Warning: mild spoilers abound.
If you look past all the penis-strangling, MAGA-baiting, and human-exploding of the first episode of The Boys’ final season, there’s a little meta message for fans who might be worried about how the show’s planning on wrapping everything up.
“It’s impossible to tick every box and tie up every little storyline,” says The Worm (Ely Henry), a new minor character whose superpower involves eating dirt at a rapid speed and projectile-shitting all of it out of his anus. “I mean, just try making everybody happy: you can’t do it! Finales are the worst.”
This isn’t exactly a vote of confidence, but showrunner Eric Kripke has never been too concerned about pleasing everyone with his dark comedy based on the comic book series of the same name (and based on very real, very angry-faced politicians, but we’ll get to that soon). “The fans will tell me whether we got it right,” Kripke told Entertainment Weekly. “People tell me it’s really good, but most of those people work for me. So I’m not getting a clear judgement at all.”
Despite Kripke’s own reservations about his ability to stick the landing, The Boys’ final season is off to a good, high-stakes start. We pick up after the events of Season 4, which ended with Homelander (Anthony Starr) becoming essentially the supreme leader of America and three of the Boys — Hughie (Jack Quaid), M.M. (Laz Alonso), and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) — being whisked away to an unknown location.
A year later, and nothing seems to be going right for the Boys. The captured trio are locked up in a Freedom Camp (which is pretty much an ICE detention facility with lots more star-spangled decor). Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) has been deported back to the Philippines. Butcher (Karl Urban) is still working on a Supe-killing virus, all while his own superpower slowly destroys him. And Annie (Erin Moriarty) is leading the Starlighter guerrillas in a failing rebellion against Homelander. She does manage to get a shot in at the caped strongman by leaking the video of his plane crash massacre from Season 1, but all it does is piss him off and make him threaten to execute the three Boys he has locked up. It’s not the toughest spot our heroes have been in, but things are certainly looking grim.
However, it isn’t all sunshine and red-white-and-blue rainbows for Homelander, either. He’s tired of tea-bagging the United States president (who’s more of a puppet figure, really), and he can’t trust any of his henchmen to do their jobs right — The Deep (Chace Crawford) is off being an alpha male and Noir (Nathan Mitchel) has gone method. Starved for any type of emotional connection, Homelander releases his immortal daddy Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) from deep freeze, only for them to have a very tense father-son talk (“Did you fuck me?” Soldier Boy asks Homelander. “Is this some kind of incest thing?”).
The ball officially starts rolling when all of the Boys — now complete after a bloody prison break — regroup to figure out if the virus Butcher has been cooking up can actually kill a Supe. Unfortunately, they need a test dummy, and they think the perfect guinea pig for their dry run would be Rock Hard: a 900-pound granite man who was last seen railing the Lincoln Memorial’s ear until “hot come burst out its mouth” (god bless this season’s writers).
The Boys Get Real
These first two episodes cover a lot of ground (and dick jokes) ahead of the season finale, but for those tuning in for The Boys’ signature satirization of American politics, you’re in luck. Even though Kripke and team wrote the final season before the 2024 Presidential Elections, a lot of the beats and plotlines ended up mimicking the real-life chaos that Donald Trump and his hordes of MAGA devotees have stirred up. Homelander — who’s always been a stand-in for the Republican president — has already had his puppet government abolish DEI, arrest thousands of Starlight “rebels” (code for anyone who’s ever liked an anti-Homelander meme), and set up hundreds of Freedom Camps around the country to make sure that only the “right” type of people get to be free. He’s also arrested Chappell Roan and Tyler, the Creator, and canceled Coachella, but hopefully these things never come to pass in real life.
“This sounds super naive now,” Kripke told TV Guide, “but I swear the plan was, ‘Let’s write a 1984 version of what creeping authoritarianism looks like in America,’ and maybe everyone will be like, ‘Whew, we really dodged a bullet.’ But instead, we got hit with the bullet.”
As we sit tight for next week’s episode of The Boys, it’s also worth noting how Kripke has already set much higher stakes with the first two episodes. A major character death shakes both the Boys and the audience, which means that all bets are off for the coming episodes.
“There’s no victory without loss,” the showrunner tells Entertainment Weekly about the final season’s high body count. “Victory costs something. If it doesn’t and it’s always happy and rainbows and everyone makes it out and high-fiving, then I really think you lose something, both the emotion of it, but also I think people sense maybe deep down, ‘Well, that doesn’t feel honest without any consequence.’ So it was always going to be a bloody season.”
The first two episodes of The Boys are now streaming on Prime Video. Episode 3 drops on April 16 (Philippine time).
