital energy.

That says nothing about the Homelander story. This is just… awful. I get that the creative team, led by Eric Kripke, were trying to comment on the current political climate of the world. The issue, though, isn’t that the current world is so much more fucked up than what this parody could come up with (which is Kripke’s response to why the parody wasn’t working well anymore). The issue is that Homelander’s story is completely stupid. For the character to get here he basically has to have a vision, think he’s a god, and then somehow get everyone else to sign off on it with him. The series twists itself into knots to get the conclusion it wants without really investing in the story properly to earn its ending.

And that ending is awful. Again, without spoiling the finale, the series functionally tosses everything it was building aside so that the heroes and villains can have one last fight, not resolving any of their storylines in any meaningful way. The final battle lacks any stakes, especially because it too is a foregone conclusion, and you’re left wondering how, after five seasons of this series, this finale is the best they could come up with? It all feels so flat, tired, and sad, a far cry from the world-ending stakes the series boasted beforehand.

If we also take into account Gen V, which tied into this series and seemed to be building its crew of super-powered twenty-somethings as a rival faction to The Seven, then things actually feel even worse. Gen V positioned its characters in a way that we thought there were going to be vital to the takedown of Homelander. Marie Moreau was said to be one of the most powerful supers in the world, someone that could kill Homelander with the right training. That was her specific plotline in season two of the series… and then the show just drops it altogether. Marie and her friends show up for two cameos in the series, and then disappear entirely, and now that Gen V has been cancelled, we’ll likely never hear from them again. So what was the point of their story, and why even bother bringing them back here?

It really feels like the production team didn’t know what to do with this last season of the show. Whatever they wanted to build to they obviously couldn’t do, not with two more spinoffs coming down the pike. And all their great plans really felt like they went nowhere. And this is all in service to a story that, because of all the meandering it does, ends up feeling like eight episodes of pointless filler until we finally get to the big battle we should have had two or three seasons ago.

Hell, we functionally had this whole fight already, back at the end of season three of the series, but the show decided to pull its punches then and drift along for two more seasons. We didn’t need season five of The Boys. Anything this series had to say wrapped up long ago. All we got here was an extended, bloated ending that could have been condensed down to a two-hour series finale. Nothing mattered this season, and nothing could matter. The Boys might have come to an end, but it hasn’t really ended at all. We’ll simply get more of The Boys with a different cast and a new location, but the same old shit still going on. As an audience we deserved better than that.