After five seasons, one of Homelander’s worst fears becomes reality.
Season 5 of The Boys opens with the psychopathic supe giving a speech to the shareholders of Vought International. During his speech, Annie January (Starlight), sneaks into Vought Tower to take down Black Noir II while a man hacks into the screen.
To Homelander’s horror, the video showing him preparing to abandon the passengers of the hijacked Flight 37 plays. Passengers are begging for their lives, pleading with Homelander and Queen Maeve to at least rescue their children. Instead of helping, he screams things like “you stay the fuck back, or I’ll laser you, goddamm it! I’ll laser every fucking one of you!”
He didn’t realize that someone recorded the whole thing. The footage survived the crash and for years, Maeve and Starlight have used it as leverage to keep Homelander in line. Releasing it now is an act of desperation. Season 4 ended with Homelander taking over America, so Annie had nothing left to lose.
The video is undeniable proof that Homelander’s All-American hero persona is a facade. Destroying that image was supposed to rob the most powerful supe of the love and admiration he so desperately craves.
Unfortunately, Sister Sage, Ashley Barrett and Vought’s PR machine are quick to claim the video was AI to discredit Starlight’s anti-Homelander resistance movement. Several years of buildup for nothing. But it’s also a clever commentary on how AI is being used as an excuse to believe what we want to believe.
AI as a Weapon and a Shield
We tend to think of AI-generated content as a weapon that’s used to create lies. A fake video of a politician saying something they never said. Deepfakes of sexually explicit videos using the likeness of real people who never gave their permission and consent.
But AI is also being used to discredit what’s going on in the real world. When damaging footage surfaces, the response is to claim it was generated by artificial intelligence. You don’t need to prove it. You only need to say it until you reach the right people, the ones who are already looking for a reason to doubt.
For most of modern history, recorded evidence carried enormous weight. A video was a video, audio was audio. These things were difficult to fake, which made them perfect for exposing corruption and wrongdoing. They were essentially for keeping powerful people and institutions in line. As generative AI gets more advanced, it’s getting harder to determine what’s real and what’s not.
The Psychology of Motivated Belief
When people dismiss real evidence as fake, whether it’s a video, a recording, a document, it’s easy to assume that person is uninformed. They don’t know any better and if you explain how easy it is to fake something, they’ll come around.
Sometimes, that person knows the difference and chooses to delude themselves.
Psychologists call it motivated reasoning, a cognitive bias where our emotions and desires distort information until it aligns with our values. The process starts with what you want to believe is true. Then you work backwards to find reasons to believe it while discrediting or ignoring evidence that contradicts your viewpoint. Psychologists refer to this process as having an “inner lawyer” inside your head defending your beliefs instead of being neutral and objective. We all do it to some degree, but this urge is at its most powerful (and dangerous) when our sense of identity is involved.
Some people revolve pieces of who they are around admiration for a particular leader, celebrity, or public figure. When something contradicts the image that person has built, it feels like a threat and the brain reacts accordingly. Instead of evaluating the facts, your mind attacks the evidence. It questions the source. It looks for any means to dismiss what it’s seeing.
In The Boys, Homelander’s supporters don’t even bother to analyze the Flight 37 footage. They see Homelander or someone they trust write it off as a “deepfake” and that’s enough for. The permission to not believe has been granted, so they move on with their lives. The sad part is this type of behavior was around long before AI was even a thing.
Remember back in October 7, 2016 when a leaked recording of an Access Hollywood segment featuring Donald Trump making lewd comments about women surfaced? Specifically him saying things like “just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything“.
A month later, Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Because by then, enough of his supporters had already invested their time, money, identity, into Trump’s agenda. The video didn’t change what they believed. It was something to explain away, an excuse to fight with others until the news cycle moved on to the next big story.
Turning Horror Into a Meme
As a part of Vought’s attempts to protect Homelander’s reputation Teenage Kix, Vought’s teenaged supe team, did a dance challenge to remix of the audio on TikTok. “I’ll laser every f*cking one of you” became a sound bite, a joke. Content.
This is another problem we’re dealing with in the digital age. When something terrible hits the internet, you don’t try to hide it. You make it funny. You transform it into a catchy song with a little dance routine to go with it. You spin it so that people will lose the ability to feel the weight of it. By the time the remix goes viral, the original meaning has lost all of its context and horror.
It’s a small detail in the episode, but it’s also disturbingly accurate.
What Happens Now?
Annie is devastated that not even Flight 37 is enough to take Homelander down. But Billy Butcher sees things differently. The leak didn’t hurt the supe’s reputation but it did something more damaging. It got under Homelander’s skin.
His failure is now a meme and he’s being forced to laugh along with everyone else. His mask cracked, even if the public chose not to see it. For a man who is obsessed with being loved, that’s a tough pill to swallow.
It’s a small win but it shows that the truth isn’t enough to win this war. The boys can’t rely on the public’s response to Homelander to reign him in anymore.
Even if the general public is willing to accept the lie, could the leak plant a seed of doubt into the right people? Homelander’s son Ryan hasn’t been since the season 4 finale, when he learned about Flight 37 along with other atrocities his father has committed. Could the video be enough to give Ryan the strength to stand up to Homelander?
In the end, The Boys is just reflecting back at us a world where airing out someone’s dirty laundry doesn’t have the same power it once did. When anyone can claim that something is AI-generated without proof, our concept of what to believe with our own eyes and ears goes out the window. Holding people in power accountable becomes nearly impossible.
The fight for the truth is less about proving what’s real and more about convincing people to care. The solution isn’t to produce better evidence or make AI literacy classes mandatory for anyone who wants to use the internet.
Because what do you do when people no longer want the truth?
Season 5 of The Boys is available to stream on Prime Video. New episodes premiere every Wednesday at 3:00 a.m. ET/12:00 a.m. PT until the series finale drops on May 20, 2026.
