The Boys S5 ★★☆☆☆

This review contains spoilers.

The Boys remains fun until the end but it was very apparent that ever since the third series the show has no idea for what to do other than have Homelander put everyone around him under more and more strain while the boys chase after a series of plot devices in the hopes of killing him until here, in the last two episodes, one of them finally works. Everything just kept lurching on in much the same way despite how increasingly little sense that made. The promise of massive escalation at the end of the fourth series was immediately rolled back but the boys are able to operate in pretty much the same way, going alone with Butcher every time despite everyone increasingly saying how fucked up and wrong he is, whether or not they are broke and slumming it up in one of Frenchie’s mob-connected safehouses, part of the CIA, or the most wanted fugitives in an increasingly fascist police state.

There are some changes! Kimiko is American now! And she talks in fluent English with an American accent. I do understand why getting her voice back would be a big thing and why they wouldn’t want the actress to put on a Japanese accent with broken English but it’s incredibly jarring, especially in Though the Heavens Fall where she gushes to an Asian-American woman about inspiration it was to see someone like her on TV when growing up despite the fact that Kimiko grew up in fucking Japan. She has only been in America for a few years. It’s not like the writers forgot that she’s not American; she says a few lines later that the show is how she first learned English. Did the writers think that Japan doesn’t have it’s own TV shows?

Kimiko also now speaks like a 2010s Redditor who has watched nothing but Kevin Smith movies trying to write Joss Whedon quips. It’s painful to watch and Karen Fukuhara gives a much less expressive performance now compared to when she was playing without her voice (though I can’t imagine it’s easy to give a strong performance while reading those lines). Everyone else’s dialogue is almost as dire now too. The show has been Flanderised into puerile vulgarity and clichéd inspirational speeches, completing its transformation from comic book satire into Marvel with knobs. We even get a slow motion sequence for A-Train that is pulled straight out of Quicksilver scenes from the X-Men films except that it looks like shit.

The satire, of course, has entirely shifted to political, but is all very surface level. It makes little jokes about and references to Trump’s regime and its media arms, and some of them did make me laugh, but it has very little to say outside of orange flag man bad. The series also fails to give much of a sense of what Homelander’s regime is like for people day to day outside of those at the top. People getting rounded up and arrested is mentioned a lot in passing and we see the camps but we get nothing like the subplot of seeing M.M.’s ex-wife’s boyfriend getting radicalised. There’s no place for that in the series any more when everyone has fully become comic book characters and are completely disconnected from normal life. Firecracker’s plot in One-Shots is the one part of the series that delivers something a bit better.

When the series finally, reluctantly, puts Hughie and Butcher in a moral conflict that was promised for so long it really doesn’t seem like it has anything to say. Butcher, after Homelander is dead and everything is over, threatening to still release the supervirus, says that he wants to kill the very idea of superheroes. I was expecting, in line other big speeches in the final few episodes, some refutation of the importance of superheroes and of stories. Some point being made about comics and superheroes in general, but the show doesn’t really have anything to say about that. Hughie is just forced to kill Butcher to stop him from committing mass murder and there isn’t really anything deeper. It’s fine. Don’t worry that none of the underlying structural problems with Vought and the superhero industry have been fixed at all.

Sage also ends up being an incredible waste. After so much contrivance being justified as part of her master plan her big plan is just… cause mass chaos so she can be Henry Bemis from Time Enough at Last in a bunker. Wow! A seventy year-old episode of the Twilight Zone! How original. But… why couldn’t she just do this anyway? She basically was already doing that before Homelander showed up. What, she can manipulate everyone in convoluted ways but couldn’t figure out a way to just get away from Homelander? To get rich on the stock market and build her bunker anyway? And then in the same episode where Kimiko forgets that she grew up in Japan, Sage is blindsided about Soldier Boy siding with Homelander despite the fact that back-Ashley told her in the same fucking episode that Soldier Boy was sympathetic to Homelander. Why are you surprised?

It’s not all bad. I still enjoy The Deep becoming ever-more pathetic and I quite enjoyed Ashley’s suffering in proportion to her increasingly higher rank as she fails upwards, having long gone past the point here she should have stepped away and saved herself. Her short redemption arc, undercut by her literally declaring in a press conference “I did nothing wrong,” only to be immediately impeached was a great ending for her and the show is still, for the most part, quite fun.

They probably should have stopped after they ran out of ideas, though.