The Boys

Credit: Amazon

I’ve been keeping my expectations in check in the leadup to the fifth and final season of The Boys on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 was a right mess and even a pretty great finale couldn’t take the bad taste out of my mouth. Thankfully, Season 5 appears to be that rarest of things: A course correction.

This is even more rare for final seasons of TV shows. Usually by the time a series has gone downhill, it’s very hard to regain momentum. Writers and producers dig in and all the problems that came up earlier are compounded. See, for example, last year’s Stranger Things 5, a disaster so utter and so perplexing it triggered my Game of Thrones PTSD.

Thankfully, the first two episodes of The Boys Season 5 are really, really good. I don’t think this show will ever top Seasons 1 and 2, but it appears that we are very much back on track, with a season that already feels more driven and purposeful than the past two. I’ve remarked with both seasons of spinoff Gen-V that I enjoyed it more than the main show’s new seasons because it had a much more focused plot. It’s too early to say, of course, but it appears we’re getting some of that focus back with The Boys.

There’s a lot to cover with two episodes out this week, so let’s run through some highlights from “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite” and “Teenage Kix." Some recap, then some discussion of these episodes and the coming season. Let’s dive right in!

Season 5, Episode 1 Recap

The story picks up a year after Homelander (Antony Starr) has shored up power, taking over leadership of Vought and installing a puppet president in the White House. Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is running guerilla operations against Homelander’s goons, but she’s increasingly on the defensive. Meanwhile, Homelander has been rounding up dissidents into “Freedom Camps” which are, naturally, private run gulags courtesy of Vought.

It’s in one of these that we find Hughie (Jack Quaid), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) and Frenchie (Tomer Capone). They’ve been held here for the past year, but that’s all about to change after Starlight hijacks the feed at a Vought shareholder meeting and plays footage from Flight 37 showing Homelander and Maeve (Dominique McElligott) on the plane, with Homelander threatening to laser-eye the passengers.

The scandal is quashed easily enough by Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) who runs a disinformation campaign blaming it all on deepfakes and AI – a topic I’m not at all surprised to see come up. If anything, this is a chilling prediction of how our own leaders will almost certainly behave when scandal befalls them (that or they’ll start heedless new wars).

Homelander is not pacified. He wants to lure Butcher (Karl Urban) and Starlight to an ambush by leaking that the prisoners are set to be executed in three days. He also wants to criminalize any and all Starlighter sympathizers – anyone who posted mean memes about him or posted nice things about Starlight, basically. All of this goes into motion, much to the dismay of newly minted VP, Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) who has her own new powers – and a Hogwarts-style secret in the form of a new, grotesque face on the back of her head, though unlike Professor Quirrell’s second face, it appears Ashley’s has good intentions, almost as if she grew a conscience.

Butcher fetches Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) from overseas and brings her back to the US and Starlight, where she reveals her own new surprise: She’s learned how to talk. It’s honestly super weird to hear her voice, and she kind of says whatever is on her mind. She’s very blunt and it’s pretty funny.

The rescuers recruit one more to their party: The Worm (Ely Henry) a former Vought writer who has been replaced by AI (this is hitting a little too close to home) and whose power is basically eating dirt and expelling it out the other side. Butcher gets him to dig the rescue tunnel into the Freedom Camp, but not before the writer gives us some funny meta-commentary on how hard it is to write a finale. You can’t please everybody, he warns us, the viewers, as we hurdle toward the show’s conclusion.

Homelander is waiting, of course, and a brutal fight breaks out. The Boys have a card up their sleeve, however, though they don’t know it yet. Starlight attempted to recruit A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) to the rescue mission, but he refused. When he’s paid a visit by The Deep (Chace Crawford) he has a change of heart, and shows up just in the nick of time, as Homelander is about to laser-beam Hughie right in the face.

We see time move slowly here, from A-Train’s perspective (and I’m a little bit reminded of a similar scene in Heroes) as he zips around the camp, pulling a pin in one of the guard’s grenades before tackling Hughie out of the way.

Hughie, Butcher and the others escape an A-Train flees, with Homelander in hot pursuit. This final scene with A-Train really sealed the deal for me. As he flees, a woman steps out of her car and into the empty road. A-Train sees her just in time and swerves out of the way, into the woods where he crashes through trees, ultimately losing his speed and collapsing. Of course, the inciting incident of Season 1 was when A-Train blasted directly through Hughie’s girlfriend, killing her horribly without a thought in the world and leading Hughie to join Butcher to get revenge and stop the supes. This much-changed A-Train essentially sacrifices himself, both to save Hughie and to save this random woman on the street.

Homelander catches up to him but A-Train doesn’t even flinch. Instead, he laughs in Homelander’s face and calls him pathetic. Without your powers, he tells his old boss, you’d be nothing. Even as Homelander crushes his throat, A-Train just laughs. No fear, no begging and pleading for his life. He looks him straight in his glowing red eyes and dies with a smile on his face. It’s a fantastic arc, taking A-Train full circle all the way to redemption. He died a hero – a real hero – and messed with Homelander’s fragile little ego in the process.

Season 5, Episode 2 Recap

Butcher’s stated goal for saving the Boys is a little suspect: He wants Frenchie to help with the supe virus, but we learn pretty early on that the virus has been perfected. Dr. Sameer Shah (Omid Abtahi) has already finished work on the virus and all the Boys need to do is carry out a test run to see how it works. It could be that he feels Frenchie’s general expertise is necessary to do this, but I think Butcher, for all his loss of humanity, empathy and compassion, still has a soft spot for these men. He’s not all the way gone, which we see when he goes home to his adorable bulldog, Terror. (Side-note: That dog better survive the season!)

They decide to carry out the experiment on one of the toughest supes out there: Rock Solid, a member of the influencer supe house, Teenage Kix. There is some tension amongst our heroes at this point. Butcher is hellbent on using the virus to kill Homelander even if it means killing the rest of the supes in the process. Hughie finds this notion horrifying, despite not being a supe himself. To his dismay, Starlight is on Butcher’s side. 10,000 supe lives to save 8 billion people seems like a fair trade, she tells him. It’s the trolley car problem at a grand scale. Only Kimiko takes Hughie’s side. MM and Frenchie see the necessity of it, though Frenchie wants to protect Kimiko somehow.

The plan is to kidnap Rock Solid (Andrew Iles) and bring him back to the lab to test the virus, but things don’t go according to plan. Rock Solid has . . . grown. He’s like a small mountain the basement of the Teenage Kix house, and we learn the mechanism by which he’s grown so large (and it’s as gross as you’d expect from this show, though overall the grossness factor has been turned down considerably this season . . . so far, at least).

Butcher changes the plan and decides they’ll run the test right there in the basement, and he and Hughie and Kimiko head back to base to get the virus, while Frenchie and MM and Starlight stay to prep for the test. MM stumbles on another supe in the house – they thought all the others would be out rounding up Starlight sympathizers – named Countess Crow (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). We learn pretty quickly that she doesn’t like her influencer gig much when she tells one of her crows (she has two, named Russell and Cameron, which is hilarious) “They make me do it.” I guess Vought has some form of indentured servitude going for reluctant young supes. Her housemates – Sheline (Emma Elle Paterson) and Jetstreak (Dylan Colton) – seem to enjoy their work plenty.

MM ends up bonding with the girl, who reminds him of his own daughter, and frees her rather than let the others kill her with the virus. It’s a nice moment, and shows that Hughie and Kimiko are not the only ones who want to spare innocent supes.

Plans keep changing. Homelander frees his father, Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) from his CIA deep-freeze and recruits him to track down Butcher, not mentioning that Butcher has a super-virus in his possession. Soldier Boy is many things, but one of these is a good tracker, and he locates a car registered to one Don T. Beakunt, flagging Butcher immediately.

When he finds them, they’re transporting the deadly virus back to the Teenage Kix house, and all hell breaks loose. He sends Sheline and Jetstreak after Hughie and Kimiko, while he chases down Butcher (in a hilariously slow-moving chase scene). Jetstreak almost kills Hughie, but Starlight catches him, and Kimiko gets the better of Sheline. Jetstreak and Soldier Boy burst into the room where Rock Solid is (still holding his breath to avoid being killed by the virus) but it’s a trap. Frenchie managed to get the virus out of the tube before Soldier Boy got his hands on it, and both Rock Solid and Jetstreak die horribly.

Soldier Boy isn’t affected at first. Then boils start to form on his face and he collapses. Satisfied that the job is done, the Boys make their escape and head back to the base to celebrate. Homelander shows up at the Teenage Kix house where The Deep is blustering around “taking charge" and making jokes in very poor taste. When he said “Soldier Boy, more like Soldier Doy” I thought he was toast. Homelander sends him away and then grieves over Soldier Boy’s body. “Why does everybody leave me?” he asks, echoing his one-sided conversation over the casket of A-Train ("I was like the big brother you never had," he tells A-Train’s corpse, totally unaware that A-Train had a big brother).

When he leaves, Soldier Boy sits up suddenly still in his body bag. It’s a terrific little cliffhanger, though I didn’t think for one second he was actually dead. They didn’t show him die, after all.

Scattered Thoughts

Some scattered thoughts:

• I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the virus doesn’t work on V1 supes – basically Soldier Boy and Stormfront at this point. It was designed to work on modern supes, and something in the original Godolkin formula makes Soldier Boy resistant, if not totally immune. This will give Homelander a reason to get V1 and protect himself.
• The satire in these episodes was quite good. I think it’s risky to make too many parallels to current affairs in a show like this, but it’s also satisfying when those pay off. Homelander’s cult of devotion, his thin skin and self-absorbed manner, are quite familiar to anyone paying attention these days. All the propoganda, the constant invoking of Jesus in the name of doing really awful things, the Orwellian branding (Freedom Camps) – it all hits very, very close to home. The slide to authoritarianism is terrifying because it’s so conceivable.
• That church scene at A-Train’s funeral was wild. Homelander was pretty overwhelmed as the rest of the congregation devolved into rapture. I think he’s really starting to crack.
• The ferocity of the Vought disinformation campaign was so unsettling. Influencers making TikTok dances out of the plane crash is . . . just too real. The doctoring of the image to make it look like Homelander had 7 fingers. “That’s what we call the uncanny valley I think,” Firecracker (Valorie Curry) says. Long pause from Homelander. “Yes it is.”
• What’s up with Black Noir II (Nathan Mitchell)? He’s not talking. He’s not a goofy idiot. He’s a pretty decent fighter now. Has he been replaced with someone? I’m very curious.
• Still no sign of Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) after the crazy events of the Season 4 finale. Where is he? I suspect he’ll be back in play in a big way later this season. I’m also eager to have our Gen-V heroes join the fray.
• Love Sausage (Derek Johns) really got what was coming to him, didn’t he? So much for “big dick energy." This is what you get when you swing that thing around too much. Ouch.
• Did you spot the One Piece jolly roger on the board back at The Boys’ base camp? That has to mean something. Maybe it’s just a parallel to A-Train’s death, laughing in the face of his executioner’s the same way Gol D. Roger did.
• I found it funny that The Worm was writing a treatment for Reacher, and that it was incredibly bad. Amazon, of course, also makes that series and it is, unfortunately, quite bad!

I think in the end, the virus won’t be what takes down Homelander. It can’t be. The theme this season, and really for the entire show, is bascially how you can’t become your enemy in order to defeat them, even when it seems like that’s the only option you have. Luke Skywalker didn’t beat Emperor Palpatine by succumbing to his hate, but by appealing to his father’s love. I suspect we’ll get a similar arc here.

I also suspect that Homelander won’t be killed in the end, but he will lose his powers and have to live as a “normal” human in disgrace. That line to Soldier Boy about “frying the V” out of him is important. It might also be the only way to save him from the virus, should it come to that, since humans are immune.

A ton of stuff happened these two episodes, so let me know if I missed anything and if you have any theories or thoughts on these two episodes on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.