The Boys Ends With a Bloody, Timely Bang
The final season of Prime Video’s superhero satire skewers fascism, celebrity culture, and America’s collapsing grip on reality.
The Boys are back in town for one last season, but things are a little different this time around. It’s not that Eric Kripke‘s show has suddenly become more political towards the end of its run. The Boys has always lasered in on real-life targets with eyebeam-like precision, brutally satirizing corporate greed and celebrity culture since it debuted in 2019. But the show has now widened its scope to mock America at large. An easy target, some might say, especially given the direction of modern U.S. politics. If anything, though, it’s only made Kripke’s job harder.
The Boys was never one to pull its punches, not when it came to satire or actual violence within the show. But what do you do when real life catches up to the absurdities of fiction, when a maniacal villain like Homelander (Antony Starr) embodies people who are actually in power right now? Five seasons in, that’s left the show’s penchant for parody with very little room to maneuver within. Kind of like Flight 37, which Homelander let crash after a botched rescue attempt back in season one.
Once upon a time, footage of the crash and Homelander’s blatant disdain for human life would have ended his career as the world’s top Supe. But as we’ve seen more and more recently, it seems there’s no limit to what people at the top can get away with.
Season five smartly taps into that by revealing said footage to the world just five minutes in. Starlight (Erin Moriarty) engineered this, hoping that it might turn the public against Homelander. But what happens? Homelander’s administration claims that Starlighters created the video using AI to discredit him. And what’s worse is that his threat to “laser every fucking one” of the innocent people who died on that plane has spawned a viral TikTok dance.
What was once hard to believe has become commonplace, both on and offscreen. But by addressing this straight away, it frees The Boys up to focus more on the overall endgame and the necessary character development leading up to it.
Given only one season left to wrap things up, Billy the Butcher (Karl Urban) and his freedom fighters struggle to deploy a virus that will kill the indestructible Homelander. Trouble is, it will also kill every Supe on earth, including decent-minded, heroic ones, like Starlighter and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara).
When a former Vought scriptwriter points out that “finales are so hard” to write, you can feel Kripke and his team grappling in real time. You could argue that it’s commendable to be so brazen about this often unspoken challenge, but it might not have been the best idea to draw attention to the difficulties up front.
There are plenty of standout character moments throughout the first six episodes I watched, even if they don’t all hang together as well as you’d hope this late in the game.
Kimiko, for example, can finally speak out loud, which leads to some amusing slip-ups as she tries to navigate speaking politely as opposed to revealing her often offensive inner monologue. Yet it’s in the way she and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) switch between talking and signing that’s more effective in the long run, speaking to the familiarity of their connection.
Disagreement threatens to unravel Vought’s fascist regime now that Homelander has declared himself to be Earth’s lord and savior. Each of his lackeys must find their own way to survive this new world order to varying degrees of success. Daveed Diggs is delightfully smarmy as an opportunistic pastor, while Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) continues to push back against his deranged son with steel and magnetism (and of course, an endless tirade of surprisingly inventive dick jokes).
It’s Firecracker (Valorie Curry), though, who really comes into her own this season in how she navigates the delusion that’s taken hold of her and others. There’s no question about Homelander’s delusion, though, which is nigh on absolute at this point. Season five reinforces yet again that Starr is the true MVP of The Boys, psychotic and terrifying one moment, pathetically cringe the next.
If only the writing in season five were quite as unhinged as Homelander. That’s not to say The Boys has gone PG. Hats off to the writers for thinking up a new kind of jizz. Plus, I’ll never use a toilet the same way again after one particular scene involving The Deep (Chace Crawford).
But just as this season has struggled to outrace our political reality, so too does it fail to live up to the grotesque heights of vile humor it’s hit previously. There’s a sense that we’ve seen much of this before. Still, there’s never been a better time for The Boys to end than now. If not, it would have run the risk of being outmatched by the everyday horrors of our world, or worse, become one of the comic book stories it once loved to mock.
New episodes of The Boys (★★★☆☆) stream every Wednesday through May 20 on Prime Video. Visit amazon.com.
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