The Boys stuck the landing — the problem was everything that led up to it

On May 20, 2026, Prime Video dropped the series finale of The Boys, its long-running, gleefully violent superhero series. The fifth and final season has been shattering Prime Video viewership records, so plenty of people were tuning in.

At the same time, there was a growing online backlash against the season as it went along, with fan review scores on sites like IMDb being noticeably lower than in past years. Then the finale, “Blood and Bone,” finally dropped. Would it turn things around and end the show on a high note, or would it vindicate the haters and secure The Boys’ place among other beloved shows with endings everyone loathed?

The answer is yes.

The Boys Season 5 was a letdown

No one episode can salvage it

The Season 5 premiere of The Boys, “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite,” actually started things off on the right foot. Lead characters like Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) are being held in a “Freedom Camp,” which is where people who object to the rule of sociopathic superhero Homelander (Antony Starr) get imprisoned. Butcher (Karl Urban) and Starlight (Erin Moriarty) team up to free them, which gives the episode a decent spine.

But what really pushes the episode over the top was the involvement of A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), a supeer-fast superhero who used to work with Homelander but who left after becoming disgusted with his narcissism and instability. A-Train helps break the Boys out of the Freedom Camp, is chased down by Homelander, tells off the superpowered bully without any fear, and is murdered.

It was sad to see A-Train go, but it was also a great end to his arc; he started a villain and died a hero. I expected Season 5 to be full of those kinds of strong character moments…but then they just didn’t come.

Instead, the characters go on a series of fetch quests. We learn that V-One, a chemical compound used to create the first superheroes, can be used to make current Supes immortal, so everyone is running around looking for that for a while. Homelander thaws out his father, the Captain American-esque Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and spends a lot of time trying to form a working relationship with him. Soldier Boy was a supporting character in Season 3, and this final season spends a suspiciously large amount of time familiarizing us with his history and introducing us to characters from his past. Most likely this was done to prep audiences for the upcoming spin-off show Vought Rising, where Soldier Boy will be a lead character. It’s just a shame that his development had to come at the expense of characters we’d been following for years.

In truth, very little of consequence seemed to happen between the season premiere and the season finale. But once we reached the end…

The Boys Season finale did almost everything right…

…given what it had to work with

The Boys made up for lost time in the finale, which revolves around Homelander speaking to the American people from the Oval Office and telling them that he was now their God. The Boys broke into the White House to try and stop him, and we finally got some of those character moments I’d been wanting all season.

Take Ashley Barrett, a twitchy corporate ladder climber who had risen high in the world thanks to her devotion to Homelander, of whom she is absolutely terrified. I suspect that Ashley wasn’t originally meant to be as big of a character as she was, but that the writers kept giving her more screentime because actor Colby Minifie is very funny, and I’m not complaining. Anyway, Ashley finally had enough of Homelander and helped the Boys in a key moment…and afterwards is tossed out of her job as president of the United States by a rare unanimous vote of Congress, which feels like an appropriately absurd ending for her.

The Aquaman-esque superhero the Deep (Chace Crawford), another Homelander supporter, had the funniest moment of the finale when Starlight tells him to take responsibility for some of his horrible choices, he screams “NOOOO” in a baby-like wail of defiance, and then is torn apart by the sea creatures he loved so much. And then there’s Homelander himself, who is stripped of his powers and exposed as the mewling coward he always was. The image of him jumping up and down in his muscle-padded suit as he ineffectively tries to fly was another laugh-out-loud moment.

The final dramatic moment is between Hughie and Butcher, who have always had a surrogate little brother-big brother dynamic going. It was moving, mostly because the actors did a great job with it, and it was nice to see the surviving characters get some happy endings. Not a bad episode…in isolation.

In The Boys, the world has 20 people in it

Where was the context?

One of the big things missing in the final season of The Boys was a sense of how Homelander’s tyranny was affecting the wider world. The season premiere spent some time in one of his Freedom Camp, but that plot was dropped quickly. We get reaction shots from his fans from time to time, but much of the final season boiled down to familiar characters talking with each other in rooms. The scope shrank at a time when it should be expanding, and the stakes shrank with them. Moments that should have hit hard, like the death of Frenchie (Tomer Capone) in the penultimate episode, felt a bit weightless. After a season with so much dithering, it felt like too little, too late.

This was on display in the finale, too; bizarrely, the only people who seem to work in the White House in this world are four named characters and a couple of cameramen. It was funny, and not in a good way, how little resistance the Boys encountered after they broke in. Where are the people? Why did the fifth and final season of one of Prime Video’s flagship shows feel so small and insular?

Polite claps all around

Despite my gripes, I did enjoy the series finale. The show entertained me, and I hope the teeming millions who watched enjoyed it too. I think The Boys definitely suffered towards the end thanks to Amazon’s insistence that it turn into a franchise with multiple spin-offs, but it still mostly works as-is. Hopefully history will be kind to it. And if not, there’s plenty of other things to watch on Prime Video.