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“The Boys” has always been a topical show, providing commentary about the state of the world through the lens of superheroes and villains, but the Prime Video series is evolving into something else entirely in its final season. It’s no longer merely satirizing current events, it’s predicting them.
Already tap dancing on the brink of insanity, Homelander is pushed over the edge in Episode 3 when the late Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) appears to him in an angelic “vision.” She tells him that his destiny is not merely to serve as the leader of the free world, but to become an actual living god — nay, the living God.
“You’re about to ascend, become immortal, divine, a true god with the love of the world,” Madelyn says in his vision. “I know you think love is weak, but who is more loved than Jesus? And why should he have more love than you? You save more people than he does.” With Madelyn’s words ringing in his ears, Homelander’s mission is clear: make the American people see him as God.
If this feels eerily familiar to you, that’s because the episode dropped just 48 hours after President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus on social media. But “The Boys” creator Eric Kripke promises he didn’t steal a crystal ball from “The Simpsons” writers’ room. As he explains it, the uncanny coincidence “just sort of happened.”
“We wrote this episode two years ago, even before the election,” Kripke tells TVLine. “It just came from us talking about where Homelander was moving, and what his sort of final form would be, as he’s been slowly losing his mind over the seasons.”
Frankly, Kripke thought the idea was “crazy” when it was initially pitched. “My concern was that everyone would think Homelander had gone too far and it had gotten cartoonish,” Kripke says. “That was my legitimate concern. But the world keeps out-crazying us. I just want to be like, ‘Yo, we’re trying to do satire! Will you slow down for a minute and give us a chance to be crazier than the world?’ It’s honestly exhausting. I just wish the Trump administration would quit marketing the show for us.”
Why The Boys Needs To End With Season 5
As much as fans of “The Boys” would love the show to continue beyond Season 5, series creator Eric Kripke believes that it’s the perfect time for this group of Supes to take its final bow.
“Creatively, it needs to end,” Kripke tells TVLine. “I’m really grateful that Amazon is letting us go out on top. You don’t want to become a pale imitation of yourself and go out on life support. But also, you can only have Homelander descend into madness for so long, and you can only have Billy Butcher spoiling for a fight for so long, before it starts to get repetitive. I think, frankly, we have flirted with that already, so it was good to know that we finally have an ending. Instead of heading for the cliff and then backing away, we can finally head for the cliff and fly right off it, ‘Thelma and Louise’ style.”
And what would a final season be without a few shocking twists? We already watched A-Train meet his untimely end at Homelander’s hand in the season premiere, and Kripke says there’s plenty more devastation where that came from.
“It was really invigorating knowing you don’t have to keep anyone alive,” Kripke says. “A lot of times, even beyond life or death, there’s only so far you can go in character conflicts because you ultimately have to keep those characters interacting. We didn’t have to do that anymore this season, so you could just explode people — proverbially and literally — into different directions, and that was really fun.”
OK, let’s talk: Were you shocked by the prescient nature of “The Boys” Season 5, Episode 3? And how do you feel about the direction of the show’s final season overall? Drop a comment with your thoughts below.
