The Boys Series Finale Review: Did TV’s Wildest Superhero Show Stick the Landing? Mostly

After five seasons, seven years, and more exploding heads than my brain can catalog, The Boys finally crashes the runway. The finale had to come in hot after a bumpy Season 5 that split the fanbase, and yeah, it mostly sticks the landing — not gracefully, not quietly, but it lands.

Before we get bloody: the setup and the temperature check

Season 5 got dinged hard for wheel-spinning — too much filler, too much time nudging us toward that Soldier Boy prequel, and a general sense the show had wandered off the trail. Episode 7 even dipped to 6.5/10 on IMDb, the only ep of the series to slide under a 7, which is not the kind of momentum you want heading into a finale.

Prime tried to make the goodbye feel big: the finale debuted in select U.S. theaters first, then hit Prime Video in the States and worldwide. Hype meets headwind.

My rating: 3/5. It is not perfect. It is a little predictable, smaller than you might expect, and some of the stumbles are painfully fixable. But it hits the right emotional notes and wraps the story in a way that makes sense for who these people have been since 2019. I had a good time.

Big spoiler warning

If you have not watched the finale yet, hit pause. I am about to hand you every major beat.

"I am the first coming... I will reign eternal and be God of the ashes."

What actually happens in the finale

• We open on Hughie reading Frenchie’s will, which swings from sincere to aggressively anatomical. It’s crass and sweet in that Frenchie way.
• Homelander swings by to patch things up with Ryan. The kid tells him to "get f**ked." Homelander is rattled — and that comes back around.
• Quick Gen V crossover: Marie, Jordan, and Emma pop in. Annie/Starlight tells them to skip the brawl and focus on protecting civilians if Homelander goes nuclear. Useful, but very blink-and-you-miss-it.
• Sister Sage taunts Kimiko into blasting her. That blast strips powers — which, crucial clarification, means Kimiko is the one with the power-canceling hit. Sage loses her super-intelligence, basically becomes an idiot, and wanders off to Harry Potter world. Yes, really.
• Homelander gives a national address where he first brands himself the messiah and then not-so-subtly threatens to scorch the earth if people don’t fall in line.
• The Boys infiltrate the White House with an assist from Ashley. (We will come back to Ashley.)
• M.M. and Hughie neutralize Oh Father by ball-gagging him. When he tries the sonic scream, he blows up his own head. It’s grim and kind of darkly funny, which is very this show.
• Starlight yanks the Deep out a window, drags him to a beach, and they scrap. She blasts him into the water, where sea creatures finish the job. Bye, Deep.
• In the Oval Office, Kimiko and Butcher square up against Homelander. Kimiko initially can’t fire off the power-canceling blast; Homelander bolts — but Ryan slams into him mid-escape, and the fight grinds on.
• Kimiko gets a vision of Frenchie and finds the resolve to blast Homelander, stripping his powers. Depowered and pathetic, he begs. Butcher beats him down, drives a crowbar through his skull, and rips the top of his head off. That’s the end of Homelander.
• Fallout: Ashley is impeached and removed from office — yes, they literally call it impeachment — and Stan Edgar steps back in as Vought’s new CEO.
• Both Ryan and Butcher lose their powers in the melee. Butcher wants a clean slate with the kid. Ryan says no: you’re not a good person.
• Butcher finds Terror dead — seemingly natural causes — and spirals. He storms Vought to trigger release of the Supe-killing virus.
• Hughie figures out Butcher’s plan and confronts him. They fight. Butcher sees Lenny in Hughie’s face, has a moment of clarity, and Hughie shoots him. Butcher dies at peace.
• Epilogue check-ins: The Boys visit Butcher’s grave. Kimiko heads to France. M.M. gets married and, from all appearances, adopts Ryan. Hughie turns down running a new U.S. Bureau of Supe Affairs — he and Annie stay together, he runs an AV store, she keeps superheroing, and they’re expecting a baby they plan to name Robin. Also, one last classic: Hughie ends up drenched in blood.

So... does it fit the characters?

Yeah. That’s the win here. The show puts its main roster — Butcher, Homelander, Hughie, Starlight, M.M., Kimiko, and even the Deep — in places that track with everything we’ve watched since Season 1. It is not shocking. It is correct.

The two big deaths are the right call. The Oval Office fight isn’t the show’s best action — you could argue it makes Homelander look a bit soft — but the aftermath is pitch-perfect. Antony Starr is phenomenal playing Homelander as a sniveling coward pleading for mercy. Very cathartic after five seasons of walking nightmare fuel.

Butcher’s ending is the show remembering he has a heart buried under all that bile. Karl Urban and Jack Quaid nail their final exchange; Hughie as the series’ everyman heart clicks back into place. And the Deep going out via fish attack after a beach brawl with Starlight? That payoff felt earned and darkly funny.

What does not land (and why it probably doesn’t)

Time, mostly. The finale runs just over an hour — normal episode length — and it feels squeezed. The season already spent time revving in neutral, so when the finale needs runway, it doesn’t have enough. Homelander dies around the 40-minute mark, Butcher follows within 15 minutes, and then you get roughly 10 minutes to wrap up everything else. Terror’s death, Butcher’s virus scheme, and the aftermath all needed more air.

If you were banking on a mega-spectacle: temper expectations. Antony Starr teased on The Kelly Clarkson Show that Homelander’s worst act was still ahead. After this? You might be wondering what he meant. A fully unhinged Homelander sequence before his fall would’ve helped. That said, I don’t mind that the finale goes intimate instead of MCU- sky-beam. I just wish it found a slightly better balance between character work and scale.

Some characters get shorted. Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy gets stuffed back into cryo in Episode 7 — Kripke said that was the plan — which is a shrug of an ending for a fan favorite. And because this season was written and shot long before Gen V got canceled, the Marie/Jordan/Emma cameos feel perfunctory. They’re there, but not in a meaningful way.

On the corporate chessboard: Ashley gets bounced from power — called an impeachment — and Stan Edgar strolls back in as Vought CEO. It’s tidy, if a little hand-wavy in the details.

Still, for a show that probably peaked around Seasons 2-3, this is a solid closer. It pays off the character arcs, tosses in a few fan pleasers without preening about it — yes, it plays the hits, but it doesn’t spend the whole hour winking at you.

Where to watch

The Boys series finale is streaming now on Prime Video.