So how ‘bout it, you lot. One last go? With America staring down a dark future as the saliva-caked play toy of Homelander, bored and savior, the country’s “eternal god of the ashes,” there is nobody besides Billy Butcher we would rather follow, once more and forever without a plan, into the psycho supe breach. On Easter Sunday, live from the Oval Office, HL will deliver his plan for a divine reboot to the nation. So Billy’s fist curls around a prybar. He grabs, Annie, Hughie, Mother’s Milk, and Kimiko, and a map of all the presidential fuck tunnels running underneath the White House. The Boys crew will keep the resistance light burning, or they will die trying. Either way, they willl have a front row seat for When It Happens. 

The crew’s chances of infiltrating The White House, fighting all the way to The Oval Office, and stopping Homelander live on TV? Fucking iffy. But Frenchie did not die in vain. The experiments to power-up Kimiko with uranium worked. It is now within her, the same energy blast ability Soldier Boy used to de-couple Bombsight from his immortality. But while it was always rage that fueled S-B, Kimiko has none of that. So she looks to a vision of Frenchie for some how-to guidance while the team prepares for the fight and makes a few farewells. First to the Gen V kids, Emma Meyer, Marie Moreau, and Jordan Li, who gather up a truckload of de-brainwashed Hometeamers to drive toward safety in Canada. And then to Sage. The super-smart supe who turned against Homelander becomes the first test-case for Kimiko’s new power. And with her brain quiet for the first time in decades, she happily declares herself “stupid, just like you guys.” Sage – or just Jess now – can finally eat her Chalupas in peace. She departs for Harry Potter World Orlando and looks genuinely happy for the very first time. 

In the Oval, as live cameras roll, Homelander can’t even pretend to give a fuck about this preposterous fake religion loyalty play. Even as it is finally really happening. The religiosity slop Oh Father wrote into the speech, stuff with HL as a benevolent parent to all his loving children – he hesitates, goes off teleprompter, and instead starts saying shit like “to heretics I offer oblivion.” Oh Father! Are the psychics in place nationwide? This is not about follower counts, who believes, who does not. He just wants to skip to the part where he is alone on kingshit mountain, surrounded by lasered corpses. Homelander started a senseless war on belief, and then he got bored when it launched.

No matter. The cameras are still rolling, but his live broadcast is going off the rails, and bad supes are checking out. Ashley Barrett proves slightly redeemable in the end. She takes the silent treatment from her Back Ashley tumor to heart, and rescues the Boys from a sticky situation in the fuck tunnels. We also see Ashley gift her husband Oh Father a weapons-grade ball gag, built for their super-powered sex sessions. But it ends up being weaponized against him by Mother’s Milk, who turns Oh Father’s superscream inward. One last head-pop to cover Hughie in goo!

And naturally, when The Deep could find no more ways to debase himself, he tried to blame all his failures on a woman. In a superfight with Starlight, he says it’s her fault The Seven ended and he has no one left. She is considering the lunacy of this logic when another punch lands Deep in the drink, all the area fish cry out in anger, and shouts of “Say her name!” and “Remember Ambrosius” rise from the water. Was Tilda Swinton as the Season 4 voice of Deep’s octopus lover the best Boys cameo of all time? Consider that while the world’s marine life destroys Deep and avenges Ambrosius’s death.

Billy, Billy’s prybar, Billy’s chest tentacles, and Kimiko have arrived in The Oval Office, and America gets an eyeful as Homelander starts lord-lazering everybody. Ryan Butcher has arrived, too, so there is an extra set of lazer eyes. But all the punching and bodies being thrown into Benjamin Franklin paintings isn’t really doing anything. It is up to Kimiko how all of this ends. She imagines Frenchie again, and he tells his true love it was never rage that drove her, but the kindness in her heart. It’s a human thing – evil supes would never understand. Kimiko powers up the energy blast, and with cameras still rolling, Homelander and his powers are consumed.

From Home Lord and Savior to Wet, Whiny Baby in like three seconds. Without his lazer eyes and powers, Homelander is just some dunce in a dye job. Butcher stalks around him in a circle while HL tries to fly, crashes out. “Shock and awe, my son” – and the first punches are for Frenchie. HL is bloody, burbling up protests. He’ll eat his own shit! He’ll grow another dick! But the punches keep coming as America watches it happen on TV. Finally, with Homelander’s cruel spell over America broken like his teeth, Butcher leans back. “This is for my Becca.” And he prybars open Homelander’s skull.

In the end, resistance wins. Sure, Stan Edgar and Vought will probably resurface. As interim CEO, he is seen giving a speech to that end, about “re-thinking our relationship to superheroes.” But for the Boys crew, they can finally enjoy life, after five seasons of constant death. Kimiko buys the bernadoodle picked out by Frenchie, and she peaces out for France. We last see her enjoying macarons at a cafe table. Mother’s Milk gets married. And Hughie opens an electronics repair shop while Annie – pregnant with their daughter Robin, named for the girlfriend A-Train killed in Boys Season 1 – helps people as Starlight. 

And Billy Butcher? Where can we follow him now? He is not even surprised when Hughie has to do him in. Tempted to do the bidding of his darkness and inject the manufactured viral supe “kill juice” into the ass of the world, Butcher makes it as far as the sprinkler systems in an empty Vought Tower when he’s stopped by Hughie’s bullets. All the chaotic, bloody, death-dealing shit these two went through, and the guy who was always the spitting image of his late brother Lenny never gave in to the same drive toward darkness. Hughie stays with a bleeding-out Butcher in his last moments, and reminds him that however much it can hurt, whatever happens, we always gotta stay human. 

Boys Noize for Season 5 Episode 8 of The Boys (“Blood and Bone”): 

• We never saw Soldier Boy again after Season 5 Episode 7, when Homelander resubmitted him to cryo-sleep. Which means after a finale season of Epic Death tallies, S-B officially ends The Boys in the “Alive” column. We will see Soldier Boy again, in the past, along with Bombsight and Stormfront, in Vought Rising.

• Ryan Butcher also provided some final commentary on the deep-down fraud that was Homelander. “Get fucked,” Ryan says this biological father’s offer of dominion. “You were already the most powerful person on earth, and you were a lonely, miserable piece of fucking shit. Scaring people into calling you god doesn’t make you a god.”

• Billy, Hughie tells the crew at Butcher’s gravesite, “was nothing but flaws and bad choices.” But he never gave up hope that he could stop Homelander, “and then he actually did it.” Our only wish is that Billy’s headstone read Fucking Diabolical instead. 

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.