Gen V

Amazon

The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke is rather chatty about a finale that critics didn’t have screeners for, and in a new interview with Collider, he has a lot to say about it, including a lot of expectation-setting. And not much of it is going to please fans. Spoilers follow, I suppose, but it comes from Kripke directly, so it’s not like this is a leak or something.

Kripke was asked about the recent appearance of Gen V’s Jordan and Marie in The Boys, where Marie has godlike powers the show is seemingly dismissing. They will appear in the finale, but Kripke is cautioning about what to expect:

“To prepare everyone, we leave the Gen V kids heading off into more story. They are not, “Now, we’re done.” They are on their way. Even in Episode 7, we’re hinting at some really interesting notions of issues and problems that Marie still has to deal with because we were hoping we could continue that story.”

This finale was written before the cancellation of Gen V, so a conclusive ending was not written for them, hence the future storylines this will set up. And it is probably unwise to expect the final showdown to be between Marie and Homelander, obviously, nor do I imagine she’d use her dead-raising power that Boys fans who didn’t watch Gen V would be confused by.

It’s also been confirmed that Soldier Boy will not be in the finale, and him going on ice is the last we see of him, despite his almost overwhelming presence in season 5 here. So he’s ending where he began. There are fan theories that at least part of Vought Rising will take place after the events of The Boys, where the WWII-era flashbacks will be the other half of the show. That has not been confirmed, however, and I have my doubts that’s actually true.

Then, on what fans expect from the finale, a big, superheroic brawl, Kripke comments on that as well:

“I hope people will be surprised by the emotion that’s in it. People don’t always seem to feel this way, but to me, the show has always had a lot of heart and hope. In its own Boysian way and in a very honest way, I think that really rings true in the finale. There are big fights and big confrontations and big climaxes, but we really tried to focus on the emotion.”

Yesterday, Amazon debuted a new poster that mirrors a famous panel from the comic where Homelander is at the White House with dozens of flying superheroes backing him up. But fans are highly skeptical that will happen, as A) there are not really even more than 3-4 named bad guys even left on the show, and only one of them can fly (Oh Father), and it seems unlikely the show will dump a ton of random supes into a Homelander army that we have never seen before. B) The show has already done these misleading posters, including one where Homelander floats in space, watching nukes go off on Earth below. Even with the finale to come, it seems impossible that anything like that is going to happen. It’s annoying, as all of this suggests the final stakes should be a lot bigger than they actually will be.

I have not read any alleged leaks, but my prediction for the finale is that Homelander will survive. With the caveat, however, that he will in fact lose his powers from a Kimiko Soldier Boy blast ray. I believe the idea that Homelander being powerless and a normal, pathetic dude is a worse fate than him just being killed outright. That’s a kind of suffering that could be worse than death after life as a “god.” But we’ll see.

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