so, i'd consider myself a casual fan of the boys since i started watching it about mid to late 2023, maybe? i remember i started the show a while before season four came out, but after season three. but that's besides the point, i'm here to talk about season five, specifically its finale. none of this is in any particular order, i'm just writing about my grievances as they come to mind. obviously spoilers for season five of the boys and the finale, so be warned!

justice for annie

i would say annie got nerfed, but frankly the writers have been incapable of ever actually showing her powers and how powerful they can really be, so i can't even say that. a better way of putting it would be to say her powers were the "potential powers" of the show. she has light manipulation/electricity manipulation, there's so many things you can do with that! but the writing has been completely creatively bankrupt on that front for some reason. realistically speaking, she should be one of the most powerful supes in the show, but we hardly ever even get to see her use her powers when she fights. seriously, when fighting with dogknott or the deep, for some reason she's throwing punches instead of trying to blind the fuckers. she only brings out the light blasts at the end of the fights, when really it should be one of the first things she tries. personally, i also think her light blasts should do more than just push her opponents back - i mean, it's concentrated light, maybe she can blind someone for a bit, or even give them temporary burns. i don't know, just do something with her!

also, i was a little peeved when she told marie that she can't control her powers when a) the entire second season of gen v was about marie controlling her powers, and b) annie has no room to talk about that considering her track record with her own powers. justice for annie, she deserved better writing. 

soldier boy and his stupid spinoff

oh my god, soldier boy served literally no purpose this season other than to advertise vought rising for half the season. the episode where everyone goes to look for the v1 at fort harmony didn't bother me all that much when i watched it at first, though i was disappointed by the end when no meaningful progress had been made. but then we got another episode, and then another, consisting entirely of just "we have to find the v1" and "look at these guys soldier boy knew one time". it got very stale, very quickly, and not just because it was blatant set up for a show you're already souring us on by ruining the finale of this one to prop it up. no, it's also because it was essentially one long wild goose chase when we find out that the whole thing turns out to be a fruitless endeavor - homelander ends up with the v1 anyway. which we were all pretty much expecting, but that's only further reason to not waste our time with this plotline, which only serves to shine a spotlight on soldier boy and his associates (who you can watch engage in some debauched bullshit soon, only on amazon prime video!)

soldier boy himself flip flops between being on homelander's side to being against him on such a whim you wonder why he's even here, not just from a writing perspective but from a character perspective. his motivations are so flimsy you wonder why it doesn't occur to him to just fuck off. not to mention that fact he's suddenly retconned into loving stormfront, who he mentioned in passing as a fling one time the last time we saw him. he said so himself, that he was in love with crimson countess, but that wouldn't serve to get you interested in vought rising, so the show just hopes you forget about that. and the only reason that retcon happens is to get the v1 to homelander, which soldier boy ends up regretting immediately anyway. basically, soldier boy played a big part in ruining the season for me, and really it comes off as insecurity on the showrunners' part if they feel the need to shove this spinoff down our throats here to get us to watch it. besides, who wants to watch a show about a racist chauvinist and his nazi girlfriend? considering how hard the writers go in on current american politics, you'd expect them to know no one's in the mood for that. 

gen v (or the lack of it)

honestly, i never expected gen v to play a particularly big role in season five. i don't think it would've been a great idea to make it necessary viewing to understand this season - i mean, that's what they were parodying with vought and their cinematic universe. but it definitely could have been incorporated better into the season, and in a way that meaningfully impacts the plot without turning gen v into homework. but the way they did weave gen v into the show was so subpar it'd wouldn't have made much of a difference if they hadn't shown up at all. cate was teased with the plotline about all the psychics in america being used to carry out the culling of nonbelievers, but we only get to see a single headshot of her in a hallway for two seconds. like could we seriously not see her actually doing something, maybe working as an agent from the inside giving information to the boys? we see marie and jordan for the first time in the second to last episode of the series, and it's just for starlight to tell them to screw off, which she takes back at the end of the episode anyway so it didn't matter. we see marie, jordan, and emma again for a bit in the finale, but they're just there as cameos at best. the last we see of them is them driving a truck full of rescued people to canada.

gen v really amounted to nothing, and after marie was built up to be a supe on homelander's level? she was probably one of the most valuable assets in defeating homelander, and the boys (both the show and the group) did nothing with that. and now that gen v is cancelled, we'll never see the point of any of them doing what they did, or even a post-homelander world through the eyes of a new generation of supes, which i think would've been really interesting to see. the gen v gang deserved better, lowkey they could've soloed floplander. 

scorched earf? more like, scorched budget

i think everyone's been wondering, "where the hell did the budget go and why didn't we see homelander actually snap?" we've been waiting for this moment since the start of the show, but the closest homelander gets to finally letting loose is making a scary speech on live tv and plans a theme park. stan edgar was right, homelander is completely unoriginal in what he does with his newfound "godhood" - eggman has done that exact thing, and dare i say, executed it better.

i've seen people throw around the term false advertising considering the marketing showed imagery such as: homelander with a supe army outside the white house, butcher walking right by a collapsed vought tower, homelander watching nukes go off all over the country from outer space. and while i doubt those claims would hold up in a court of law, it's already become common consensus in the court of public opinion. i can't fault people for drawing that conclusion - the biggest threat to the world in-universe has always been homelander finally going rogue and leveling a city, which considering this is the boys, we were expecting to see at least some of. especially with the v1 in his system, he had no reason to hold back, and we know how much he hates bureaucratic red tape.

considering its buildup throughout the entirety of the show, the leaked footage of flight 37 should've been his breaking point. maybe the placement of the leak within the season could've been changed to better accommodate a "homelander going rogue" plotline, but what ended up happening with it was utterly underwhelming. i know it's a commentary on ai and how we're dealing with living in a world where irrefutable video evidence is no longer really a thing, but we've already touched on that subject before. it does nothing but make one of, if not the most valuable piece of blackmail against homelander utterly useless. in the end, we don't really get to see homelander snap, but we do get a fight.

though that ends kind of underwhelming as well, as it ends up taking place in a single room: the white house oval office. i really wish the fight locations had been more dynamic, since this is the fight the show's been hyping up since the beginning. in the show, the whole thing was being recorded on live tv - what if they took it to the streets, have people recording and actually reacting to what's happening? i'm not a showrunner or director, or anything of the like though, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt. i do also realize that the budget may have played a big role in the season as a whole being pretty underwhelming. in that case, what's up with amazon not giving them a higher budget, considering this is one of their most successful shows ever? probably just greed, which explains everything honestly. i'm not sure a higher budget would have led to better writing overall, but come on, it's the boys - bezos can hand over some cash and live without a fifth yacht for this. 

quickfire round of things i didn't like

• sage. she gets a happy ending. yes, she ends up on the boys' side by the end, but she literally helped put homelander into the position of wannabe god in the first place. also the second she started talking about "love is unpredictable, i can't comprehend love" is the second i knew the writers can't write smart characters for shit. one of her listed abilities is empathic accuracy, but aside from that can we please retire the trope of "smart character doesn't get feelings"? human emotion is absolutely something smart people can and usually do understand, emotional intelligence is intelligence. at this point it'd be redundant to say she deserved better writing, but it's true. 
• butcher snapping. after ryan decides to leave him and terror dies, he snaps and decides to release the virus. i get that it might come from a place of "well he's lost everything, might as well do what he's set out to do this whole time: kill all supes". but i don't think that came across all that well; the way i saw it, it was more like "his dog died, welp time to kill all supes". and anyway doesn't he still have hughie, who he sees as a proto-brother? his canary or whatever? i think hughie also should have left him like how ryan did to really drive the point home that butcher's alone and has nothing to live for, which pushes him to try to release the virus. he was definitely meant to die from the start, so i'm not too upset about that part. i'll miss the bastard though. 
• kimiko getting irradiated. i know a lot of people were put off by her dialogue this season, which i agree with. her humor consisted of just porn and not-so-varied variations of the crude humor we've seen throughout the whole show (seriously, i'm not against it, but there's other types of humor you can do, you know?). but something i don't see enough people talking about is the asspull to end all asspulls out of any show i've watched: popping her in the microwave for a couple days to give her soldier boy's powers. seriously, that came out of nowhere in the penultimate episode with absolutely no buildup. it's even questioned in universe, considering soldier boy was experimented on for years to get the same result, though this ends up being more of a poor attempt at lampshading than anything resembling an explanation. i think it could've been a great chance to make gen v relevant: maybe marie can use her biokinesis to separate the v from homelander's blood and take it out of him. i don't know, i'm just spitballing, but even that sounds like a better idea than what the show did. 
• vought is still around. i know for the sake of spinoffs it kind of has to be, but how is it that the government hasn't rounded up every vought higher up and put then in front of a wall for the shit they did? or at least forcefully shut down the company? i know the government loves to kneel to capital, but i seriously doubt even they would just let stan edgar become ceo again after all that.

quickfire round of things i did like

• homelander's death was pretty satisfying. i did cringe a bit at his last words, but he is a sniveling pathetic crybaby, so i think it fit him. 
• the deep's death was pretty satisfying too. why annie threw him in the ocean when she doesn't know all the fish hate him, i don't know. maybe include something like the fish signaling to her to throw him in, and the deep showing he's afraid of getting in the water to give her a hint. but it turned out great for her, so i'm fine with it. 
• ashley is such an icon, i'm so glad she had a semi-redemption arc. also really glad she got to live. 
• it's sappy, i know, but i'm glad most of the boys got a happy ending. also i think it's really funny frenchie was the only one to die. 
• butcher and hughie's final showdown was pretty good i think. got me in the feels a bit, not gonna lie.

and those are my thoughts on season five of the boys! i didn't expect to write this much, but i guess i got a little carried away. goodbye boys, i'm not watching any of your spinoffs.

but then butcher said "daddy's home 😼" and saved the whole thing, 10/10, peak, absolute cinema

xoxo, ♥