After an extremely uneven final season of The Boys, the final question was how on earth it would all be wrapped up in a single, hour-long series finale. There were fears that if it didn’t stick the landing, we’d once again be making Game of Thrones comparisons, or the recently flubbed Stranger Things ending. But in the end, The Boys pulled it off. It was good enough, if not quite good, in fact, and a worthy ending for the diabolical series. Spoilers follow.
No, every single thread didn’t find a knot, but the major ones? They managed the balancing act well. It solved many persistent problems with the season, though in many ways it made it clear that only a third of the events of the past seven episodes seemed to matter.
Fundamentally, I think this is all most fans wanted to see: Three of the most important characters of the series beating the living hell out of Homelander and finally, after all these years, killing the allegedly immortal supe. That fight, actually a fun superhero brawl, something that has been in short supply in the series for a while, involved bringing in Ryan again, a character fans complained had been sidelined, despite his previous importance, now key to helping win the fight. Kimiko got her vengeance for Frenchie, but without needing pure rage to do so after a nice little mid-fight vignette for the two. And Butcher? It always seemed like a sure thing he’d land the final blow, and he kills the begging, pleading Homelander with a crowbar in an instance of the show fully mirroring the original comic. The whole thing was a phenomenal sequence.
The rest was equally solid. Starlight got her big brawl with The Deep that was five seasons in the making, though I was a bit sad he died as I would have watched the hell out of a Deep spinoff. Hughie and MM got a Seven supe kill of their own with Oh Father. Ashley had a moment of redemption and Homelander probably wouldn’t be dead without her (albeit she didn’t skate from consequences either). Even the Gen V cast got a glimmer of sunlight after their last underwhelming appearance. And I do understand why Marie wasn’t in that Oval Office fight, for narrative reasons, if nothing else.
Of course, things didn’t end there. Abandoned by his son and dealing with the extremely ill-timed death of his dog, Butcher goes supervillain himself, finally bringing the actually-not-useless-after-all virus back into the fold as he plans to kill all supes, heroes or killers alike. After the Homelander fight, the final standoff being between Hughie and Butcher felt like a culmination of what the true final faceoff would be. Though obviously it wasn’t one full of utter hatred, but necessity, and Butcher even gives Hughie the blessing of knowing he had no choice but to kill him, even if we see he was a second past changing his mind.
The ending previews promised a “messy” end to the show, but I do think it mostly wrapped things up in a bow and delivered what most fans wanted to see. The episode was so good it felt like it wasn’t even a part of this season at all, and I think much of the past seven episodes was fat to be trimmed, and some aspects never really worked like the Homelander god delusion. As Ryan said, he was already the most powerful person on earth, so what did it even matter? I’d argue it didn’t.
The Boys will live on, sort of, through the Vought Rising spinoff, where unfortunately, promotion for that took up large chunks of this season. Another benefit of the finale was that any reference to that era was all but erased short of a single Soldier Boy name-drop. It focused on the right conflicts with the right characters and in the end, delivered something worthy of staying with the show across seven years and five seasons.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
