‘The Boys’ Final Season: When Reality Gets Crazier Than Fiction

Amazon Prime Video's "The Boys" Series Finale Event — Source: Unique Nicole / Getty

DEK: The Boys

[Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Boys season five]

After six years and a cornucopia of blood, guts, and various other bodily fluids, The Boys came to a close on Wednesday night. While season five’s plotting was a bit rushed and scattershot, I still think it was one of the most interesting seasons of the show, both thematically and in the audience’s response to it. For some, The Boys season five was underwhelming, but I honestly don’t think the problem is the writing. In the two years between seasons four and five, reality has simply outpaced The Boys in terms of how insane things have gotten.

While the first two seasons were a gleeful satire of capitalism and the global obsession with superheroes, the final three seasons firmly aimed at the current state of America’s politics and culture, with Homelander very clearly becoming a stand-in for Trump. This inevitably led to a portion of the audience having a “is this play about us?” moment. Even with that shift, The Boys constantly managed to shock with how far it went in both the violence and plot developments.

I’ve seen some online discourse about how this season was a bit of a Game of Thrones-tier letdown, and I was wondering if we were watching the same show. Nothing about the prior four seasons of The Boys led me to believe that season five was going to be an Endgame-level event with world-shattering fights every episode. The Boys was never that show and never gave me the impression it was building to that.

Maybe it’s because I have the benefit of binging seasons three through five consecutively, so I didn’t really fall into a hype cycle. In my viewing experience, there wasn’t a noticeable downturn in the writing between seasons. The bad guys got a decisive win at the end of season four, and I think season five did a solid job showing what a country shaped to Homelander’s insane vision looks like. The problem is, we are currently living through a reality that mirrors The Boys a little too closely.

Only a few years ago, the idea of branded internment camps seemed like a far-off joke, but now we live in a country where Alligator Alcatraz exists. It’s hard to be shocked by a secret police force indiscriminately rounding people up off the streets when a masked, secret police force has been indiscriminately rounding people up off the streets in several American cities. A national leader having delusions of godhood and believing he’s above the church would be absurd if we didn’t live in a world where the president had beef with the pope and posted AI renderings of himself as Jesus.

The Boys went for it in season five; it’s just that reality went for it even harder. If The Boys season five proved anything, it’s that we live in an era so absurd that it’s actually beyond satire. And make no mistake: The Boys was always a satire first, superhero show second.

The most unrealistic parts of The Boys season five are when power is actually held to account. Homelander being forcibly stripped of his power and revealed to be a sniveling, pathetic little man-child before getting his long-deserved comeuppance was cathartic because we know that’ll never happen in the real world. It’s kind of sad that the most fictional part of a show where corporately designed superheroes exist is Congress unanimously acting to remove a scandal-prone president from office.

It’s when The Boys breaks free of its cynicism and makes a full-throated defense of maintaining hope in seemingly hopeless times that it actually feels transgressive. That was the thread I enjoyed the most this season, and I was satisfied that was the note the series ended on. While the shock might have been dulled, the season was ultimately saved by the messy, beating heart at its core.

For better or worse, The Boys spoke to our current moment in a way no other superhero show has dared to. Could it be heavy-handed at times? Sure, but we don’t exactly live in subtle times. Have I seen better series finales? Of course. But I also live in a world where Game of Thrones season eight and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker exist. There have been far, far worse endings than The Boys season five.

While The Boys’ trademark insanity couldn’t keep up with reality, season five delivered a satisfying conclusion to all the characters’ journeys, and ultimately left me feeling a mixture of hope and melancholy. At a time when most superhero movies and shows make me feel absolutely nothing at all and are devoid of anything resembling a point of view, I’ll take it.