The final season of a TV series is both a promise and an obligation. Not just to wrap things up, but to make the audience feel like every moment leading to the grand finale matters.
Game of Thrones spent eight seasons weaving an intricate story of power, politics and betrayal, only to squander it in six rushed episodes.
The series finale of Lost, appropriately called The End, failed to provide any meaningful answers for the mysteries surrounding the island.
How I Met Your Mother filmed its ending years in advance, but refused to change it after the show evolved into something different. These aren’t small mistakes, it’s writers failing to give a proper ending for the stories they’re telling.
Now, four episodes into its fifth and final season, The Boys is showing signs of suffering from the same problem.
Four Episodes, Very Little Ground Covered
The final season of The Boys has one mission: stop Homelander at all costs. Everything else is background noise. And yet, the first four episodes haven’t done much to move our anti-heroes any closer to their goal.
The team developed a virus capable of killing Homelander. That’s a huge deal that evens the playing field in their war against supe conglomerate Vought. Then the virus was destroyed after the scientist helping them realized the boys lied to him about Butcher murdering his lover Victoria Neuman. Now Frenchie has to rebuild it from scratch and that the process will take weeks. Which means the story is basically back at square one.
The hunt for V-One, the original strain of Compound V that could grant the test subject immortality, was treated as a major plot thread in the trailer. Yet that was resolved in episode 4 Though The Heavens Fall, where we learn that the last of V-One was taken by a supe called Bombsight years ago. For something that was presented as being significant, it was sidelined so quickly it barely left a mark.
In the same episode, Butcher, the man who devoted his existence to killing Homelander, finds him in a supe-proof cell. Homelander is vulnerable due to exposure to enhanced uranium. And what does Butcher do? He delivers a monologue about how Homelander will never truly be happy or satisfied.
Karl Urban is a great actor, and he nails this scene. But it’s completely out of character for Butcher.
Even the sub-plot involving Black Noir II has an unsatisfying conclusion. He wasn’t replaced with a different supe or pressured into silence by Vought or Homelander. He was just taking his method acting way too seriously.
This is not me hating the show. At its best,The Boys is a savage black comedy that isn’t afraid to comment on the negative effects politics, corrupt corporations and influencer culture have on society. The idea of someone gaining superpowers and becoming a hero is actually terrifying because there’s nothing to hold these heroes accountable for the destruction they cause.
You’d expect a show as absurd as The Boys would go all out for its final season. Instead, most scenes feel like padding to justify greenlighting an eight episode season.
Final Seasons Play by Different Rules
If it’s lucky enough, a TV series has the time to tell its story. Plot threads can be abandoned, revisited and expanded on. A final season doesn’t have that kind of luxury. Every scene, storyline and character arc needs to have a pay off or move us closer toward the ending. There’s no room for filler, no “we’ll get to that later,” because later is almost here.
Reviewers have noted that episode five is where The Boys truly finds its footing. If that is true, then half the season was a waste.
Story Structure is Part of The Problem
To be fair to the writers, The Boys has centered around a specific problem: Homelander is essentially unstoppable. Every season, the heroes try and fail to reign him in over and over again. That creates a trap, especially in a season where the audience is waiting for the moment the show finally commits to an ending.
The Boys isn’t alone in this struggle. Stranger Things moved so far from its intimate, character-driven charm it became an over-the-top spectacle. Dexter was kept on the air years past its ending point. Killing Eve ran out of ideas long before it ran out of episodes.
The shows that had really good final seasons like Breaking Bad, Succession, The Americans, The Wire usually share one quality: inevitability. When those shows end, you feel like they couldn’t have ended any other way. The story knew where it was going, and that the season as a whole had purpose.
It’s ironic that a show that satirizes powerful institutions for choosing profit over integrity ends up doing the same thing. They’re giving viewers something that keeps them coming back instead and actually serves the story. Amazon is stretching one of its biggest series into eight episodes. To be honest, season 5 of The Boys could have wrapped up being told in a two hour special
There’s still for The Boys to turn things around. The Boys has the characters, performances, and mythology to pull off a satisfying ending. Antony Starr’s Homelander is still one of the great television villains of this era, and there’s real institutions waiting for how this story ends.
But the clock is ticking. The first half of the final season is a slow burn that doesn’t build toward anything meaningful. If episode five really is the turning point, then what comes next needs to be extraordinary.
