The final season of The Boys was a wild ride, with major character deaths (A-Train, Frenchie), some character turns (Kimiko can talk!), and dark parallels to the real world as Homelander and Vought turn America into an authoritarian state.
The finale brought it all together with relatively satisfying endings. Homelander was stripped of his powers, beaten to a pulp, and killed by Butcher while exposing himself to his followers as a coward; Sister Sage likewise lost her powers but felt freed without her super intellect; the Deep was fittingly ripped apart by sea creatures; Hughie killed Butcher when the latter tried to unleash a supe-killing virus; Annie was revealed to be pregnant with Hughie’s child; and Kimiko and MM both attempted to move on with their fight behind them.
Yet the finale has already received backlash on Reddit and other forums, with criticisms of the writing, the seemingly anticlimactic end for Homelander, the lack of a high budget, and more. This ties into earlier criticisms of the final season for wasting too much time on things from Soldier Boy’s plotlines to a Supernatural reunion and for “treading water” to the end.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, creator Eric Kripke addressed some of those concerns. First, he brushed off how having only eight episodes hurt the final season by not giving them time to develop stories, and they had set out to bring it to a proper close.
“I’m really happy with it, because — despite the online criticism that nothing happened — we attacked the season to make sure we land every character. We have 15 characters, and they all needed an emotional payoff on the journeys they’ve been experiencing for the last five years. After this episode, people are going to say goodbye to a lot of these characters. They became like friends or familiar figures, who the audience is never going to see again. So I really wanted to emotionally land the end points of every character, and that was what we were spending our page count on.”
Kripke had stated before the season aired that they wouldn’t have the huge budget for a truly epic finale that was never going to match the over-the-top insanity of the original comics. There are legitimate criticisms that some episodes felt either too padded out or too rushed and that made the characters and storyline suffer. If nothing else, some fans had wanted a feature-length finale to bring it all to an amazing close, but Kripke didn't seem to agree.
“I’ve gone through a journey when I first started to read everything — like on social media or online — and it starts to feel like that’s the whole universe, and it feels scary, and you have a pit in your stomach. But season five is the biggest season out of all of them and at 35 days in, we have 57 million viewers in season five alone,” Kripke defended himself.
He added that looking at the ratings, he felt, "Oh, obviously, how many times do I have to relearn the lesson that the online world is not the actual world? [The online reaction is] a fraction of very loud, opinionated people, and God love them. They’re welcome to have that opinion. But it’s actually not reflecting what’s happening out in the world. And once I saw [the numbers], I calmed right down.”
Some fans may see this as Kripke brushing off their concerns, while the finale is already sparking a divisive reaction among the fandom. Granted, it’s easy for such a genre show to not be what fans wanted in the end (Stranger Things and Game of Thrones come to mind), and The Boys also had to wrestle with reality being crazier than their fiction.
Still, Kripke may come off as too dismissive of fan criticism, and using ratings as a defense for quality rarely sends out the right message. That's not unlike the GOT showrunners defending that infamous finale, and that didn't go over very well with the fandom.
It may take time to fully assess the impact of the finale and whether it tarnishes what came before, yet Kripke will defend The Boys as ending the way he wanted it to and let the fans judge if that’s right or wrong.
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