‘The Boys’ Season 5: Episodes 6 and 7 Recaps and Review: What Are We Even Doing Here?
the series enters its penultimate chapters with so little urgency and continues to get bogged down with its worst habits.
As the series nears its end, with so few episodes remaining fans and critics alike, this one included, are growing tired of The Boys’ complete aversion to actually tackling its long gestated ‘endgame’ plot headfirst. As mentioned in previous episodic reviews for this season, the very formulaic episode structure with what feel like ‘pump-fake’ equivalents to substantial narrative developments have grown beyond stale, and the season’s sixth and seventh episodes, the latter of which is the series’ penultimate episode, feel like the epitome of the ‘treading water’ criticisms lobbied against the show. This review will neither be the first or last to make this statement, but it is beyond frustrating to see how little the season has accomplished in roughly 7 hours of time, continually prioritizing tired, formulaic plots with the allure that something is being built to, with nothing to show for it.
The sixth episode sees an ending to one of the season’s more fruitful subplots, the feud between Black Noir II and The Deep. Noir, seeking revenge for Deep’s killing of his acting teacher Adam Bourke, sabotages a Vought sanctioned Pipeline that The Deep endorsed. This results in an oil spill that decimates sea life nearby, upping the ante of the feud. Eventually, The Deep violently kills Noir by strangling him with a microphone cord on their podcast set, and stabbing Noir with one of his own knives. It’s a shocking yet relatively anti-climactic death for Noir that plays like the series’ typical shock value beats, ending one of the season’s best plotlines in what feels like a premature way.
Elsewhere, Paul Reiser reprises his role as Legend, an ally of the Boys, who helps them in the direction of the supe Bombsight and his V1, which leads the team to Golden Geisha (guest star Naoko Mori), the ex of Bombsight and former star of very Orientalist-sounding Vought productions.
Ashley and Sage convene after Ashley reads Soldier Boy’s mind to get a look into his, and Homelander’s plans with the V1. Sage deems these to be too reckless and eventually defects to join The Boys. Sage suggests the team use Golden Geisha as bait to attract Bombsight (Mason Dye), a move that works but is not without its consequences. Bombsight and Soldier Boy reunite and eventually spar with their powers, before Bombsight surrenders the V1 to Soldier Boy, under conditions that Soldier Boy uses his own powers to reverse Bombsight’s immortality. Soldier Boy then relinquishes the V1 to Homelander, claiming it would be what Clara Vought (aka Stormfront) would have wanted. This episode feels like the biggest and worst offender of a prevailing problem with the Soldier Boy character and his subsequent plotlines this season, in that everything feels like the series is engineering its main narrative to work backwards to provide set-up for the upcoming Vought Rising prequel series, which stars, you guessed it; Soldier Boy, Stormfront, Bombsight, and surely other characters mentioned in this season. Homelander then injects himself with V1, now seemingly surged with immortality and new power, with all looking lost for The Boys as the series finally seems to have reached its epic crescendo. Right?
The answer, as proven by Episode 7, is a resounding no. This review is not advocating for the series to glorify Homelander or indulge in ‘powerscaling’ kinds of scenes, but when marketing and previous seasons alike have built up to Homelander finally gaining a power boost and teasing heightened erratics akin the infamous plane crash from Season 1 or crowd incident from Season 3, going back to Homelander just staying dormant for effectively the whole of the series’ penultimate episode feels beyond underwhelming.
At the White House, Homelander kills the President, outlaws abortion and nut milks, operating with a renewed sense of ego due to the power boost and boost of being propagated as the new Jesus in American society. At this point, the character feels like a walking caricature, with little seasonal depth beyond obvious Trump parody moments which will likely annoy viewers of all political realms, due to how surface level they all play. This was once a show with very interesting commentaries on the military industrial complex, superhero culture, and more, with a truly riveting performance from Starr anchoring it. As of now in Season 5, Homelander feels like a pale shell of his former dramaturgic self. He later returns to Vought Tower, to inform The Deep that he plans to disband The Seven, as they are the only two members left. He then knocks out Soldier Boy for trying to leave, and re-freezes him in the cryo chamber he came out of. This Soldier Boy plot point is especially frustrating, after each episode featured such similar plots for the Homelander-Soldier Boy dynamic with no real headway in any direction beyond direct set-up for Vought Rising, and raises the question if the character’s arc was much more complete in his Season 3 plotline, a notion this review would get behind. It feels disheartening to see the Ryan plotline be built up over four seasons as the big ‘x-factor’ in the demise of Homelander, only for it to be cast aside for more of the showrunner’s buddy Jensen Ackles.
Elsewhere, Starlight and MM meet up with two prominent figures of their resistance movement, Gen V leads Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) and Jordan Li (London Thor), for information on where Oh-Father is, in hopes that they can use him to locate and reveal Homelander’s next steps. After an entire season’s worth of Gen V building-up to the series’ leads, Marie especially, playing a large part in the culmination of the fight against Homelander, Marie’s role being reduced to a deliverer of thankless exposition feels, again, underwhelming. This especially feels like the character is getting the short end of the stick when you consider that Gen V Season 2 so often went out of its way to include plotlines that felt more like The Boys Season 4.5 and sidelined its own characters in pursuit of a more cohesive shared universe plotline, a kind of choice that The Boys does not extend a reciprocating olive branch back to. Beyond this, Starlight’s characterization in relation to her own resistance movement feels very passive and bizzarely out of character, which I had noted in the Episode 4 review.
Regardless, with this information, Starlight, MM, Butcher and Hughie make their way to Vought Studios for another ‘mission of the week’ that feels like a complete cul de sac, and frankly, a waste of time for the series’ penultimate episode. It feels hard to care about anything going on in a plotline involving Starlight and MM rescuing Vought test audiences who were subjected to execution after being deemed ‘non-believers’ in the Homelander = Jesus agenda, when there is still so much to be tackled in such little time. This detour at Vought Studios may have yielded a more enjoyable episode earlier in the season, but it again feels like treading water, with the heroes on an episodic mission for what feels like no reason at all. Can audiences really be expected to care about weightless Dogknott or Synapse fights with just one episode remaining? I’d wager not.
Back at Fort Harmony, Sage and Frenchie work on recreating Soldier Boy’s powers for Kimiko via uranium exposure. Little progress is made, with Kimiko and her healing factor slowly deteriorating. At the end of the episode, Homelander discovers where the Boys are hiding and experimenting, and flies to Fort Harmony. Frenchie temporarily traps Homelander in the uranium space with him, in order to protect Kimiko and Sage, weakening Homelander, who eventually flies off, but this ultimately kills Frenchie in the process. The rest of the team arrives to see a grief-stricken Kimiko holding his dead body, as the penultimate episode, after 50 minutes of dreck, comes to a somber end. This decision is ostensibly the season’s most daring, but even then, with the dramatic loss of a main character, it still feels telegraphed, and like it’s frankly too-little, too late.
Episode 6 comes with higher highs than perhaps any other episode this season, but still feels like it’s meandering for most of the runtime, whereas that is what 95% of Episode 7 feels like.
To quote Langston Kerman’s Eagle the Archer in this episode, “Can you at least write a finale that’s not just a pile of red-state bumper stickers?”. Replace the bumper stickers with senseless gore and pop culture references, and this is all that is being asked of Eric Kripke and company at this point. Can we finally put aside all of the tired episodic trappings and commit to the core conflict of the show one last time? On paper, it looks like it will be a tough fit, having so many plotlines to wrap up, and one can only hope for long awaited character resolutions to be satisfying, instead of more episodic navel-gazing and giving more focus to gory trappings. At this point, even if the finale delivers on Homelander’s demise in a satisfying way, it still feels like many characters will be leaving with the short end of their respective sticks. If nothing else, we are in for an interesting finale, that this author will enter with baited breath.