I've Been Threatening To Rage Quit The Boys For Years. This Was The Final Straw
Prime Video’s snarky supe satire won’t stop until it’s dragged us all down with it.
There are plenty of times in the past seven years when I’ve fought the instinct to turn off The Boys, get up off my couch, and never think about the show again. That I’ve lasted this long is thanks to a myriad of things: I write about superhero stuff for a living, my partner loves the show, etc. But I also, deep down, kinda care about the characters. Prime Video’s God-forsaken supe satire has always had a way with its heroes and its villains. Whenever I felt my hand itching for the remote, they’d dangle a juicy morsel of pathos right under my nose. I’d soldier on, wincing through the gauntlet of sex jokes clearly written by a 15-year-old, wading across rivers of blood and guts, because I knew something worthwhile (something human!) was waiting for me on the other side.
With Season 5, I’m convinced there’s no humanity left. Or if there is, I just don’t care anymore. And that’s something I never thought I’d say, given this season’s introduction of a drug that can make its terrifying Superman stand-in, Homelander (Antony Starr), truly omnipotent, or a virus powerful enough to stop him and every other supe, permanently. At this point, though, Homelander can have his immortality; the Boys can unleash the plague that will surely murder every supe on the planet and maybe some humans along with it. I no longer care what happens to anyone — in fact, I wouldn’t bat an eye if they all just bit the dust.
Where The Boys once satirized our world, it’s long become a caricature of itself.
It’s not that I’ve suddenly become Butcher-pilled and am actively rooting for a superhero genocide. But if the minds behind The Boys don’t care about delivering a finale that honors any form of investment, why should I? Across six scattershot episodes, showrunner Eric Kripke and his team of writers have systematically stripped this once cutting-edge series of everything that made it so inventive. Sure, glimmers of pathos remain in the relationships that we’ve spent years rooting for — and even, admittedly, in some of the new dynamics meant to pave the way for the show’s upcoming prequel. That Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy is becoming the de facto star of The Boys ahead of his real starring role in Vought Rising isn’t the true problem here, because Ackles pours everything into the role. The problem is the litany of tacky jokes, ranging from passing puerility to barely-funny bigotry, that he has to imbue with the same level of commitment.
Every meaningful moment in The Boys Season 5 finds itself undercut by a blindsiding reference to sex, or porn, or any given character’s not-so-secret kink. For some reason, a bunch of supes possess powers that weaponize their genitalia (which can happen, I guess, but after the fifth magical penis, you simply have to move on). To make matters worse, every character is slowly being assimilated into the numbing nihilistic rhetoric that once made Soldier Boy stand out. Someone like Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), a previously non-verbal victim of exploitation and trafficking, is suddenly obsessed with bukake. Annie (Erin Moriarty) and Hughie (Jack Quaid), once the most stalwart and normal pairing The Boys had to offer, can no longer bond without making dirty jokes about clouds. They’re borderline unrecognizable, lost in the sea of diarrhea gags that now define the series above anything else.
The fates of these characters once mattered more than superhero satire — now, it doesn’t matter what happens to them.
Week after week, The Boys is committing one instance of character assassination after the next. That the blows are relatively minor (despite the sheer blunting force of all those jokes) doesn’t make it any less devastating to the show as a whole. The world of the series has always been rotten; the characters were meant to embody the glimmer of hope, reminding us that some of it was at least worth saving. I’m not sure I believe that anymore, and it’s not only because everyone’s suddenly making dick jokes or talking about their past conquests. All that immaturity is emblematic of the rot, of the caricature that’s been redrawn to heights so stupid it’s almost insulting.
In Season 5, characters make decisions that defy everything we’ve ever known about them, all to justify deaths that feel unearned and unnecessary. Others are written out of the world entirely. Capable heroines like Annie and the ultra-smart Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) are rendered utterly inert. In Episode 6, each fails the one mission they’ve spent the entire season building up to. Does it make any sense for their characters? Absolutely not — but it does give Kripke and co. enough plausible deniability to sideline them without ruffling too many feathers. It’s all a ploy to stall for time: The Boys has only ever been about Butcher’s ever-looming showdown against Homelander, and the inane ways the series is disposing of its supporting cast only crystallize that ugly truth. This series promised to burn everything down to get to that grudge match, but a scorched earth would honestly be preferable to this.
Whatever purity The Boys once had, it’s long been tainted. It all needs to end, or maybe it ended a long time ago — either way, it’s hard to care how it happens now.
