‘The Boys’ Season 5 REVIEW: All Herogasm, No Climax Endgame
‘The Boys’ Season 5 REVIEW: All Herogasm, No Climax Endgame
This review contains spoilers for ‘The Boys’ Season 5 and ‘Gen V’ Season 2.
Two things can be true at once. A television series can achieve remarkable longevity when audiences care deeply about it, and that same longevity can make delivering a satisfying ending nearly impossible. Good endings are hard to write, and television history offers lots of examples. Just ask David Benioff and D.B. Weiss or the showrunners behind Ozark and Killing Eve. Characters stack up. Audience expectations accumulate. More plot threads mean more loose ends that need proper resolution. Such is the fate with The Boys. Like long-running television juggernauts such as GameofThrones and StrangerThings before it, one can foresee The Boys collapsing under diminishing returns. Season 4 was a drag and left a lot for the final season to resolve. And ever since sidelining and effectively cancelling Gen V, the focus has shifted toward spin-off bait like Vought Rising and The Boys: Mexico, leaving the main series finale feeling increasingly meandering and bloated.
Tomer Capone (Frenchie), Karen Fukuhara (Kimiko), Laz Alonso (MM), Erin Moriarty (Annie January/Starlight), and Jack Quaid (Hughie Campbell) in The Boys | Still courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Known for its gleeful hyperviolence and biting satire of celebrity culture and politics, The Boys thrives on drawing uncomfortable parallels between superheroes and real-world power structures. But for all its trademark dark humor, gory excess, and irreverence, this season lacks the narrative momentum to make its finale truly resonate. Instead of building toward a strong ending, it too often falls back on familiar beats and recycled provocations, making its endgame feel more anticlimactic than explosive. The promotions surrounding the final season proved to be even more imaginative than the season itself. Fans are expecting a scorched earth, shock and awe, blood and bone finale. What we got instead is hot-buttered, melt-in-your-mouth popcorn fun nonsense.
Despite being a middling finale, Season 5 is not without its merits and brings payoffs to viewers who can stick with it until the very end. Episode 8 delivers a good, albeit saccharine, resolution for some of its fan-favorite characters and comically nails the long-foretold downfall of Homelander at least.
Based on the adult superhero comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, The Boys follows the eponymous ragtag group of vigilantes led by Machiavellian, suave leader William “Billy” Butcher (Karl Urban) as they combat superpowered individuals often called “Supes” who work for Vought International. What they lack in superpowers, they make up for with sheer resourcefulness. The group's dynamics become complicated as they find themselves in a Hail Mary crisis in toppling mass-murdering, self-proclaimed god Homelander (Antony Starr). In the final season, The Boys race to stop Homelander from acquiring the V1 formula, a substance that would render him effectively immortal and immune to the supe-killer virus.
Jessie T. Usher as A-Train in The Boys | Still courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
The fifth season premiere picks up one year after the bloody aftermath of Season 4. Starlighters and dissidents of Homelander’s fascist regime are detained in a maximum-security internment camp in a dystopian present-day America. Even Chappell Roan and Tyler, the Creator, were mentioned to have been arrested in this fictional universe of The Boys. At the Vought Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Annie (Erin Moriarty) infiltrates the event and hijacks the screen with Flight 37 incident footage. The audience reacts in horror to how Homelander (and reluctant Queen Maeve) deliberately abandoned the passengers on board. In response to this revelation, Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) manipulates the public by launching a TikTok and disinformation campaign, claiming the leaked footage is AI-generated propaganda by Starlighters.
And that’s what the show is really good at. Just when you thought the good guys were finally having the advantage, the show reminds us how the world is built by those who manipulate, exploit, and corrupt in pursuit of power. Truth can be easily twisted nowadays. It’s no longer just a battle between good and evil anymore, but also between reality and misinformation. The trial is no longer a search for truth but rather a referendum of public opinion. By blending real-world political and cultural satires into the narrative, The Boys created a bloody, irreverent supe romp, yet something recognizably familiar and horrifyingly happening just outside our windows. The show effectively incorporates this narrative to reflect our real-world fears of deepfakes, corporate media manipulations, and misinformation, where even the most indisputable evidence can be dismissed as fabricated AI slop and vice versa.
The first episode ends with A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) acting as the episode’s deus ex machina just when Hughie (Jack Quaid) and MM (Laz Alonso) are about to be executed. Homelander pursued A-Train in a high-speed chase that ultimately ended with A-Train's death at Homelander's hands. The moment comes full circle from the series premiere, when A-Train accidentally disintegrates Hughie's girlfriend while running at superhuman speed. This time, however, instead of recklessly plowing through a pedestrian, A-Train deliberately dodges a passerby, highlighting how much he has changed since the beginning of the series.
However, by midseason, the show turns out to be an endurance test, with the writers seemingly having no idea what to do with the stack of characters with different abilities. Especially with Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), the so-called smartest person in the world. Viewers are really looking forward to how the show’s brainiac twisted master plan would turn out to be, as she plots each piece of events, toppling one domino after another, leading to Homelander’s guaranteed defeat. But after how many episodes, her game plan turns out to be a suicide mission. She misreads Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and misconstrues the unpredictable, complex nature of human emotions. That’s assuming Soldier Boy’s self-preservation and contempt will overcome kindness, which directly results instead in Homelander acquiring the V1 serum and becoming fully immortal by the end of Episode 6. Well, you know what they say. A character can only be as smart as the writers themselves.
The show’s saving grace lies in how committed the cast is to the material. Even though the story seems to run in circles and there’s not much to work on, the actors consistently bring their A-game, making their characters engaging and entertaining to watch.
Karl Urban as Billy Butcher in The Boys | Still courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Standout performances include Karl Urban, who effortlessly embodies Butcher’s nihilism and charisma, and Karen Fukuhara, whose portrayal of Kimiko/The Female captures the internal struggle of female rage, vengeance, and longing for a life beyond violence.
Valorie Curry shines as Firecracker, bringing nuance and depth to an antagonistic character torn between her Christian ideals and her unwavering devotion to Homelander. Daveed Diggs also steals every scene as Oh Father, a slick, power-hungry parody of American charismatic megachurch televangelists.
My personal favorite performance comes from Colby Minifie as Ashley Barrett. She delivers some of the show's funniest one-liners and seamlessly shifts between girlboss composure and complete nervous breakdowns. Through all of Ashley’s frantic attempts to survive and maintain her humanity, working alongside some of the worst people imaginable ever, Minifie makes the character hilariously compelling to watch.
Antony Starr as Homelander in The Boys | Still courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Then there is Antony Starr, who deserves at least an Emmy nomination for his chilling portrayal of Homelander. There is no question that his portrayal of the show’s big bad villain would go down as one of the best casting choices in TV history. From his subtle facial tics and soulless stare to his deceptively playful, gleaming grin, Starr’s chameleonic performance as a megalomaniacal, breast milk-obsessed, head-popping perversion of Superman perfectly captures Homelander’s volatile ruthlessness and the constant threat of violence lurking beneath the surface.
Even if the execution falls flat, I think the show should deny Homelander a grand death. With his powers gone, Homelander is reduced to a man-child begging for mercy. Butcher answers with a final “This is for my Becca” before striking him the killing blow. Still, the final fight scene could’ve been staged better. For a long overdue showdown between Butcher and Homelander, the Oval Office setting feels down-sized and uninspired. Some CW superhero shows have delivered more inventive action set pieces, which makes the missed opportunity harder to ignore.
Jaz Sinclair as Marie Moreau in Gen V | Still courtesy of Prime Video
Looking back, The Boys benefited from audiences’ superhero fatigue, standing out from other comic book adaptations by being different, unpredictable, and unafraid to take risks. However, after five seasons, it has clearly overstayed its welcome.
The final season feels shambolic, repetitive, and overextended, failing to integrate with Gen V in the way it was intended to. I personally find Marie Moreau’s role, in particular, to be disappointingly minuscule. After joining Starlight’s resistance, she seemed poised to play a significant part in the showdown against Homelander. Many fans even speculated that she could be the one to defeat him, given the immense potential of her hemokinetic powers showcased in Gen V Season 2. Such an outcome would have been more satisfying than having Kimiko anticlimactically depower Homelander. Instead, none of that materialized. In retrospect, Gen V might have worked better as a standalone series rather than being woven so closely into The Boys’ endgame.
Jack Quaid as Hughie in The Boys | Still courtesy of Prime Video
More dispensable than diabolical, The Boys' final season exemplifies contemporary television’s growing paradox: the longer a series sustains its ambitions, the less certain it becomes of how to stick the landing. It’s messy and unsure, but still enjoyable enough as a mindless distraction while waiting for a new series to watch. After five seasons of buckets of blood, exploding heads, foul-mouthed buffoonery, and Butcher & Co.'s impossible gambits, The Boys' mayhem is finally over, and my love-hate relationship with the show can finally be laid to rest.
The series closes with Billy Joel’s "Piano Man," a fitting send-off for the surviving characters. At the very least, the finale offers some emotional closure, with Ryan finally finding a loving home with MM’s family and Hughie finally getting the happy ending he deserves with Annie after all they have been through.
All episodes of ‘The Boys’ Season 5 are now streaming on Prime Video Philippines.
