Superhero satire “The Boys” wrapped up its five-season run in May, and not everyone was thrilled. For as much stock as you can put in IMDB ratings, almost all of the lowest-rated episodes of “The Boys” come from Season 5, and the series finale, “Blood and Bone,” has the worst rating of them all.
Before the premiere of “The Boys” Season 5, creator Eric Kripke (speaking to The Hollywood Reporter) expressed concern that fans would rethink the whole show based on the last episode. Then, during the run of Season 5, Kripke fired back at fan complaints. Now that the show’s over, he gave a similarly blunt address to viewers who didn’t like the finale (in an interview with TVLine).
“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, and I’m sorry if I disappointed you, but it was the story I wanted to tell,” Kripke said, standing by his ending though conceding not everyone was happy with it.
Granted, some of the criticisms of the finale are off base. “The Boys” has long had a big problem with fans viewing the main villain, Homelander (Antony Starr), as the hero he pretends to be. Starr’s incredible performance adds pathos to Homelander, sure, and the character has a tragic backstory, but he’s also a delusional, fascist mass murderer.
These fans didn’t like that Homelander went out like a coward, crying and begging for his life to Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) after losing his powers. That’s why you’ve gotten people complaining that Homelander lost his “aura,” as if “The Boys” were a typical superhero action fest. Even Elon Musk (who received a very unflattering parody in the finale via the character Günter Van Ellis) joined in on criticizing Homelander’s well-deserved death; Kripke, in turn, called that the best review he’s ever gotten.
The Boys wasn’t willing to go scorched earth
In the TVLine interview, Eric Kripke pointed to the strong viewership numbers for “The Boys” on Prime Video.
“We have way north of 60 million viewers, so that makes the online storm, which feels very all-encompassing, actually a fraction of a single percentage point. […] You just have to put it into perspective of it being a reasonably small, vocal audience when the vast majority seem to be happily tuning in.”
Personally, I’m not one of the finale’s haters. I enjoyed Homelander’s perfect, pathetic death so much that it actually made me like the whole episode more. But it’s disingenuous to act as if all the criticisms were in bad faith and to claim I don’t share some of them. Pacing was the big problem with “The Boys” Season 5: there were a handful of episodes where little happened, and then “Blood and Bone” tried to cram at least three episodes’ worth of story into an hour. “The Boys” ended like writer Garth Ennis’ original comics, but sped through the impact too quickly.
In a 2013 foreword to “The Boys: Definitive Edition” Volume 6, Ennis wrote that “What happened to the Boys in their last storyline still haunts me slightly. It was where the story was meant to go, but man, it felt like murder.” Said “last storyline” sees Billy Butcher attempt to murder every supe on the planet, kill the rest of his team, and die at Hughie’s hands. Whereas Ennis wrote a tragedy, Kripke (speaking to Polygon) said he found the deaths in the comic “unsatisfying.” You can feel a similar reluctance to let Butcher be the bad guy, and it undermines “The Boys” Season 5 in ways that only flatter the comic ending.
“The Boys” is streaming on Prime Video.
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