The Boys Season 5 Episode 4 Makes One Thing Clear: Butcher Is the Endgame Villain

We all want to see Homelander finally get what is coming to him in The Boys Season 5. But after this week, I am way less convinced he is the last problem. The show keeps nudging us toward a different endgame: Butcher as the real final villain. Mild hope for justice, meet messy reality.

Spoilers for The Boys Season 5, Episodes 1-4 below.

Episode 4: Fort Harmony turns into a pressure cooker

In Episode 4, King of Hell, the team heads to Fort Harmony to track down the V1 serum, the same old-school stuff Homelander is desperate to find. They are not the first ones there. A supe called Bombsight gets his hands on it first, and that alone would have been bad. Then another V1 supe, Quinn, cranks up everyone’s emotions until the whole group is at each other’s throats. That means brutal honesty, a couple of stinging insults, and yes, some actual punches between the leads.

Hughie and Kimiko let some feelings fly, and while that hurts, it is survivable. The fallout probably does not bode well for one of the show’s best couples (hi, Frenchie and Kimiko), but it is the kind of pain they might come back from. Butcher? Not so much.

Butcher does not just cross a line — he sets it on fire

The thing about Butcher is that he has always lived in extremes: good vs. evil, humans vs. supes, kill vs. be killed. That black-and-white thinking has been calcifying, and by this episode it is basically concrete. He and MM lay out their real plan: destroy the V1, not use it to save Starlight and Kimiko like the rest of the team wants. Hughie overhears and unloads on him, and honestly, it is hard to argue.

"If there was anything human in there, it is dead."

"Maybe I like it better this way."

Hughie also says Butcher is "just as bad as Homelander, maybe worse." Butcher barely blinks. Then he goes full monster and lashes out at Hughie with those tentacles. That is not tough-love mentor behavior. That is a guy who no longer protects the people he supposedly cares about. If you are keeping score at home, that is villain territory.

• He wants the V1 destroyed instead of using it to save Starlight and Kimiko.
• He shrugs off being compared to Homelander.
• He attacks Hughie with his tentacles.
• Back in Season 4, he chose his worst impulses (shoutout to Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Joe Kessler) over Becca’s memory, which used to be his North Star.
• Now, he is willing to use or sacrifice Ryan and even his own teammates to get to Homelander.

Season 4 already told us where this was headed

Season 4’s ending quietly drew a line in the sand. Butcher picked vengeance over Becca, full stop. If even her memory cannot pull him back, what can? He is past the point of no return, and Season 5 is basically him burning whatever remains of his old code. Hughie has him pegged: the little scraps of humanity that used to keep him in check are gone.

And look, thematically, it tracks. Homelander and Butcher are two extremes on opposite ends of a broken world. There is a version of this story where both are taken off the board. The twist — and it would be a twist, but not a shocking one — is that Butcher ends up the last boss they have to beat.

The comics tease a darker version of the same idea

The show is not a beat-for-beat translation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comics, but there is one big overlap: Butcher as the final problem. In the books, Homelander does not actually die at Butcher’s hands — Black Noir takes him out, thanks to a clone twist the series cannot really use. After Butcher’s own showdown with Homelander leaves the supe alive, Butcher decides to wipe out all supes, period. Sound familiar?

It gets uglier: comic Butcher kills his own team to chase that goal — MM, Frenchie, and The Female (Kimiko’s counterpart) all die. He is only stopped when Hughie kills him. After Episode 4, tell me you cannot see how the show could angle that way. Hughie and Butcher are well on their way to hating each other, and Butcher has basically announced he will turn on anyone to finish this.

Where this is going

Homelander is still the biggest, loudest disaster on screen. But if the season keeps pushing like this, the true endgame might be cleaning up Butcher. Honestly, that might be the only way The Boys can actually win — by beating the monster they built while trying to kill another one.