Imagine a regime of the sycophantic, the dumb, the desperate. Can you picture it? Yeah, you probably can. A random gang of rabid, sweaty losers, convinced they each have individual power, all because the tinpot dictator with actual power sort of, for now, until they’re no longer useful, knows their name. People ever more willing to debase themselves. Because taking a stand, in private or public, to believe in literally anything else, would be a regression, and prove they were stupid all along. In The Boys Season 5 Episode 5 (“One-Shots”), we watch the final few flecks of humanity fade from Firecracker’s eyes as she forsakes her treasured Jesus figurine for absurd, empty devotion to a super Jesus figure. 

Homelander is seething in Firecracker’s general direction. Last week she built this idiot his own idiotic religion, and it still wasn’t enough. “Americans deserve better!” FC cries to HL. (Her light still shines, faintly, behind marketing gloss.) “They deserve Homelander!” (The internal light refracts through terror and desperation.) “They deserve the Democratic Church of America!” (The light has reversed.) And not even a visit from Reverend Greg (W. Earl Brown), her Sunday School teacher back in Daytona, will help Misty Tucker Grey remember. This is what a regime of stupid does – it eats itself. On national television, Firecracker throws her childhood church under Homelander’s Democratic Church of America bus, the worship-as-persecution express, and that’s still not enough. He can sense the panicking heart beating under her costume. “Turns out you don’t believe in me,” HL says dismissively, and casually brains Firecracker, his most debased public supporter, on the outstretched bronze wing of an eagle statue.

Yep, in The Boys Season 5, showrunner Eric Kripke’s Epic Deaths tally just keeps epically tallying. And Firecracker’s demise isn’t the only escalation over at Vought Tower, this hive of crazy. This episode switches perspectives between Firecracker, Black Noir II, and The Deep – she couldn’t avoid the loyalty purge, while they are locked in a two-man battle of the suck ups. But it also switches perspectives to Sage. We’ve been wondering about her scheming all season long, and apparently so has Ashley. The Vice President of the United States visits Sage’s office. “I know you’ve been working on some big plan all year.” But Sage spins the VP around to speak exclusively with Back Ashley. She needs the psychic tumor to scan Soldier Boy’s mind. 

Sage says Homelander’s national takeover and ideological destruction is just a prequel to her preferred action, and she wants to take Soldier Boy’s temperature. (“Is he warming up to his sadistic rug rat?”) The sequel to Homelander’s Home Lord and savior act, his Starlighter deathsquads blather, is no more complicated than turning humans and supes on each other. So Sage and her big brain can have a little peace and quiet in her apocalypse bunker. It’s funny how the more powerful someone is at Vought, the more insane they are. It leaves people like Ashley flailing, and us with her. Not because she’s some paragon of Doing The Right Thing, but because even she looks redeemable in the face of this kind of evil. “You’re invited to my bunker,” Sage says. “You too, Front Ashley.”

Another thing Kripke promised about this final Boys season? Reunions. At least briefly. In Los Angeles, Homelander and Soldier Boy visit the mansion of Mister Marathon, formerly of The Seven, who was A-Train before A-Train. The speedster supe is played by Jared Padalecki, who on Supernatural was Sam Winchester to Jensen Ackles’ Dean Winchester, and Marathon is still smarting over HL kicking him out of The Seven. He’s out in LA making superhero movies for Sony instead of the Vought Cinematic Universe. And Mister Marathon’s celebrity buddies think Homelander is just as much of a frustrated asexual super-dork as he does. Seth Rogen (also a Boys exec producer), Kumail Nanjiani, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Will Forte join The Boys’ final season as Hollywood types frustrated with HL’s new church and his bullshit cultural purges. “They’re rounding up everybody cool!”

You probably guest star on a show like The Boys with the hope your face will be stomped to a bloody pulp, and that’s exactly what happens to Padalecki. Marathon showed the visitors his Vought Vault, where S-B did not miss the Stormfront photos among his Nazi memorabilia. He promised them the still-unseen Bombsight had a stash of V1. And then Mister Marathon teamed with a noxious gas-emitting supe called Malchemical (Misha Harris in another Supernatural cast cameo) to try and stop Homelander. When Malchemical’s gross breath knocks out HL, Marathon pleads with S-B to help them. Stop the reign of terror! What about that creepy church shit he’s doing? “Help us curbstomp him while we have the chance.” Instead, Soldier Boy helps curbstomp every last one of these left coast softies. “No one fucks my son but me.” Marathon’s skull becomes pink mist, Forte, Nanjiani, Rogen, and Mintz-Plasse are rendered bloody pulp, and nobody’s any closer to securing a stash of that old-ass viral immortality juice. 

The diversion Marathon tried was hilarious in its own right. “Bombsight will meet us here with the V1,” he swore, and proceeded to blow rails with Soldier Boy while the Hollywood types smoked joints. Homelander just sat silent through all of this. A frustrated, prudish silence, as people found individual joy in actions he neither craves nor can understand. His is a regime built on hate, on apathy, on the dismissal of joy. It’s a wonder he’s even waiting until his supposed immortality to just lazer-eye everybody in addition to these celebrities. As Firecracker found out, Homelander’s fuck around is a whole lot of nothing.

Boys Noize for Season 5 Episode 5 of The Boys (“One-Shots”):

• Let’s run down a few references in this episode of The Boys. First there are the Hall & Oates and Naughty by Nature T-shirts, rocked respectively by Hughie and Mother’s Milk. And Billy Butcher, chilling with his little bulldog Terror, is reading a paperpack of the John le Carré spy classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

• PJ Byrne’s time on The Boys also ends with a glorious death blow. He was Adam Bourke, director of Dawn of the Seven and occasional God U film studies professor. Now Bourke sees his dreams of putting Black Noir II in a Bee Gees Broadway musical go up his butt when a toilet eel, dispatched by Deep, destroys his insides. On a show like The Boys, this is really the only way to go out.

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.