Amazon’s The Boys returns for its fifth and final season April 8, 2026. If the internet is any indication, there’s two questions fans want answered: will Homelander die and how will it happen?
In the comics the show is loosely based on, Homelander’s own clone, Black Noir, rips him in half during a brawl at the White House. There’s no grand speech or a crowd of mourners. Just a monster getting ripped apart by a bigger menace. But the show has always diverged from the comics, and the final season won’t be any different.
So what will The Boys do? Does Homelander go out in an overly exaggerated spectacle? Or will his death be so anticlimactic, it’s not even worth mentioning? Personally, I really hope it’s the latter.
The Case for Going Out in a Blaze
I get it. After four seasons of watching Homelander grow more dangerous and deranged, people want to see the payoff. Antony Starr has turned this character into one of the most threatening villains on television. That achievement feels like it earns a confrontation worthy of the fear he’s generated.
Think about all the atrocious things he’s done. He raped Becca Butcher at a company party, setting the entire series in motion and setting Becca’s husband Butcher on the path to vengeance. He destroyed a plane’s controls mid-rescue and then let hundreds of innocent passengers plunge into the ocean. He then used their deaths to advance his goal to get Supes in the military.
He murdered Madelyn Stillwell, a woman he treated as a surrogate mother, by lasering her eyes out with his heat vision. He spread Compound V across the globe to manufacture Supe terrorists, engineering a crisis only he could resolve for publicity. He encouraged a suicidal teenager to jump to her death, killed a protester in the middle of a rally and basked in the crowd’s cheers. He ordered the assassination of the President-elect to install a figurehead that’s loyal to him.
And this is just a small sampling of what Homelander has done over the course of the show. He’s gotten away with a lot and it would be nice to see him go down in The Boys’ typical over-the-top fashion.
But Here’s Why That Would Be a Mistake
One thing that separates Homelander from other villains on the show is the thing he always wanted: to be loved.
It’s a desperate, pathological need Vought engineered in him to keep him submissive to them. Every terrible thing he’s done, his cruelty, his narcissism, all trace back to spending his childhood in a lab. An environment where he was treated as a weapon instead of a child. Homelander has been trying to fill that void for years, but nothing comes close to being enough for him.
Having him go out in a blaze of glory would be the worst possible ending for him. Giving him a spectacular death would give him what he’s always craved. It would cement his legacy as someone who mattered in the world. He’d become a martyr, a myth. Killing him in some grandiose way would almost be a gift.
An anticlimactic death targets the wound in his blackened heart instead of the body. Something humiliating and small. Being taken down by a nobody like The Deep. Dying in a way that gets mocked by his supporters. Vought erasing every trace of him to protect their brand before anyone even knows he’s gone. The world moving on within a week, his fans finding a new Supe to adore, history forgetting to add him to their books.
That would be devastating because it would confirm a hard truth Homelander has been running from: he was always replaceable.
It would be lovely if his son Ryan would be the one to kill him. Season 4 had Homelander groom Ryan to be his heir, an extension of himself. If Ryan chooses to reject that, if Homelander dies knowing his own child refuses to continue what he’s built, it would be almost perfect. The manchild who never knew love was betrayed by a son who chooses not to love him back. The monument crumbles. The name dies with him.
“It Doesn’t Matter How He Dies, As Long It Happens”
A lot of fans, exhausted from watching this man escape consequences for four seasons, simply want Homelander gone. They don’t care how it happens, what happens is that he doesn’t make it out of season 5 alive.
But The Boys has never been content to give audiences what they want in the way they expect it. It is, at its heart, a deconstruction of popular superhero tropes and modern culture. If there’s a way to subvert the idea of a grand finale, the writers are going to head in that direction. Especially now that they’ve made Homelander a satire of President Trump and far-right conservatism.
Showrunner Eric Kripke has been tight-lipped on what to expect for the final season, but he’s made it clear the ending has been in the works for a long time.
Homelander’s story should end in the most insignificant way imaginable. One where everyone in-universe moves on within a day. That’s the ending he deserves.
