Episode 7 of The Boys Season 5 is its second-to-last episode ever, so let’s go live to an apparently now-immortal Homelander as he reboots the universe. Congress, he dictates to a supplicant President Calhoun, will be disbanded. The borders between church and state will be destroyed, and the Democratic Church of America will become the official religion of the one true god, “Me.” Fake milk for babies will be banned. Only breast milk for healthy hometeamers of the next generation. Troops will occupy Starlighter sanctuary cities. It is all part of the psychotic vision of a nitwit, high on his own godlike supply, and as usual, non believers will not be tolerated. Not even the prez.  

Yeah, The Boys is ending, but Homelander is still winning, and the wrong people are dying. He’s walking around satisfied, like a cat who swallowed a pigeon. He’s got Oh Father practicing the big song-and-dance number that will open HL’s divine unveiling, live on national television. (Sample lyric: “Healing a few lepers won’t cure these open borders!”) And he’s doing shit just because he’s bored and cruel of heart. When The Deep is called into the big man’s office, it’s with a bright-eyed look. After all, he turned heel on all aquatic life and murdered his only friend for this dude. But he has given so many versions of everything to Homelander, Deep gets lost in a redundant kiss-ass speech trying to explain how, and when Homelander cancels The Seven outright, his only protest is that the sham supergroup was all he had left. HL just frowns. “Don’t make this about you.” 

The number of people around Homelander keeps shrinking with his every violent, selfish whim. Sage turned on him. He has banished The Deep. He killed the president right in front of her, and that seems to finally have driven Ashley Barrett insane. (“I should be proud I’m not dead!”) And when Soldier-Boy calls bullshit on HL’s god power trip – “You’re too weird and you’re no god” – he chokes out his biological father and re-suspends him in the cryo tank. At this point, Oh Father’s about the Homelander only inner circle member still hanging around. 

Which makes him the Boys crew’s next target. They are fighting the cynical vibes, of being profoundly disheartened by watching their nemesis receive V1’s live forever magic. But they rally to infiltrate Vought Studios, where Oh Father practices a “Hitler on the outside, Fosse on the inside” jazz hands number while running psychotic diagnostics on Hometeamers. Folks who eat up Vought’s propaganda media slop are being analyzed by the most dangerous psychics in the country, such as Synapse (Steven Yaffee), and then are killed for betraying “impure” thoughts. The Boys don’t even get the chance to kidnap Oh Father before Billy and Hughie are caught by Synapse in his mind trap.

Welcome back to The Boys, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who via Synapse appears again as Joe Kessler, Billy Butcher’s old CIA buddy/Boys Season 4 mental projection. Kessler’s little speech about the darkness that permeates Billy’s mind is meant to embarrass him in front of Hughie. But at this point, after so many seasons of chaos, none of the Boys are innocent. And to a person, they are impervious to dark shit alone. Elsewhere, when Annie expresses the futility of their actions in the face of Hometeamers being willingly brainwiped by Homelander, Mother’s Milk reminds her of one thing. Not the fact of dark shit. That’s obvious. Instead, and using the uplifting origin story of his “Mother’s Milk” nickname to do it, MM tells Annie it’s all about giving a shit. Because in a world where nobody gives a shit, “That ain’t soft. It’s hard as hell.” 

Some gave so much of a shit, they were willing to give it all. The Epic Death tally of The Boys Season 5 has also finally hit the crew where it hurts the most. While the team tried to infiltrate Vought Studios, Frenchie was exposing Kimiko to enriched uranium. The same stuff from the vault at Fort Harmony, with the intention of Kimiko gaining enough destructive power to take out Homelander. It was insane, but worth a shot. It was their last play.

Torturing the woman he loves with toxic fire because she asked for it? Only on The Boys. And in the face of this terrible violence, as Kimiko labors to survive the treatments, she must rally with Sage to hide, because Homelander suddenly arrives at Boys HQ. Frenchie has nowhere to go, but instead of being caught in the open, he enters the uranium chamber and hits the switches. Where his middle finger extends. Suck it, putain. “I bet you never danced a day in your life!” As HL departs to the sky, made bored again by his own cruelty, a tearful Kimiko holds a gravely wounded Frenchie close. “Mon coeur,” he tells her softly. “Thank you.” They will never settle down together. They will never buy that little house in Marseilles. Never have a few babies, never raise a bernadoodle named Simone. Because after everything, after all they and this resilient Boys crew have survived, Frenchie dies in Kimiko’s arms.  

Boys Noize for Season 5 Episode 7 of The Boys (“The Frenchman, The Female, and the Man Called Mother’s Milk”): 

• “Scenes from Italian Restaurant,” which Hughie says is really like three songs, “The Entertainer,” which to us is the deep cut of his list, and his wavering between “Allentown,” “You May be Right,” and the four-quarter quadrant bop that is “Tell Her About It”: Hughie uses his list of best Billy Joel Songs ever list to protect his brain from Synapse.

• Gen V what up! OK, so Prime Video canceled the Boys spinoff after two seasons. But here in Ep 7, Jaz Sinclair and London Thor make brief cameos as Marie Moreau and Jordan Li, and mention Lizze Broadway’s Emma Meyer as also still being in the resistance mix.   

• Sage aided Frenchie and Kimiko’s experiments because of Love Island. She’s watching marathons and eating Chalupas when Frenchie admits he’s a fan of every international Love Island ever, and explains how “No one has ever understood love, ever.” That really gets through, and convinces the super smart supe to help.

• Homelander canceled The Deep right along with The Seven, and after he turned his back on them, none of his old fish friends want the Lord of the Seas around. “You are dead to us! Bitch-ass!” Samuel L. Jackson guest-stars on The Boys as the voice of Xander the Hammerhead Shark.

• And everybody making return cameos on this Boys finale season must have written “Grossest Death Possible” in their contracts. PJ Byrne was toilet-murdered, and here in Ep 7, Jeffrey Dean Morgan gets impaled and eviscerated by Butcher’s chest tentacles.

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.