The Boys Series Finale Review: The Show (Mostly) Sticks the Superhero Landing

After five seasons, seven years, and 39 episodes, The Boys‘ series finale is here. The path to this point through the show’s fifth and final season has been a rocky one, to say the least. Like other heavyweights such as Game of Thrones and Stranger Things before it, the last run of episodes has been met with a divided audience. There have been complaints of having too much filler, of too much time being spent setting up the Soldier Boy prequel, of the show having lost its way, and so on.

The Boys Season 5, Episode 7 became the lowest-rated on IMDb with 6.5/10 (the only installment to fall below a 7 up to that point), which did not bode well for the endgame. It’s into that backdrop that the series finale has been released, first in select theaters in the United States, and then on Prime Video both in the U.S. and around the world. Once a backlash has gathered steam, it’s hard to stop, and it makes for a difficult landing area for the Supe series. Nonetheless, I’d say it (mostly) manages to stick it.

Rating: 3/5

The series finale of The Boys is certainly not perfect. I don’t think it will do enough to please the most ardent detractors of Season 5. It’s a little predictable, and perhaps too small for many viewers’ tastes. And yet, I had a fairly good time with it. It lands the necessary emotional beats, and ultimately, it is a satisfying, sensible conclusion to what this story has been and what it’s built to. There are problems, several of which are frustrating because they seem so easily avoidable, but on the whole, it works. Warning: SPOILERS from this point on.

The Boys Series Finale Spoilers & Recap:

• The episode opens with Hughie reading Frenchie’s will, which is a blend of funny (with a lot of talk about their a**holes) and emotional.
• Homelander tries to reunite with Ryan, but his son tells him to “get f**ked,” which leaves the villain visibly upset.
• Marie, Jordan, and Emma from Gen V briefly appear, with Annie instructing them to focus on saving people from Homelander’s potential destruction, rather than joining the fight.
• Sister Sage goads Kimiko into blasting her, proving she has the ability to remove a Supe’s powers. Sage loses her super intelligence, becoming an “idiot,” and heads off to Harry Potter world.
• Homelander addresses the nation, saying he is the “first coming,” and that they deserve a God who will fight for them and promises a new dawn, but later flips his message into a threat that he will “reign eternal and be God of the ashes.”
• While that’s happening, the Boys infiltrate the White House, with some help from Ashley.
• M.M. and Hughie cover Oh Father’s mouth with a ball gag, and his sonic scream ends up exploding his own head.
• Starlight flies the Deep out of a window to a beach, where they fight. Eventually she blasts him into the ocean, where he’s torn apart and killed by sea creatures.
• Kimiko and Butcher fight Homelander in the Oval Office, but she is unable to blast him. Homelander tries to escape, but Ryan flies in and tackles him, with the fight continuing.
• Kimiko has a vision of Frenchie, which gives her the strength she needs to blast Homelander and remove his powers. Now weakened, he begs for his life, but Butcher beats him up, shoves a crowbar through his skull, and rips the top of his head off.
• Ashley is impeached and removed from office; Stan Edgar is later named the new CEO of Vought.
• Ryan and Butcher have both lost their powers. The latter wants a fresh start together, but Ryan turns him down, saying he’s not a good person.
• Butcher then finds Terror is dead, somehow (seemingly of natural causes), which causes him to go to Vought and take steps to unleash the Supe virus.
• Hughie figures this out and goes to stop him. They have a fight, which is then ended when Butcher has a vision of his brother, Lenny, while looking at Hughie. Hughie fatally shoots Butcher, who dies at peace.
• The Boys say farewell to Butcher at his grave. Kimiko leaves and goes to France. M.M. gets married and has seemingly adopted Ryan. Hughie and Annie stay together; he turns down an offer from the U.S. government to head up a Bureau of Supe Affairs, instead running an Audio Visual store, while Starlight continues to work as a Supe. They’re also expecting a child, who will be named Robin.

The Boys Gives All Its Main Characters The Right Ending

What matters most, to me, in a series finale is that the episode gets the necessary emotional resonance, and that it feels like the characters we’ve spent time with over the years end up in a place that feels right, whether it’s a happy ending, a sad one, something ambiguous, or whatever else it might be. To that end, I think The Boys‘ ending satisfies the criteria. Certainly, in terms of the biggest characters – Butcher, Homelander, Hughie, Starlight, Mother’s Milk, Kimiko, and the Deep – I think where each of them ends up is exactly the right call from creator Eric Kripke.

Their fates were satisfying and made sense with their full arcs. I didn’t find any of them particularly shocking, so if you’re hoping for that, you may be disappointed, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because it means they stayed true to the characters we’ve watched since 2019.

The biggies, of course, are the deaths of Homelander and Butcher. I think it’s right that it came down to those two in the end, and while I didn’t think the Oval Office fight sequence was anything special (and probably made Homelander look a little too weak to serve the narrative), it achieves the right result. Antony Starr is absolutely fantastic in his final scenes, a cowering, pathetic mess pleading for his life, in a way that’s satisfying to watch after five seasons of him being the most evil force in the world.

I also found Butcher’s ending to be poignant, and Karl Urban and Jack Quaid nailed their final scene, with the latter reminding us that Hughie is the everyman hero and heart of the series, and the former that he does have a heart somewhere in there. The Deep getting defeated by a combination of Starlight and sea creatures was a fun payoff, and the rest of the conclusions I’d describe as being a nice, happy way to wrap things up for them.

There are some characters who don’t fare as well. Kripke had revealed ahead of time that Jensen Ackles’ final scene as Soldier Boy was being put back into cryo-freeze in Episode 7, and that doesn’t feel like the most satisfying end for his character. Likewise, because this was written and shot long before Gen V‘s cancellation, the heroes from that series are extremely short-changed. Your mileage may vary on whether that’s an issue, but having them involved at all has seemed rather pointless over the past couple of installments.

The Boys’ Series Finale’s Biggest Problem Is Not Having Enough Time

My major issue with The Boys‘ ending is quite simply that I wish there were more of it. It runs for just over an hour, so no different from a standard episode, and while that’s fine in theory – I normally think that TV show finales should be in keeping with what the entire series has been – it does mean things are a little rushed here. That goes back to some of the broader complaints with the final season as a whole, where there has been some wheel-spinning, and coming into the finale, one major question was how it’d fit everything in.

Again, it does a good job getting the characters to where they need to be and landing the emotional beats, but it’d be more enjoyable and have even more heft if there were more room for this to breathe, whether that was by having an extended episode or dealing with some of the other characters and plotlines earlier on.

Some of the stories do feel a little expedited, and it would’ve been stronger to have a few more moments with certain players. For example, Homelander dies 40 minutes in; there are fewer than 15 minutes until Butcher’s death, and then only another 10 or so of the finale. It really needed longer to flesh everything out, so that Terror’s death is more than a moment and you get a longer, more dramatic build to Butcher’s plan and demise, and then more of an extended epilogue to reflect on everything and set the characters on their new journeys.

I think some viewers will have other complaints as well, especially if you want this to be a much grander spectacle. Some expectations about Homelander will also inevitably lead to letdowns: before the season, Antony Starr promised that the villain’s worst act was still to come [via The Kelly Clarkson Show], and you’d be forgiven for having no idea what he was talking about after this. Again, I liked his fate, but I think if we’d had a fully unleashed, graphic Homelander sequence before it, it would’ve been better.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s a wholly bad thing that there wasn’t much of a spectacle. This was smaller and more intimate than expected, but for a superhero satire, that’s not entirely a bad choice, rather than going all-out MCU CGI battle in the sky route, it just could’ve achieved a slightly better balance between the two things.

Still, I keep going back to the idea of this being true to its character arcs and to itself, and that was the prevalent sense I got as the show wrapped up. There are a few nice nods for fans – it plays the hits, such as Hughie getting covered in blood one last time – but without it being overly self-referential or self-satisfied, as some finales can be. Some of it is very neat and tidy, other bits a little less so, but given we’ve seen endings become disasters and this show peaked around Seasons 2-3, I’d say what we got was solid.

The Boys‘ series finale is now streaming on Prime Video.

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The Boys Ending Explained: Homelander & Butcher’s Fates, Ryan’s Powers, And What’s Next After the Series Finale