The Boys
Credit: Prime Video
The end is upon us. The final showdown between Homelander and Billy Butcher and the Boys drops this week, and all our burning questions about the finale will be answered. It’s been a very uneven final season of The Boys, with last week’s penultimate episode now ranked the lowest of any episode across all five seasons. This finale really needs to stick the landing, but I have my doubts.
As we head into the series finale, titled “Blood and Bone”, Homelander (Antony Starr) and his crew of nefarious supes, now with the full backing of both Vought and the US government, are facing off against Starlight (Erin Moriarty), Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the rest of the Boys one last time. The finale’s tagline reads: “With everything at stake, The Boys abandon it all for one final diabolical showdown.”
Read on to find out everything you need to know about The Boys Season 5, Episode 8 plus a recap of the season so far.
New episodes of The Boys release on Wednesdays on Amazon Prime Video at midnight Pacific Time. This is a global release, so Episode 5 will drop at the same time in every region Prime Video is available. Here’s what that translates to in your timezone:
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The final episode clocks in at 1 hour and 5 minutes, pretty much in keeping with the rest of the season. Pretty much every episode has been just over an hour in Season 5. Anyone hoping for a super-long series finale is out of luck.
The Boys
Credit: Prime Video
Read a full recap of Episodes 1 & 2 right here.
One year has passed since the events of Season 4 and Homelander has solidified his hold over both Vought and the nation. A puppet president is in place. Butcher is on the run while MM (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Hughie (Jack Quaid) are all detainees in a Vought-run “Freedom Camp” for Starlighter sympathizers and other political prisoners. After Starlight releases the Flight 37 video showing Homelander’s true nature, he vows revenge and has Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) leak that the Boys will be executed in three days. Butcher finds Starlight and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) and they make an escape plan that goes very badly until A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) shows up and finally does something truly heroic, paying the ultimate price to save the team.
The Boys
Credit: Prime Video
The Boys escape and move on to the testing stage of Butcher’s plan to release the supe-killing supervirus (I think we should call it V-None), which involves breaking into a mansion that houses supe influencers and testing it out on them. Only, Homelander unfreezes his dad, Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), and sends him after Butcher, withholding information about the super-virus. Things get crazy and two of the influencer supes are infected with the virus and die. Soldier Boy is also infected, but while everyone from Butcher and Starlight to Homelander himself thinks that Soldier Boy is dead, he’s revealed to be very much alive in the end.
The Boys
Credit: Prime Video
Read a full recap of Episode 3 right here.
Instead of going rogue, Soldier Boy returns to The Seven where he’s proclaimed a hero whose reputation was smeared by the “lamestream media” and who was framed by Starlight. The Boys head to Stan Edgar’s (Giancarlo Esposito) bunker for help, and Butcher has a chat with Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) that doesn’t go well. Zoe (Olivia Morandin) hitches a ride back to the Boys HQ where she finds her father and tells him Butcher killed her mother, Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) whereupon the two destroy all remaining samples of the supe-virus. The Boys are tracked down by The Deep (Chace Crawford), Black Noir II (who may be someone other than we think, having gone silent), Cindy and Dogknott and a big fight breaks out, in which Black Noir captures Edgar but is double-crossed by The Deep who takes him back to Homelander. Ryan confronts Homelander and is nearly killed. Starlight abandons Hughie because she worries she can’t protect him.
The Boys
Credit: Prime Video
Butcher, MM, Frenchie, Kimiko and Hughie head to Fort Harmony. This is where Vought ran a bunch of experiments including experiments with V-One, and they’re trying to track down any remaining serum before Homelander can get his grubby paws on it. Meanwhile, Homelander and Soldier Boy are also headed to Fort Harmony, though Homelander doesn’t realize Soldier Boy is actually working against him, urged on by some not-so-subtle hints from Sister Sage. At Fort Harmony, something is wrong and everyone other than Frenchie starts acting angry and hostile. Some underlying tension bubbles to the surface. When they spot Homelander and Soldier Boy, MM and Butcher decide it would be a good idea to go fight them. When Frenchie stops that, they all turn on one another.
Frenchie finds a supe who we later learn is Quinn, effectively growing into the wall. The weird vines throughout the fort are his doing, and he is the source of the pure hatred that’s overcome everyone. Frenchie gets Soldier Boy to kill Quinn, but when the hate effect is gone, Soldier Boy is crushed over what he’s done. Clearly there is a lot of backstory here. Soldier Boy also managed to lock Homelander in a super cell filled with radiation, though it didn’t hold him long. There is no V-One anywhere to be found. Someone else has taken it, likely Bombsight, another hero from Soldier Boy’s time. Meanwhile, Starlight paid a visit to her father who she hasn’t seen since childhood and meets his new family, learning a thing or two in the process.
Oh, and Homelander announces his godhood to the nation, as Vought launches the Democratic Church of America. It’ll be interesting to see how that’s received by the general public.
The Boys
Screenshot: Erik Kain
This was the first episode of The Boys to really focus on Firecracker (Valorie Curry) the Vought News talking head and conservative / supe-supremacist / evangelical Christian rabble-rouser who has been one of Homelander’s biggest supporters. We’ve seen her conflicted over her boss’s claims this season. Homelander wants to spread the good word: He’s God, actually, and it’s time to ditch all that pesky Jesus stuff. Not only does Vought start the Democratic Church of America, with Homelander as its lord and savior, they send supes to harass congregations that refuse to play ball and then malign their pastors and members as evil Starlighters and pedophiles.
Firecracker has a lot of misgivings over all of this, and these are heightened when she’s visited by her old pastor who asks her for help after a supe attacked his church. When Firecracker goes on air, however, she’s confronted with Vought’s new angle: They want her to call out her old pastor as an abuser, effectively ruining his life and destroying her old church. Curry does a terrific job in this scene. Firecracker clearly doesn’t want to comply, but she sets aside her values, her beliefs, and her convictions and toes the Vought line for Homelander. In the end, even after sacrificing her dignity, Homelander kills her anyway.
Meanwhile, Homelander and Soldier Boy pay Mister Marathon a visit and find his mansion occupied by a bunch of comedians all played by themselves. The comedians and their supe friends all hate Homelander, but they’re all revealed to have been complicit in the various show trials that have seen many of Hollywood’s luminaries disappeared, killed or taken to Freedom Camps. When Malchemical gases Homelander, rendering him unconscious, they try to get Soldier Boy to kill him but he refuses. Everyone dies and Homelander and Soldier Boy return with new info about the location of the V1 serum: A superhero named Bombsight has it.
The episode was structured around various self-contained stories that shed more light on characters like Black Noir II, The Deep and even Butcher’s dog, Terror.
The Boys
Credit: Prime Video
In Episode 6 we finally meet Bombsight, another one of the V-1 supes from Solder Boy’s days. Unlike the vast majority of Supes, and certainly unlike Soldier Boy and his ilk, Bombsight seemed like a pretty good guy, all things considered. He just wanted to give the love of his life, Golden Geisha, V-1 so she could live forever with him. Instead, he trades the serum to Soldier Boy in exchange for Soldier Boy taking his powers. Then Soldier Boy, in yet another about-face, gives it to Homelander who immediately injects himself and becomes “immortal.” I use scare quotes because it’s not quite immortality. He could still have his powers taken away by Soldier Boy, for instance, and die. But it’s close enough and it means he’s immune to the supe-virus, though it will still take him out temporarily.
It’s a pretty dramatic conclusion to this arc, but my favorite scene this episode was between The Legend and Homelander. For the very first time in this show, and probably in Homelander’s life, someone actually talks to him like he’s just a normal person. “A whack job” he calls Homelander, “But that’s just talent.” It’s probably my favorite scene of the entire season.
We also got a very lame fight between The Deep and Black Noir in which the former quite easily dispatches the latter despite all his super powers. Black Noir probably deserved it if only because his revenge on The Deep – causing a massive oil pipeline spill in the ocean – is among the most egregious things any villain has done over the course of this show.
Meanwhile, Starlight and Hughie’s plans to plant the supe-virus in the Democratic Church of America are ruined by Oh Father who, it turns out, is quite a lot more powerful than Starlight. That’s . . . surprising and weird, but okay!
The Boys
Credit: Prime Video
We finally come to the penultimate episode of The Boys, and the one that has so many fans up in arms (though not for the first time this season). We see Homelander really stretching his evil villain wings this episode, killing the president because he’s not “faithful” in his heart and then dissolves the Seven, much to the dismay of the Deep. The Deep is also cast out of the sea, threatened by marine life for his role in the pipeline disaster, unable to save someone when they’re drowning and fleeing in shame.
Gen V supes, Marie Moreau and Jordan Li, show up to help Annie and she tells them to get lost, which is incredibly annoying. They end up helping, but not to the extent we were led to believe by the spinoff series.
Meanwhile, Frenchie and Kimiko are trying to reproduce Soldier Boy’s radiation blast power that depowers supes, hoping to use it on Homelander.
When Butcher, Hughie, M.M. and Starlight go to investigate some unusual activity at Oh Father’s church, Butcher and Hughie are captured by an evil supe called Synapse who uses psychic powers to trap them in their minds. He uses his mind tricks to turn into Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character, Joe Kessler, who reveals a few grim details about his past with Butcher. They use this to distract Synapse and kill him, fleeing the otherwise totally unguarded facility.
M.M. and Annie rescue people at an Oh Father screening where they’re trying to effectively force people to believe in Homelander. There’s a big fight with Dogknott and Sheline who, in-between sniffing one another’s butts, start massacring the test audience. Once again, it’s a little too hard for Starlight – former member of the Seven and one of the most powerful supes – to win. A rat distracts Sheline and that turns the tide, but I feel like the show has depowered Starlight too much this season.
Homelander shows up where Frenchie and Sister Sage are conducting their Kimiko experiments and the two women hide. Frenchie isn’t so lucky. He and Homelander have a little chat and he gets a big dose of radiation, but still manages to crawl pretty far before Kimiko finds him. It’s a bummer to see a beloved character die, but it’s the first casualty of the core Boys team and frankly I’m surprised it took this long. (M.M. recovered from a gunshot wound to the back in minutes, so I half-expected Frenchie to pull through).
The goodbye between Frenchie and Kimiko was heartbreaking and there were some other good moments this episode, like Frenchie’s line to Homelander “Look at you. You’ve never danced a day in your life.” But like so much of Season 5 it still doesn’t really feel like a final season to me and this didn’t really feel like a great setup for a series finale. At least we got some good Butcher / Hughie moments.
One thing I’ll give this show: I have no idea what’s going to happen. I have no idea if they’ll actually beat Homelander. I can’t imagine they lose, but it’s possible. I think Butcher will die, and probably some other good guys. Maybe the Deep goes down or maybe his exile from the sea is enough. Does M.M. get his family back? Do Hughie and Annie get to ride off into the sunset? Sister Sage, Ashley and plenty of other characters’ fates hang in the balance.
Judging by the trailer, The Deep and Oh Father are having a conversation they’d rather not have Homelander hear. Annie shows up and tackles the Deep, blasting him through a window, though whether to take him with her or just kill him remains to be seen. Butcher, meanwhile, says it’s time to end the whole notion of supes altogether, so he’s definitely going through with the virus plan. And we get a glimpse of Ryan, so it seems likely that he’ll play a part in the final Homelander showdown, as will a vengeful Kimiko who, it seems likely, will be able to use the depowering ability at this point. We’ll know more soon!
Look for more coverage of The Boys here on this blog. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook and let me know what you think of Season 5 so far. I’ll have thoughts on the series finale tomorrow.
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