The Boys Season 5 Review: Frustrating

The Boys Season 5 has glimmers of a great final season, but its tired tricks and uneven sense of finality end the superhero show on a frustrating note.

Well, Season 5 has wrapped up. And while it has its moments, it falls into all of the same trappings as its predecessor and is nowhere near spectacular.

The world of The Boys is at its most dire. Homelander (Antony Starr, of Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant) has seized control of the United States government. All those who oppose him, as well as “Starlighters” who stand with ousted hero Annie January (Erin Moriarty, of Jessica Jones), have been rounded up into camps. This includes Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid, of Companion), M.M. (Laz Alonso, of Wrath of Man), and Frenchie (Tomer Capone, of Slingshot), who were hauled away in the Season 4 finale. But if you’ve seen… well, a lot of season premieres, you may have guessed that these three are busted out by the end of the first episode. That way, we can return to the status quo we’ve been running with from the start.

The only difference is that this time, the team’s ultimate goal is to create a virus that will annihilate all superheroes on Earth. But to ensure the survival of their own superpowered friends like Annie and the newly non-mute Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara, of The Boy and the Heron), they also search for V1, the original form of Compound V that will give anyone who takes it complete immortality. Unfortunately, Homelander is looking for the compound too in his final quest for eternal power.

Between this game-over possibility and the question of wiping out millions of lives, there are bits and pieces of finality in The Boys Season 5. A few characters we’ve known as far back as the start are killed. Annie and Kimiko need to grapple with whether their survival is worth the extra effort to get V1, which opens more doors for failure. This dilemma, naturally, also has them questioning how much they value their own lives, whether they deserve to live after everything they’ve done, and even if they want to live with or without the threat of the virus.

The inevitable endgame is here. There’s nowhere left to go, and The Boys Season 5 is at its best when it forces its characters to actually confront that and choose what the greater good demands. Episode 6 is a shining example with a tender, beautifully written conversation between Homelander and someone from his past, which comes the closest the show ever has to showing any trace of good, approachable humanity in him. The episode is also home to a subplot about people separated by time, age, and conflicting beliefs on immortality, tying in nicely to the broader issue going on.

But this is all an exception to the rule of the season, because almost everything else in Season 5 has been done in any other season of the show. Our team fights the powers that be, they hunt down a solution, things go wrong, something extremely gory happens, Homelander spirals, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban, of Mortal Kombat II) remains the unlikeable terror he’s always been, and so on and so forth. Outside of the finale (Episode 8) there were very few points in which I felt like I was watching the show’s final season. Not because I need a flurry of massive battles and scorched-earth devastation, but because the show’s attitude is unchanged no matter what happens.

With America now in Homelander’s control, it should be harder than ever for our “heroes” to live safely day-to-day. But they keep throwing themselves into danger and, of course, keep surviving impossible odds by sheer luck instead of actual thoughtful planning. Hughie, M.M., and Frenchie were in a prison camp for a year between seasons, but we barely see how it affected them beyond a few lines. It might as well have just been a month. The ending of Episode 6 should have been the scariest moment in the show’s history, but it’s followed up on like it’s just another setback, resulting in a solution that comes about far too abruptly given how critical it is to the finale.

A lot of subplots and side characters keep coming and going for long stretches that made me forget they existed. The biggest example is Ryan (Cameron Crovetti, of Boy Kills World), Homelander’s son, who’s focused on in Episode 3 and then disappears until Episode 8. It’s not like the show didn’t have time to build everything up for its finale; it just chose to keep wasting that time on more oddball diversions and gross-out shock value that have more than worn out their welcome by now. How does several minutes of Seth Rogen, Kumail Nanjiani, and Will Forte at a supes’ party in Episode 5 sound? Or a butt-sniffing session between two animalistic supervillains in the show’s penultimate episode?

With all this in mind, it’s amazing to me that Episode 8 turned out pretty good. Despite the weak foundation of the previous seven episodes, the finale ties up the most essential threads in about the most satisfying way you could expect from a show this bleak, to a point where I actually applauded by myself in my living room. Had its events been given more buildup or even just spread throughout one or two more episodes, we may have had a 10/10 finale on our hands. It’s only good in its current state, but I can honestly see it winning people over who were on the fence about the rest of the season.

When it comes to the “good guys,” Season 5’s biggest bright spot is Kimiko. She’s always been a likeable character, but giving her a voice opens up new avenues for her to show personality and express herself through Fukuhara’s performance. Her outlook and actions in response to the world-ending stakes always kept me guessing, and I even finally bought her romantic relationship with Frenchie. I was indifferent to them as a couple before, but I’ve warmed up to it quite a bit now. Annie’s sense of self-worth as the face of the country’s biggest resistance movement, which has only spread the suffering further, leads to some touching moments for her as well, especially in Episode 4.

By contrast, Butcher lost me completely. Karl Urban’s performance has devolved into an impression of his previously complex persona with endless mugging and head tilts. I can’t tell if this was always his performance or if I’ve just gotten sick of this character since he has nothing left to offer. That is, until his final big sequence in Episode 8 opposite Jack Quaid, one of the best and most chilling moments in the entire series. Even Sister Sage, (Susan Heyward, of Orange Is the New Black), the smartest person on Earth who teased a master plan, is a letdown when you realize how much she didn’t have thought out like I’d assumed. The reasons why she turned out this way are a little interesting, but not enough to offset the disappointment.

I was worried that Homelander’s continuing power-hungry storyline would get old and repetitive like Butcher’s, but Season 5 sees him scarier than he’s ever been. He doesn’t want to make everyone love him or have them conform to his rule. He wants them to already want it deep in their hearts. He’s always been forcing people to sacrifice their desires to appease him, but his ultimate final mission is so oppressive that those around him are losing their core identities and the most fundamental parts of who they are just to stay alive. And it’s still not enough. That is the perfect way for his series-long journey to naturally climax… and I think the notion makes him naturally climax in a different way.

Firecracker (Valorie Curry) goes from a carbon copy of alt-right religious nuts to a fascinating look at what happens when you’re forced to pick between two sacred ideologies. It’s the first time we see that her hardcore pandering was never just a front, which makes it eye-opening to see her conflict of interest that reaches its zenith in Episode 5. The Deep is easily the best he’s been since Season 1… or rather, he’s at his worst, which makes it the best for us to watch. He’s been trying to suckle at the teat of Homelander all this time, but now he’s finally facing the consequences and laying bare just how empty he is for it.

Speaking of alt-right ideologies, though, The Boys already lost its edge when it comes the political and social satire. Like last season, the commentary is too obvious and one-to-one without anything clever to say. Have you caught on yet that the evil religious cults in the show are meant to represent evil religious cults in our world? Or that they’re parodying the AMC Nicole Kidman ad by having a superhero reenact it word-for-word and nothing else? Newcoming supe Oh Father is little more than an echo chamber for Homelander’s fascist agenda, but at least Daveed Diggs (of In the Blink of an Eye) is effortlessly entertaining in the role.

I’m torn on The Boys Season 5. Though it has the fewest high points out of any season, the few it does have are major standouts. It never commits the cardinal sin of being boring, and there’s no catastrophically mind-boggling decision that nukes the whole thing like with some other final seasons. But it leans way too hard into what’s already stopped working, almost like it’s resigning itself to such an underwhelming fate. The final episode sends the show out on a surprisingly good note, but considering how little everything else even resembles a dramatic endgame, that’s not quite enough for me to say the season works as a whole.

As for the show in its entirety, I still say it’s worth watching for three great seasons, and for the scattered chunks of payoff that shine through the remaining two seasons. This mediocre homestretch isn’t enough to kill the whole series’ value outright. I just wish Season 5 could have used the ingredients on the table to their highest potential. All it needed to do was get out of its own way.

The Boys Season 5 is now available to stream globally on Prime Video.