Yazar 
The Boys has said farewell to its audience — the show that won hearts from the very first day it aired with its unique voice. Seven years after its first episode premiered on Prime Video (July 26, 2019), I’ll be looking back at the five-season run of The Boys and evaluating its finale.
This piece contains spoilers for The Boys.
A Good Parody Extends the Life
The Boys arrived at a time when superhero films were at their peak. MCU movies and Snyder‘s DC adaptations were, as they say, breaking down the doors. There was simply no more appetite to consume yet another superhero story. A new superhero property might have been destined to be remembered as just “one more experiment floating in the void.” But the series before us was such a grounded, no-nonsense parody that it genuinely captured hearts.
Eric Kripke — who had previously made his name with Supernatural — developed the project that Amazon needed to fill its “hit series” gap. The project was an adaptation of a comic book series created in 2006 by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson. It probably drew attention at first because it featured people wearing capes and capable of flight. The reason viewers ended up loving it, though, was that it mocked those same cape-wearing, flying people. A successful superhero parody had been a rare thing since The Tick. Hence the eight million people who watched it within the first ten days. The Boys made such a splash that Amazon greenlit two additional seasons before the first season had even finished airing.
They took dozens of beloved characters familiar from notebooks, animated series, and comic books, and gleefully dragged them through the mud. They drew sharp, hilarious comedy from super-powered, fast, intelligent, agile characters. And they did all this with remarkable success, weaving it together with American marketing culture. The Boys was a masterful critique of the celebrity culture inflated by advertising, feature films, corporate social responsibility projects, and charity campaigns. They depicted beautifully what the partnerships of major corporations with the entertainment industry and political channels can lead to. Boldness bred success, and success bred more boldness. The Boys won the love of audiences worldwide, joining the ranks of shows people eagerly waited to see during their off-seasons. From there, it genuinely leveled up — evolving from successful parody into successful systemic critique.
We Know How to Do This
Systemic critique isn’t something that can be dashed off on demand and conveniently placed at the center of any story one writes. In the majority of works that are treated as mere entertainment and condescended to as “kid stuff” in the modern age, we observe the exact opposite. Today, one of the sharpest critiques of American culture sits inside the GTA series, dismissed as a “children’s game.” The Dark Knight — which most people wouldn’t object to summarizing as “Man in Bat Costume Punches Clown” — is, in a sense, an entirely different vision of how underground culture relates to bureaucracy in America. Comics and games have, for more than half a century, been critiquing the oppression people suffer at the hands of institutions and the dirty schemes of authoritarian regimes.
Speaking specifically of The Boys: to look at stories like this as “those simple films where the good guys always beat the bad guys in the end” is an extremely shallow perspective. Because this series, frankly, had the most grounded and riveting systemic critique I have ever watched. From top to bottom — politicians, major corporations, the judiciary, and the public in all their self-interested and compliant variety — it depicts everything in the finest detail. It handles with subtlety the relationships between all these people and institutions, and their effects on individuals and the world. In fact, behind the Homelander vs. Butcher conflict we’ve been accustomed to from the outset, every season, every episode draws its own small stories with distinct characters.
Of course, there’s a gradual decline in creativity from beginning to end. But this decline is not as painful as in other series — that much must be said. For instance, in the final season I didn’t experience the kind of disappointment I felt with the finales of Game of Thrones or Stranger Things. I think the reason is that they ended it on time; if they had extended it one more season, we might have remembered this series very poorly.
How It Began, How It Ended
If we were to evaluate our characters one by one, assessing their five-season journeys, The Boys doesn’t offer any spectacular development. In fact, almost everyone’s arc concluded more or less as we predicted. Going through them by name — is there anyone you could honestly say genuinely surprised you? Unfortunately, no.
Take Billy Butcher, for example: we knew he would do everything in his power to bring down Homelander in the finale. Had it not been for the sudden introduction of a compound called V1 midway through the season, Butcher would have released that virus without blinking and killed all the supers well before the finale. Based on Butcher’s final scene, it seems the writers didn’t want to give up on the character entirely. After everything was said and done, you may have wondered why they wrote Butcher that kind of ending. In my view, they wanted him to remain caught between the darkness inside him and the remnant of humanity he held onto in memory of his brother. At the end of the day, Butcher chose not what was right but what was good. With all these crimes, all that guilt weighing on him, he couldn’t exactly put on a floral shirt and retire to a seaside town. That’s why they ended our character’s story with the conscience he had clung to through five seasons — that is, with Hughie’s hands.
Hughie, on the other hand, surrendered early in the first season — with his very first killing — to the terrible truth he’d learned: sometimes you have to get your hands dirty. By the time he arrived at this point, he had lost everything he had, yet still managed to remain the most reasonable, most centrist member of the group. His story — as everyone predicted — was written and concluded with minimal risk. So risk-free, in fact, that in the finale, Hughie’s arc wrapped up in a manner that would have suited a 1970s melodrama.
A Leader Who Can’t Get Her Message Across
As for the tireless revolutionary leader Annie January — all the interesting details about her character came in the first two seasons. Nothing added in the last three seasons relating to Starlight, no event that happens to her, holds my interest. Even in the final season, thinking about what she goes through with her father and what happens in that house — the most gripping moments were her brother’s parts. Watching the reactions of a screen-addicted, fascist adolescent is always entertaining. Annie couldn’t come out ahead in a single two-person dialogue she entered. Frankly, I’ve never seen a revolutionary leader with such weak rhetoric. In the final scenes, she came close to convincing The Deep — the universe’s single most foolish person — of something, and she couldn’t even manage that.
MM was one of my favorite characters in this ensemble. Calling him “the world’s most steadfast person” would not be an overstatement. He has principles and lives without compromise no matter what. He fights until death against things he knows to be wrong — you’ll recall from earlier episodes that he once stood up to Soldier Boy with his bare hands. But at the start of this season, he had transformed into someone who’d given up, seeking solace in alcohol and cigarettes. The prisoner camp that didn’t even break the psychologically fragile Hughie had somehow managed to get MM in line. Honestly, I think this was a serious mistake and an insult to the character arc drawn up to that point.
As for Frenchie and Kimiko — in my view, they didn’t deserve to be the losers of this screenplay. I wish Hughie had died an episode before the finale so that at the end we could have seen Annie on the shores of Marseille. Maybe we’d have seen her in a shop selling tech gadgets — I couldn’t be sure. Frenchie is perhaps many viewers’ favorite character. His romance with Kimiko was perhaps one of the series’ sweetest aspects. We watched, step by step, the effect these two characters had on each other. Frenchie overcame the guilt that came from his past through Kimiko. Through Frenchie, Kimiko came to believe she was a human being, not a weapon. Was this really how their story was going to end? After they planned to build a family together, after everything was resolved? That’s a brutal call. And I also found it utterly cowardly that Homelander — who has been bisecting and blowing the heads off everyone in his path — kills Frenchie with a stomach wound. You feel compelled to give characters a final word; please break free from this tired, rote mentality already!
The Costume Everyone Recognizes
Now to the show’s main man: Homelander. Let’s talk about the man who grows more oppressive the more powerful he becomes. Imagine a character who gains a little more power every single day. And the more power he gains, the more people step forward to tell him, “You are a pitiable creature.” A magnificent profile, drawn with precision. His past is traumatic — to exactly the right degree, neither too much nor too little. The self-assurance that comes from the Vought International glitter he’s constantly bathed in, the intoxication of Hollywood, and being a god living among mortals — these have driven him mad in a way that fits naturally within the flow of life, never sticking out for a moment, never tipping into exaggeration. A magnificent figure of villainy. The only kind of ending that could be written for a Homelander who seized Vought, then wanted all of America, then declared himself a god after seizing America, was precisely this one.
At first I was bothered by the plans constantly shifting throughout the season. Then I stopped and thought it through, and convinced myself that having Homelander catch a virus and die would indeed have been a damp squib. My expectation was for an ending tied to Soldier Boy. After all, Soldier Boy is the only character whose story remains unresolved — that’s a real shame. Instead of turning Kimiko into a Soldier Boy, they could have brought Soldier Boy himself back into the picture. And we could have watched more Terror scenes in the remaining time. Speaking of which, I must confess: the finest part of the season was those brief, fleeting moments seen through Terror’s eyes.
We all knew Homelander was going to die at the end of this story, yes. But none of us predicted he would die on his knees, saying the words I cannot write here. At precisely this moment in history — with the world in such turmoil — we should be grateful to the entire The Boys team, if only for showing us how psychopathic dictators, once stripped of their power, will fall to their knees and beg.
Before I forget: let’s also mention how badly the censorship applied on Prime Video — particularly in dialogues relating to religious figures — damaged the story’s flow and made certain scenes difficult to understand. I particularly wanted to note this: the official bodies that impose these kinds of restrictions on these companies need to understand that they are pushing people toward piracy in the name of “protecting” them with cleaner content.
As for The Boys itself: it truly isn’t something whose void will be filled easily. I can say it’s one of the very few series I was genuinely sad to see end. Imagine a story that contains superheroes, bloodsucking corporations, the most shameless marketing tactics, social conflicts, and hate crimes — all with remarkably successful and funny writing. Works like this come along once in a century. We must treasure them. Our compliments to everyone who contributed.
To read more articles by Mehmet Tezcan, click here.
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