The Boys has overstayed its welcome
The Boys Season 5 is the most exhausting TV viewing experience I've ever had.
While the show began as a savvy skewering of superhero stories, it soon devolved into a punishing political satire with all the sharpness of a baseball bat. Season 5 continues that trend with The Boys' darkest, most dour season yet — one that plays at commenting on our fractured America, but only offers shock value as opposed to real substance.
In The Boys Season 5, Homelander is in control.
The Boys Season 5 picks up a year after the events of Season 4, when Homelander (Antony Starr) took control of the U.S. government. Since then, he's continued to shore up his volatile base and imprison any detractors in so-called freedom camps. There, detainees like the Boys' Hughie (Jack Quaid), Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso), and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) are subjected to a non-stop deluge of Vought propaganda. Oh, and they're routinely tortured by sadistic Supe guards, including Love Sausage (Derek Johns), whose extendable penis gets extensive screen time as a tool for keeping prisoners in check.
The penis whip of it all is emblematic of The Boys' decline: Take something that was initially fun and shocking, then beat the enjoyment and surprise out of it until all you're left with is a resigned feeling of, "Oh, we're doing this again."
The biggest offender here is the show's relentless focus on Homelander, whose megalomania reaches new heights in Season 5. However, while his ambitions keep growing, everything else about him has plateaued. After Homelander faced no consequences for killing a civilian in plain sight in the Season 3 finale, the show has escalated the atrocities he commits to prove over and over that he can get away with murder and still have the United States in the palm of his hand. It's bleak to the point of numbing.
The Boys' political satire lacks depth.
Adding to that numbness is the fact that America's current reality is more upsetting than anything The Boys tries to conjure up.
Showrunner Eric Kripke has revealed that Season 5 was written before the 2024 election, and that the writers were envisioning a cautionary tale of what a new authoritarian America would have looked like should Donald Trump win. Of course, what they wanted to caution against is exactly what happened, leading to some eerie parallels between Season 5 and the real world. Coordinated police efforts to round up Starlight (Erin Moriarty) supporters recall ICE raids, while Homelander remains an explicit stand-in for Trump. However, the show's satire is unprepared to meet the real world's political moment.
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Like in past seasons, The Boys Season 5 seems to believe that simply name-dropping buzzwords is satire enough. Every episode feels like the show is running down a hot-button topic checklist, crossing off talking points like immigration, trans rights, and DEI initiatives without actually saying anything new or specific. If Trump had lost the 2024 election, perhaps we'd be able to look at these scenes and laugh a little about the the nightmarish alternate history we might have lived through. Instead, these moments bludgeon us with our reality and even feel dated by this point, enough to make you wish for truly any course correction and deeper introspection on the show's part concerning the second Trump presidency.
Even most of the non-overtly political elements of the season are slogs, from uninspired pop culture references (a Nicole Kidman AMC parody in 2026? Really?) to some of the most heinous insults you're ever heard. I get it, The Boys revels in its own rancidness. But five seasons in, the effects are stifling, and the lack of catharsis turns even the most ridiculous of fight scenes into joyless affairs.
There are still standout moments this season. Notably, they involve little to no Homelander. Personal conflicts within the Boys offer up rich character moments for the whole team, including a tense, paranoia-fueled sequence. Elsewhere, the Deep's (Chace Crawford) misadventures provide The Boys' most consistent dose of silliness, even if his manosphere podcast once again skews too far into checklist territory.
But on the whole, The Boys Season 5 is nowhere near a powerful swan song for what was once a refreshing superhero takedown. Instead, it's an agonized limp to the finish.