#1 This doesn’t feel like the final season.

This is the underlying issue that makes me feel the most uneasy about Season 5. It just doesn’t feel like a final season. I don’t mean that in a good way. It also doesn’t feel like there’s another season’s worth of content. Game Of Thrones was the opposite. That felt like a final season, but it didn’t feel like the story was ready to wrap up. I still maintain that HBO could have, and should have, produced two more seasons – one for the Long Night and the war against the Others and one for after Daenerys went over to the Dark Side and the rebel fight to take her down.

The Boys, on the other hand, just feels like a lot more setup in the fifth season and very little resolution. I get that most of the resolution has to take place in the final couple episodes, but things should feel like they’re coming to a head and they don’t. The Boys are sort of low-effort looking for V-One. There just isn’t a ton of urgency. Homelander and Soldier Boy’s search is almost weirder since their relationship is still so murky and fluid. But really, this is the foundational issue I’m having with the season as a whole, and the rest of my issues all sort of feed into it.

#2 The Boys all have too much plot armor.

A-Train’s death this season was excellent. His arc came full circle. Firecracker’s death was sudden and jarring and she got a great final story. But while A-Train ultimately ended up on the same side as the Boys, he wasn’t really one of them. And Firecracker was clearly not. Quite the opposite.

MM, Frenchie, Kimiko, Hughie, Starlight, Butcher . . . they’re all still alive and kicking and at this point, they probably should have had at least one team member kick the proverbial bucket. But even setting aside deaths, the Boys rarely feel like they’re in any kind of real danger. The closest we’ve come is the Fort Harmony scene, but even then Homelander and Soldier Boy were basically afterthoughts. Escaping the Freedom Camp was easy enough. Only Stan Edgar was captured at his bunker. Half this team doesn’t even have super powers, but every time they’re confronted with death or capture they make it out with barely a scratch.

This keeps the stakes low when they should feel high. This season has felt largely pretty tame and free of the kind of tension that you’d expect in a final outing. We need to fear for these characters’ lives. We need to worry that they’re all going to die (even if they don’t all die) and right now it just seems like they can get out of any pinch without even trying.

#3 Homelander

Homelander is a fantastic villain but a lot of the menace and unpredictability that made him so much fun and so diabolical in the first couple seasons seems to have just . . . fizzled out. Homelander is still very funny. There are many very funny moments with him, whether that’s Terror’s dream sequences or Soldier Boy’s cutting barbs, or the whole sequence with the comedians (all the more hilarious because he was going to let them go unscathed after a stern talking-to about their cruel use of memes).

But I remember Season 1 Homelander. He was genuinely scary. There were moments in Season 1 that played more like a horror movie than a superhero show. Homelander getting on a God kick is interesting because it explores the idea of a Homelander-centric “Democratic Church of America” and that kind of satire is effective because it seems very plausible despite how ludicrous it sounds. But Homelander as an unpredictable, deeply terrifying villain is mostly a thing of the past. He’s taken out by some supe gas-breath. He’s locked into a radioactive closet. Everyone mocks him constantly. The main people he frightens are people we hate, like the Deep. It’s as if they’ve gotten his development in reverse, making him less and less intimidating each season.

4. The story is too zoomed in, and too unfocused at the same time.

I’m sort of grabbing a bunch of different issues here and tying them all into one. We still get a lot of time spent with the Boys, but that time feels largely wasted. There has been very little character development this season. The relationships have hardly changed. I thought Kimiko and Frenchie were breaking up last week, but this week it seems as though they’re still together. Every member gets a tiny bit of spotlight but not too much. The central duo that was, effectively, the heart of the show in its earlier seasons – Hughie and Butcher – no longer feel like the focus of the series, and the ensemble nature of the show now means that everyone gets a lot less screen time.

Meanwhile, we see very little of what’s happening outside the confines of the Boys secret hideaways or Vought or the places Starlight or Homelander visit. We got a glimpse of people being rounded up and of prisoners at the Freedom Camps, but that’s all. The story needs to zoom out a bit so we can see what’s going on in the rest of the country and it needs to zoom in a bit and place more of the focus back on Hughie and Butcher, who did have a nice moment with Terror in Episode 5.

Right now, the story feels too insulated from the consequences of all this Vought propaganda and too much of our time spent with our heroes feels like wheels spinning.

5. There’s no sense dread or escalation.

This, again, ties in with many other points in this list. The combination of the Boys having too much plot armor and Homelander not being all that menacing leads to a season that just feels a little too bland. It has lots of good moments, but I’m never really worrying about the outcome. Sister Sage reveals her plan to destroy the world and I just shrug it off, because I don’t think there’s any chance of it actually happening. I don’t think the bad guys will win. I’m not terribly curious how the good guys will overcome the odds.

There’s just very little urgency, very little dread or suspense, and the plot is just rambling from here to there with no escalation of stakes. It’s not actively upsetting me like Season 4, but it’s making me think that perhaps Season 4 and 5 ought to have been combined in order to cut down on filler and up the ante some. The pacing is just too lackadaisical for a final season. Which brings us full circle to my first point, which is that this just doesn’t actually feel like the final season.

Hopefully the next three episodes give us that mounting tension and rising drama that we need and this doesn’t end up another Game Of Thrones or Stranger Things, though so far I wouldn’t rank it nearly as poorly as either of those crushing disappointments.

Bonus: Where are the Gen V supes?

Amazon’s decision to cancel Gen V is . . . really bizarre, quite frankly. And sad. That show did a lot of things better than The Boys. It was more focused. Each season had a clear mission, a mystery to solve, an antagonist to overcome. Each season had momentum and clear stakes. It wasn’t perfect and Season 2 wasn’t as good as Season 1, but purely from a storytelling perspective, I think it handled these conflicts a lot better than The Boys has in a few seasons.

Topping off that cancellation is the fact that none of the Gen V characters are present in the final season of The Boys at all. Maybe they will be, but it would have been nice to have them actually be part of the season as a whole. The Boys could use the help and Starlight, well, Starlight knows these young supes exist and have crazy powers. Why isn’t she utilizing them? Why haven’t they joined forces? Why are all the good guys operating as if they have zero allies when the last episode clearly showed that other supes are willing to try to take down Homelander. It’s just disappointing and hopefully this becomes a non-issue and Marie and Jordan and Sam and the rest all get to play some kind of role before this is over.

What do you think of Season 5 so far? Again, I’m not trying to just blindly hate on the show here, and I’m not leaving any one episode thinking it was awful. It’s just an overall sense that this is kind of lackluster and a bit low-energy for a final season. Though Soldier Boy sure is getting a lot of great lines. Frankly, I’m not sure there’s room this season for both Soldier Boy and Homelander to compete over the spotlight, but that’s another story for another time.