The Boys finale was always going to fail as it makes a mistake that ruins it
After five seasons The Boys has stumbled across the finish line, and reaction online has been hugely negative.
Many fans have called it the ‘worst finale ever’ and, whilst that’s a bit hyperbolic, it is undeniable that the final season of The Boys has been pretty disappointing.
The finale of The Boys finally brings to a head the storyline of Butcher, Hughie, Starlight, Mother’s Milk, and Kimiko trying to bring down Homelander.
The final season has been marred in controversy, with Eric Kripke hitting back at accusations that the final season was ‘boring’ and several actors from the show appearing to criticise the series by liking negative posts about the show on social media.
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When discussing why the finale seems to have fallen flat however, it is important to remember one vital thing: The Boys finale was always going to fail, it didn’t really have a chance.
Season five of The Boys set the finale up to fail by not fulfilling promises in the series
The Boys season five was a bizarre ride. The first episode was a mixed bag but, in the death of A-Train, promised a more serious and consequential tone for the final season.
This tone was not then continued again until about halfway into the finale episode.
All five seasons have led to the supposed ‘carnage’ that would happen when Homelander finally snapped and decided he longer needed to sit within Vought. Season four’s finale set this up perfectly, showing Homelander overthrowing the government and throwing the titular Boys into camps in a dramatic moment.
This was resolved within one episode after the protagonists all broke out and throughout season five Homelander never goes on any kind of tear or rampage. All four previous seasons built up the idea that the only thing that prevented Starlight from releasing footage of Homelander refusing to save the passengers from Flight 37 was his threat to level New York if she did. When she released it in the first episode, it was explained away in a minute with a lame joke about AI.
At its best The Boys was a show that had serious stakes no matter the debauchery, a show where the villains felt dangerous and like they could snap at any second. In season five, Black Noir II does a more catastrophic act to piss off The Deep than anything Homelander tries and – after a whole season centred around him getting V1 and becoming unstoppable – it ended up being inconsequential.
The key reason The Boys season five set the finale up to fail is it spent too much time focusing on its upcoming spin-off shows
Throughout The Boys season five numerous fans have been left with one key question: Why are Soldier Boy and his old friends such a big deal all of a sudden?
Soldier Boy’s introduction in season three was a welcome twist in the plot, giving a similar level threat to Homelander who has a personal tie to a major protagonist.
Season five however spends what feels like half its run time setting up Soldier Boy, Bombsight, his relationship with Stormfront (which comes out of nowhere) and there’s a clear reason why. With The Boys coming to an end the franchise cash cow is leaving, but Jensen Ackles and Soldier Boy are set to appear again in prequel show Vought Rising.
Whether it be for Vought Rising or the other planned spin-off The Boys: Mexico – Soldier Boy was written off the finale and did not appear at all in the final episode, being put into some sort of cryo pod after Homelander turns on him.
This set the finale up for failure, with a huge amount of time this season plot-wise being spent on characters such as Bombsight who do not move the story forward, and on a character in Soldier Boy who doesn’t even get any resolution in the final episode in order to keep him alive for a spin-off.
The Boys season five is not the worst final season of a TV show. Whether it be Game of Thrones, Umbrella Academy, How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, or Scrubs – there are a lot of final seasons of TV shows that have bungled their endings worse than The Boys.
That said, The Boys season five is a major disappointment and it’s all down to the writing looking beyond season five and onto new horizons (but the constant Trump parodies probably didn’t help).
Topics: The Boys, TV and Film, TV
Michael Slavin