The Boys season 5 review: A more sombre than satisfying goodbye to Prime Video's anti-superhero hit | Buckle in for a bittersweet way to bow out.

Deep seems nigh indestructible, maybe due to his body adapting to the pressure of the deep sea. Annie and A-train jumped and pummeled him last season and he was barely wounded, just incapacitated.

Idk about that a train and the deep had a shockingly even fight. I know the super powers tend to come second in this show but it's insane the deep was able to react and hit a train a few times last season

Neither of them want to fight. The Deep is pissing his pants following Homelanders orders and A-Train genuinely feels sorry for him.

Because then homelander might actually replace him with someone competent

If Atrain killed the Deep then Homelander would 100% find and kill his family

Lol the method you chose is so fkn funny. YEETTT

... his last action was avoiding killing someone His entire arc....was becoming an actual hero Come on now, it's 2+2....not rocket science for character development

Because that would be an insult to homelander which would just make him hunt a train instead of delegating it to a much more stupid and therefore manageable deep

Bro it's throwing me off so hard, every decision they made so far in S5 is so idiotic.... It's getting real close to character assassination the way ALL of them change their core values then 30 minutes are back to normal over and over and over yet try to convince us viewers their adamant about their standpoints. Not to mention the constant TikTok references oml.

Thing is,comic Boys were all juiced with a stripped down version of Compound V. By Butcher's logic,they themselves had to go. In a scenario like the TV show,only the full blown supes had to go,the temp v people not so much.

That really doesn’t seem satisfying

They can't do that here. Killing all supes will mean ending spin off shows like Gen V, which as you know, Amazon has no intentions of doing so. If not for the director insisting on ending the boys at season 5, corporate Amazon wanted to keep the show going as long as it had viewers.

Butcher is a pos, that doesn't seem bittersweet

Frenchie’s small talk with Starlight in episode two kind of had me believing they are going to have a similar ending to the comics. Talking about making the lives lost worth it or something of that nature.

Think Season 2 of Gen V is required viewing? I liked Season 1 but the first episode of season 2 didn’t hook me. 

I think each season has been less good than the previous, I don't have an arbitrary cutoff where it stopped being good. Season one had a bag of gags where they subverted your expectations with shock and gross out humor. They started from a place where it was difficult to raise the bar. They have been trying to recreate what they succeeded to do in season one ever since. I think for most people the effect just isn't as powerful after repeated uses of the same old shtick. Where the show really went wrong is just using a few disconnect pieces of the source material and just winging it season to season and essentially fully abandoning that story. People have issues with the storyline from the comics, but a lot of the choices in these characters were building that story. If you remove them from that path and jsut try to build a new story and forcs these to fit you just end up going no place. With out that original story trajectory, a lot of the characters have no reason to be the way they are. Take black noir. There is a reason his character is masked and silent. A very important and fundamental to the plot reason. Well they just discarded that entirely. Instead somewhere around the halfway point they were like, wait, why is this character even the way that he is if we are going to completely throw his character arc in the garbage? So they unmasked him, gave him a voice, even a race change for good measure, all to completely abandon his character arc from the source material and burn it all to the ground with no possibility to recover. Point here is, if they were going to just completely abolish the narrative arc of the source material, then a lot of the choices they have made and the inclusion of a lot these characters as they are serves no real purpose to the plot. It creates this narrative cohension failure that the show has been dealing with for several seasons now. they are winging the plot here. They never started with any master plan or outline and that has been showing more and more as the season go on. I often see any criticism of them abandoning the source material so entirely simply hand waved away as 'oh the comic story sucks anyway' or 'f*** the source material, this is better'. Thing is, the comic storyline has a carved path and reason for each of the choices they made. this show is just winging it, clearly. they don't even know what they are doing season to season, and now across multiple shows. It couldn't be more obvious. Just like gen v. that series is completly invented by these people. Season 2 is just literally undoing and redoing everything they accomplished in the first season. They just have no clue what they are building towards and it shows. So I say, none of this arbitrary 'it stopped being good in x season' stuff. They were always just winging it and writing by committee with no solid plan of what they were going to do. I don't even think they expected as much success as they ended up achieving and everything since season 1 has been a scramble to try to match the level they started at. And it was too late to use the source material as a guide because they nuked so much of that plot from being possible because the story is now unrecognizable from the source. They have been using this ip as a vehicle to to tell their own story for so long that they have lost the plot along the way. That is why the repeated use of gross out d*** humor has long since lost it's charm and the lampooning politic humor isn't funny at this point because it is no longer a joke.

I see this critique often, for me I don’t quite agree. It definitely moves forward slowly but I don’t think it spins its wheels. Season three they attempt to kill homelander and fail, season 4 is about Butchers dissent into full on maniac and starting to become a fully realized version of the thing he hates, as well as homelanders seizure of total authority over the United States. These aren’t nothing happening events these are major events. Also the episode where homelander goes home is kind of a side quest but probably the best episode in the series

Yeah 100% she went from gritty badass to pink fluffy teenager.

I would blame reality for doing such a sprint to catch up to and surpass satire. Unfortunately we live in such media illiterate times that the show sometimes has to bash some points so heavily in order to make it clear that _it is a satire._ Of course it will come over as heavy handed. But how big a hand do you need to get through to people? People can argue that you shouldn't have to write around your dumbest audience - and there's truth in that - but I sympathize with showrunners growing frustrated at people somehow still not getting that Homelander is Trump and Homelander is _bad._ Like if the Punisher had to turn to the camera and do a five minute monologue about why cops should never use his logo, that they stand for completely opposite things - people would roll their eyes but jesus it's way past necessary.

You know his name was Vought long before The Boys was created?

Yeah I mean, the fact that the Season 3 finale which essentially summarizes MAGA/Trump relationship released before Trump was even the GOP nominee genuinely makes me respect the show more cuz while it's lost the plot a little bit as a satisfying TV show it's still probably one of the most accurate depictions of our world today in media, which is insane to say lmao

They did actually make a good comment about current politics in the first episode. When they're watching the news, you can see a chyron that reads: "Calhoun administration declares parts of constitution unconstitutional". Seven words, no notes. You could actually see Trump or his cabinet saying the exact thing.

I turned it off and stopped watching when homelander smushed a dudes head while getting a handy.

Apparently this season was written before the election. Idk how the production schedule for a tv show works, but this shows that maybe spending at least 18 months on releasing an extremely topical show after it was written isn’t the best idea.

Yeah that's why season 1 will always be my favourite. The first 2 episodes had a real propulsive energy to them and over time it's just become scenes of people sat in rooms talking about Homelander over and over.

The classic villain who’s great and carries the show early on but has to become a complete idiot so it can last 4-5 seasons. So lame

Yeah, it remains to be seen how season 5 will end up, but if we look at the show as whole now, it’s easy to see that the story would have worked out better if it was a whole season or two shorter. There was so much pointless faffing around especially in season three, with all the searching for Soldier Boy that ultimately accounted to basically nothing when you look at the status quo in season 3 vs 4. And sure, Soldier Boy probably will have an instrumental role in season 5 and I’m not saying that he’s pointless as a character, but my point is that you could have cut so much away from that season without really losing anything essential. There’s no reason why most of it couldn’t have happened in parallel with events of season 4 etc.

Honestly I've been thinking since the last season that's what they should have done. It feels like the entirety of that season was arbitrary except for the second half of the finale. Now I'm just hoping Starr at least gets a few solid scenes to chew on because I'm kind of thinking everything else is going to end up being unsatisfying in an unintentional way. But who knows, maybe the rest of the episodes are going to be bonkers from here on out.

I enjoy the show but every time I rewatch season 1, I'm blown away by just how much better it is than any subsequent season.

I don't know if you can really criticize Invincible for that? Maybe I'm crazy but when I see people talk about Invincible they're talking about it as if the story is up in the air and still being decided by the show runners...it's a comic that started in 2003 and finished in 2018. The Boys strayed pretty much completely from the original concept of the comic, but Invincible is pretty much following the comic with a few small changes and some fleshed out parts, but it's a done comic we know where it's going to go and how it ends. Also Invincible is written by Robert Kirkman who did the Walking Dead; the dude loves gore, his stuff at points is arguably mutilation p***.

Uhh, Invincible is still amazing. If you think both shows have had similar dips in quality I don't know what to tell you.

There's something to be said about not every show on air being catered specifically to my tastes. But it does sting that they pivoted so hard since S1 which at least had a semblance of emotional nuance

Rock Hard was hilarious, I laughed at every line.

He literally tried to and A-train stopped him what are you talking about did you watch the episode?

What? He actively was trying to kill the group, would’ve killed Hughie and probably Butcher if not for A-Train showing up, and he did kill A-Train

The difference this time round is that, it's the final season, at some point, these characters are going to die most likely, at homelanders hands? Who knows, but there ain't another season after this, so if just for one last time we get to follow these characters then great, I'll take it. 

They said it's the most negative review on metacritic, which is true, not that it is a negative review overall

This is Listnook. Everyone just reads the top comments to see how they align with the hive mind.

It's Listnook, 70% of people only read the headlines

“Endings are hard. Any chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard can poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible. You try to tie up every loose end, but you never can. The fans are always gonna b****. There’s always gonna be holes. And since it’s the ending, it’s all supposed to add up to something. I’m telling you, they’re a raging pain in the ass.”

I wouldn’t entirely d******* the idea that that could be where they are heading. The deep notes that Noir doesn’t speak or take off the mask and complains that Kevin has gone method. it’s not outside the realm of possibility that he’s actually a Homelander clone now and that’s why he doesn’t talk and they’re setting up for that twist.

to be fair the supe that is playing BN now is depicted as some sort of "actor", someone that can mimic other people and we've already seen that his actual powers are bigger than og BN's (ie he could fly). MAYBE in the end they can reveal that this specific supe was made with all HL powers, not as a straight substitute but like someone that can match HL if it's the case.

I noticed the change in Noir as well, the fact he didn't speak indicates someone different under the mask than in season 4

And yet it was just him. S5 is not going to be satisfying is it