The Boys

Amazon

The Boys has aired its final episode, and even with spinoffs on the way, it’s unlikely anything will match the main series in terms of impact. But of course, the eternal question is whether a show can stick the landing in its finale, and so far, the general consensus among The Boys fans is that…it didn’t.

That’s something we can at least track numerically, and right now The Boys is below the other biggest streaming show finale of the last year, Stranger Things, in terms of its finale IMDB scores among audiences.

As it stands, The Boys finale has a 6.6/10 score on IMDB, the second-worst, just over the previous episodes' 6.3/10. The show never had a single episode under a 7 before this.

Stranger Things, despite a lot of controversy around the finale, still managed to put up a 7.5/10 for its final outing. Not amazing, but The Boys being almost a full point lower is significant in the context of IMDB’s scoring. That too was one of the lowest-score episodes of Stranger Things, however, in third place. But The Boys fans were harsher, it seemed.

Personally, I very much disagree with this. So much of the criticism I’ve seen of this episode makes little sense. One is that Homelander was supposed to be “scary,” but in his final moments, he was a sniveling loser. That’s the point! That’s how it should have been! And while I miss the Gen V cast too, no, Marie Moreau should not have been in that room.

Butcher still being motivated to kill every supe in the end was not an illogical arc for his character, as he’s never been fully a good guy and has been willing to erase every supe on earth for the greater good this entire time, pretty much unwavering in that view. There’s a lot more, but I really do not understand the mass criticism of the finale, as I thought it very much turned around what was previously a poor season. And this finale was certainly not worse than six of the eight other episodes. Not even close.

It does speak to how hard it is to land the plane when it comes to ending a big series with an outspoken fanbase. I too thought the Stranger Things finale was a bit overhated, and none of these deserve to be in the same category as Game of Thrones, one of the low watermarks in TV history. Though I’ve seen some people say The Boys is worse than the original Dexter finale, and I mean, come on, be serious.

But these are the numbers, and I guess I’m in the minority here as someone who did not think it was one of the worst episodes of the series. What this means for interest in future shows like Vought Rising or The Boys Mexico is unclear, but I think a lot of the passion for the universe will be gone after this.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.