In Its Final Season, The Boys Is No Longer Fun: Review

In the fifth and final season of The Boys, superpowered fascist Homelander (Antony Starr) has fully embraced the roots of his origin story. Which is to say he’s gone full Nazi, controlling every facet of the United States government, enacting his own will as he sees fit, and putting everyone who doesn’t bend to said will in detention camps. (If they’re lucky.) “We arrested Chappell Roan and Tyler the Creator and they canceled Coachella,” eternal Vought stooge Ashley (Colby Minifie) reveals during a ramble about all the various ways Homelander has made America “safer” today. Let freedom ring.

This means that Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and his eclectic group of allies are up against seemingly impossible odds, especially as the season opens with most of them on the run or detained. It starts bleak and doesn’t get much more positive from there, as the first seven episodes of the season provided to critics reveal a build-up to an incredibly grim conclusion.

It could be said that The Boys is simply meeting the moment, especially as the show’s satire has become increasingly focused on the minutiae of today’s world. Take, as some of the more subtle examples, The Deep (Chace Crawford) becoming a men’s rights podcaster, and Homelander’s team launching a new Bible. There are plenty other elements drawn directly from the cruelty of today’s world, courtesy of a production marinated in the chaos of Trump’s return to power, one that pushes its characters to even greater levels of madness just so that the show can attempt to parody today, versus offering up a mirror image.

Boy, does the murderin’ continue this season, with big deaths right from the start, because more than ever, the root of Homelander’s power isn’t in his actual enhanced abilities, it’s in his ruthless disregard for others, his complete lack of pity and shame. Pretty much any scene he has with a living person is filled with tension, because the odds are pretty good that somebody will get brutally killed by the end of it. It’s a tension that almost feels overused by a certain point.

Yet it also means that the gruesome yet hilarious violence, always a staple of this series, just seems less funny during this go-around. Maybe it’s because some of these deaths are even more personal. Or maybe it’s because the show has finally run up against the limit of how many times we can watch a person get ripped apart and still find it entertaining — as impossible as that may seem.

One other curious element of the season is that while there is a true sense of building to a conclusion, it’s hard not to see the latent franchise-building happening in the margins: Old-school hero (and Homelander’s father) Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) repeatedly makes reference to his wild pre-frostbite decades of screwing and partying, a non-subtle reminder that the prequel series Vought Rising has already wrapped production. Less integrated is spinoff series Gen V, though characters from that show do play a small role in the season.

It’s not quite like the season is a slog to binge through, thanks to both our well-established connections to these characters, as well as the continued way it approaches its superheroes as a prism through which to mock celebrity culture. One perpetual runner is people telling Homelander about previous times they’d met. Homelander, of course, never remembers meeting them.

Without having seen the series finale yet, the standout episode of this season is the fifth. The well-titled “One Shots” consists of standalone yet overlapping vignettes told from a variety of points of view, highlighting some of the show’s deep bench and also giving us some special time with Terror, Billy Butcher’s beloved dog.

The returning series regulars all get a few solid moments in the sun: The underused Laz Alonzo in particular gets some meaty scenes, and Erin Moriarty is pretty affecting as she battles her demons as the center of Homelander’s ire. One other exciting change in Season 5: The character once known only as “The Female” has become, in many real ways, the beating heart of the show, thanks to Karen Fukuhara’s empathic, often heartbreaking work as Kimiko (who now speaks English near-fluently, thanks to TikTok).

There are new players as well, such as Daveed Diggs, who gets limited screen time but makes a huge impact as Oh Father, a new-to-us supe whose powers include his fervent Christian faith and some impressive song and dance skills. It’s a bit surprising to see the show add someone like him so late in the show’s run, but it’s almost kind of necessary, given the bloodbath that so many previous episodes have been (especially last season’s finale).

I reviewed the first season of The Boys for The AV Club back in the summer of 2019, and my primary complaint back then was that the show was a justifiably vicious satire of superheroes, but didn’t have much to say beyond its basic critique. As Season 5 takes aim at the world itself, it does emerge with one ultimate message: That in a world where power corrupts, no one complicit deserves pity. It’s certainly unsubtle, but the way that The Boys has grown up over the past five seasons is fully a reaction to these unsubtle times. To paraphrase a very different franchise: It’s the satire we deserve, if not the one we need.

The Boys Season 5 premieres April 8th on Prime Video. New episodes debut weekly on Wednesdays.