Sometimes a show runs so long that it forgets what made it special in the first place. The Boys just spent five seasons building toward an ending that felt less like a climax and more like a wet firecracker.
The fifth and final season of Amazon's superhero satire wrapped this week, and the internet is not happy. Reddit threads are filled with disappointed fans comparing it to Game of Thrones Season 8—which, in case you've forgotten, is not a compliment. One viral post called it "actually one of the worst endings I've watched in years," and honestly? They might be onto something.
Here's what went wrong: The Boys spent four seasons building Homelander into one of television's greatest villains—a narcissistic, unstable Superman analogue with mommy issues and fascist tendencies. Antony Starr's performance was consistently chilling, even when the writing around him got shaky. The show's entire premise hinged on the idea that this unkillable, all-powerful psychopath was a threat that couldn't be stopped through conventional means.
And then the finale just... solved it. With a tentacle thing. From Butcher's stomach.
According to Gizmodo's review, the final season "felt like watching a comedian bomb their set." The show that once skewered superhero tropes with surgical precision devolved into the very thing it mocked—repetitive gross-out gags, convenient plot contrivances, and characters making inexplicably stupid decisions to service the narrative.
The most egregious example? Homelander has superspeed. We've seen him use it. But in the finale, he just stands there while Butcher's parasite tentacles grab him. Because the script needed him to lose, so he forgot how his own powers work.
Fans also complained about wasted potential. Marie Moreau from the spin-off Gen V was positioned as a game-changing addition, but the show barely used her. Meanwhile, Jensen Ackles' Soldier Boy hijacked entire episodes as a backdoor pilot for yet another spin-off, because apparently learned nothing from the 's franchise fatigue.
