Amazon’s TV adaptation of The Boys functions on one important rule: all superhumans get their powers from the drug Compound V. Nearly every Supe we’ve encountered over the show’s five seasons from Starlight to A-Train were exposed to Compound V in early childhood since children have a lower risk of experiencing complications from the illicit drug.
Then the show introduced Ryan Butcher, the first natural-born Supe in The Boys universe. Born as the result of Homelander raping Butcher’s wife Becca, he inherited all of his father’s abilities: laser beams shooting from his eyes, super strength, flight, superhuman durability. And he got it all without being injected with Compound V. He’s treated as some kind of scientific miracle.
So when the series finale implies that Ryan was depowered, it confused fans and revealed a major problem with how The Boys handles its own mythology.
How did Ryan lose his powers in The Boys series finale?
In the show’s fifth and final season, Soldier Boy gives Homelander the last of a more powerful iteration of Compound V called V-One. This makes the narcissistic psychopath even more overpowered than he already was. Now immortal, Homelander deludes himself into believing he’s ascended to godhood and uses fear to force America to accept him as the one true God. He even deploys a group of bald, psychic Supes to read the minds of everyone with orders to kill anyone they sense is a “non-believer”.
Since the Boys can no longer rely on the Supe-killing virus to stop Homelander, they turn to plan B. Teaming up with Sister Sage after she defects from Homelander and Vought, Frenchie works with her to recreate Soldier Boy’s depowering chest blast. His power is the radioactive energy he gained after decades of experimentation from the Soviet Union.
The show doesn’t go into much detail on how the blast can depower Supes, but it’s believed that the radiation and enriched uranium the Russians used burns the Compound V out of a Supe’s bloodstream. It worked on Queen Maeve and dozens of Supes at Herogasm so maybe it could work on Homelander.
Frenchie and Sister Sage use Kimiko as their test subject since her powerful regenerative abilities could boost her chances of surviving. They expose her to enriched uranium inside a radiation chamber over multiple brutal sessions. When Frenchie is killed by Homelander before he can learn if the experiments work, the final episode “Blood and Bone” shows that it did.
During the brawl at the White House showdown, Ryan helps subdue Homelander long enough for Kimiko to fire off the radioactive blast. The blast catches Homelander, Butcher, and Ryan. Homelander loses his powers immediately and is murdered by Butcher, who is stripped of his Compound V-powered tumor tendrils.
Butcher assumes Ryan is powerless too, telling the boy they’re both “ordinary” now. But it’s left ambiguous if that’s really the case for Ryan because he never uses any of his powers again for the rest of the episode.
One thing that viewers probably failed to notice is that after Ryan is hit with Kimiko’s chest blast, he’s not bleeding from his head at all. Homelander and Sister Sage (who was depowered by Kimiko earlier in the episode) both had a streak of blood running down the top of their head, while Butcher was bleeding from his cheek. However, Ryan is the lone exception so maybe the blast had no effect on him?
Ryan’s story ends with Mother’s Milk adopting him after Butcher dies, but the series ends without confirming if Ryan is a regular human now.
Why would Kimiko’s blast affect Ryan at all?
The biggest problem with all of this is that Ryan is supposed to be a natural-born Supe. His powers are not the result of a Vought experiment. That’s what made him so unique but also very dangerous.
The show has implied throughout its run that Ryan could be more powerful than Homelander and even his grandfather Soldier Boy. He’s the second Supe after Queen Maeve to hurt Homelander to the point of making him bleed. He made Soldier Boy bleed and left Stormfront a severely burned, amputated mess with his heat vision alone. Keep in mind that both Stormfront and Soldier Boy were given V-One and were shown to be practically invincible, particularly the latter.
If the blast works by destroying Compound V, and Ryan never had the drug injected in his system, then there’s nothing for the blast to burn away. Radiation designed specifically to neutralize V-enhanced biology should not, by the show’s own rules, have any effect on a Supe whose powers are genetic in nature.
So many questions about Ryan remain unanswered
What makes this really frustrating is that The Boys never addressed why Ryan has powers to begin with.
Did the experiments Vought subjected Homelander to alter his genetics, which he then passed onto Ryan? Was Becca exposed to Compound V during her pregnancy without her realizing it? Are Ryan’s abilities the result of a mutation stemming from his father’s DNA? And if that’s the case, does that mean that any child with at least one Supe parent will inherit said parent’s superpowers during their childhood?
Ryan’s existence also suggests that maybe Homelander really was different from the average Supe. Obviously not to the point of being a god of course, but something outside the bounds of what we already know about superhumans in this world.
Answering these questions has major implications for The Boys universe, but they also draw a line of what Soldier Boy’s and Kimiko’s radioactive blasts can actually do. Kimiko depowering Ryan would have a bigger impact if we knew more about how he got his abilities in the first place. It should feel like an unspoken rule has been broken, but instead it just feels like another case of bad writing.
What did Ryan’s actor say about his character’s fate?
At the red carpet premiere for the final episode of The Boys, Ryan’s actor Cameron Crovetti was asked about his character’s future by ScreenRant. This is what he had to say:
“I would like to see him grow into his powers, grow into who he is… especially him being the first natural-born superhero, I’m really curious to see how that would develop over the years, and how powerful or how strong he would become.”
His response can mean three things. One, Crovetti was trying to give a spoiler–free answer since “Blood and Bone” wasn’t available for the public to stream yet. Two, it’s his way to subtly confirm that Ryan still has his powers. Three, Ryan really was depowered and Crovetti was dropping hints that he’d like showrunner Eric Kripke to undo it in the near future.
Is this a major plot hole or a deliberate cliffhanger?
The Boys franchise is just getting started. One spin-off prequel series titled Vought Rising is supposed to premiere on Prime Video sometime in 2027. The Boys Mexico is still in development. And there’s probably other projects that are in the works.
If Kripke wanted to bring Ryan back, the teenager could discover that his powers are still intact and grapple with what his place could be in a post-Homelander world. Or he could decide to get them back by injecting himself with Compound V (which was used to restore Kimiko’s healing abilities after she lost them due to Soldier Boy’s chest blast in Season 3). With Stan Edgar back in charge of Vought International and Soldier Boy still out there, Ryan will need his powers to protect his adoptive family.
For now, whether Ryan is still a Supe or a normal human now is unknown. Which is annoying because Crovetti was right. There’s so much uncharted territory for Ryan to explore. It would have been nice to see how his powers evolved over the years, to see how powerful he would’ve become or if his abilities started to differ from Homelander’s. But until Amazon decides to order another spin-off, all that potential is hidden behind a question mark.
The Boys Season 5 is available to stream on Prime Video.
