When The Boys premiered on Prime Video back in 2019, the crass superhero show felt like a comedian with its finger on the pulse, jabbing at everything that’s become an annoying trope in superhero media and giving it the middle finger as it did so. And now that The Boys is over, it’s hard not to feel like the joke turned on itself as its final season squeaked by, becoming what it once parodied.
The final season of The Boys had a lot riding on it. That pressure was felt not only by fans wondering how it would tie up all its loose ends after feeling like it’d been spinning its wheels for two of its five seasons and squandering its high-key better spin-off before axing it mid-finale, but also by showrunner Eric Kripke, who admitted to living “in absolute terror of becoming the thing we’ve been satirizing for five years.” For whatever reason, season-five finales are what make or break shows nowadays. The Boys’ season-five premiere trailer seemed ready to rise to that occasion as it set up a destructive all-out war, with key visuals showing Homelander (Antony Starr) lording over Earth and Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) walking over the rubble of Vought Tower. Holy shit, this season is going to be an all-out war. Scorched earth, all that jazz.
After four seasons, the fate of humanity was riding on a group of assholes who routinely wallow in their own misery, pitted against an egomaniacal manbaby draped in the American flag—both sides with genocide on their minds. Granted, the show was never going to be Avengers: Endgame bedlam or Roman-candle fireworks like Justice League. But The Boys promised to build to something diabolical and wound up feeling like a spent firecracker by the grand finale.
It was around the third episode of The Boys season five that a creeping feeling settled in: the sense of gravitas and momentum leading up to its finale never felt urgent. If anything, it felt lopsided, as if it wasn’t aware that it only had a handful of episodes to get to that endpoint and become something truly epic. In fact, watching the fifth and final season of The Boys felt tantamount to witnessing a comedian you once liked bomb their set… for eight hours.
Throughout its eight-episode season five run, the show felt like it was getting long in the tooth with the elaborate setup for its jokes or letting it plop onto the floor and sit there. Granted, this season, more than ever, had its punchlines upended by the real-world politics it was parodying outpacing the show, sometimes weeks ahead of its delivery. Still, the show’s jokes, the half-decent ones anyway, never felt phoned in and lazy like a Saturday Night Live bit that only had to repeat, verbatim, whatever drivel talking heads, politicians, and the like spouted on TV with the express goal of becoming the main characters of Twitter for a day. But it never quite felt prophetic like The Simpsons, either. It felt like a comic desperately checking the time on their tight eight minutes, throwing out every old joke that killed in past sets to a silent crowd that could practically mouth along with them as they patiently waited for new material or for the comic to mercifully move on to the next bit.
As I wrote in my season two review of Gen V—an all-around brilliant show whose cancellation I’m now revving the engine of my proverbial motorcycle extra hard to at its casket, having witnessed its potential sent to the Fargo wood chipper this season—most of the jokes in The Boys inevitably end in a flurry of swears like a 12-year-old who discovered cursing as conversational punctuation marks or someone remarking about someone else being a sex pest. You can spot it winding up for its jokes from a mile away, and rather than excitedly awaiting whatever jumble of wordsmithing The Boys would pull off this time, it was something to patiently wade through, like your grandparents showing you yet another AI video on Facebook they got duped into believing was real. It felt like the show exposing its “in case of emergency” writer’s crutch, attempting to give its final season the same gleam as its earlier seasons, with action scenes that ricocheted from dudes shoving each other (really hard) to the most overindulgent, gory viscera you’ve ever seen on TV. And with an entire ensemble with no straight man in sight to bounce jokes off of, that became infinitely more grating to sit through.
Of all the things The Boys annoyed me with, Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy was the well the show dipped into too often for a laugh, hijacking the show as a backdoor pilot for a spin-off rather than telling the story to which it should have been the final chapter. Inversely, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) was the setup that The Boys forgot the punchline to, and eighty-sixed its way past to another, continuing to spin its wheels, regressing its characters along the way with conversations we’ve already seen countless times before—this time, with Supernatural cameos that weren’t worth the juice they squeezed as meta-reference fodder. Why I had to watch a scene of two cat/dog supervillains sniff each other’s asses for nearly double the screentime as the Homelander-killing superhero that the series established as a big deal in its spin-off only for her to be told to sit on the bench will forever confound me. The show had a trump card that would flip the table and shoot the other player, but it refused to play it and instead delivered something more middle-of-the-road as its final battle.
That isn’t to say there weren’t any highlights. Antony Starr as Homelander continued to be the most consistently entertaining part of a show full of eccentric Deadpool-like characters that never got grating. Valorie Curry as Firecracker gave a surprisingly moving performance in arguably the show’s standout episode. Even the throughline of Butcher and Hughie (Jack Quaid), although stretched a bit thin by its finale, managed to be moving. And sure enough, some of the meta humor parodying our own unreality garnered a chortle here and there, but The Boys never felt focused or timely enough to have them land as a full belly laugh. Just gross-out humor, sight gags, and potty-mouthed quips.
Calling The Boys season five a series finale feels like a misnomer. If anything, the show feels like it parodied too close to the sun and became the thing it once wisecracked about, reverse-engineering a cinematic universe of its own, kitted out with spin-offs and franchise aspirations after the fact that are hard to feel excited about, given how badly it screwed the pooch with its own finale.
The final season of The Boys is streaming on Prime Video.
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