The following story contains spoilers for The Boys season 5, episode 8, “Blood and Bone.”
IT SHOULD BE nothing but a pleasure to watch Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) ram a crowbar’s wedge end into Homelander’s (Antony Starr) face, then pry open his skull to spill his brains on the Oval Office’s floor. In each of The Boys’s five seasons, plus a cameo in the spin-off series Gen V, Homelander has, at nearly every available opportunity, casually perpetrated a variety of atrocities, crimes against humanity, and mundane brutalities. In action and speech, he’s expressed the absolute worst of our species, though because he’s a lab experiment given a cape, he’d bristle at being lumped in alongside us mere mortals. In the show’s context, Homelander had to die. The alternative would have been pseudo-theocratic dystopia.
But as Butcher performs a Mortal Kombat-style fatality—of the modern persuasion, in which the loser dies four times before they finally expire— on Homelander, the acrid taste of dissatisfaction hangs in the air. This certainly makes for an unexpected note in what should be a moment of pure, guilt-free triumph. We get ignominy, certainly, as Homelander falls to his knees before Butcher, begging for his life after realizing how high he can jump without his power of flight and feeling the blunt-force impact of a vicious right hook for the first time in his life. He whines and cries, and the spectacle of his pathetic shame goes down as a treat until the time comes for Butcher to at long last avenge his wife, Becca, Homelander’s victim prior to the events of the series.
There is no fanfare to the moment. No exultant Howard Shore orchestrals ring over the sequence, which lets viewers sit with the mechanical splurt-crack-splat of Butcher’s impromptu surgical extraction of Homelander’s gray matter. The sound is revolting, the sight is horrific, and the other characters in the scene react accordingly. We see relief on their faces, but why wouldn’t M.M. (Laz Alonso), Hughie (Jack Quaid), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) feel relieved? They’re alive, Homelander is dead, and the odds favored a reverse outcome. But none of them communicate jubilation at their enemy’s defeat, likely because there’s still a monster in the room—and it’s Butcher.
The Boys drew a relatively solid line connecting Butcher and Homelander as foils to one another at the series’ outset. As seasons passed and the narrative expanded, they began functioning as mirrors instead, reflecting shared philosophies, desires, and goals; They’d each like to kill the other, though they seem to prefer the pursuit and hesitate at its logical conclusion. Butcher needs Homelander; Homelander needs Butcher. They’re two peas in a horrible pod, with no regard given for whatever havoc they happen to wreak on friends, family, and bystanders in their mission.
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The series finale, “Blood and Bone,” puts a strict timer on their conflict, and forces them to shit or get off the pot: One of them has to die. Every other scheme Butcher and The Boys have cooked up has failed, so of course it’s their maddest one yet that they all hang their hopes, and frankly the hopes of the world, upon: using Kimiko as a homegrown de-powering ray in the same vein as Soldier Boy, to rob Homelander of his strength, render him vulnerable, and give him to the Devil. This is harshest note played in the finale. The Boys has shown us this exact same trick before, in the season 3 episode “Herogasm,” in which Soldier Boy partnered with Butcher and Hughie—each under the effects of V24, a chemical MacGuffin that bestows temporary superpowers on users—to take Homelander down. It didn’t work then, obviously. Why it should work now is a question we don’t quite have the answer to. Fine: Kimiko has the power of love on her side, thanks to a last second vision of Frenchie—a fantôme, if you will—that gives her the confidence to start blastin’.
She succeeds where Soldier Boy failed in “Herogasm,” and, well, that’s it. There are no more members of The Seven to worry over. Prior to Homelander’s defeat, Starlight sends The Deep (Chace Crawford) flying into the ocean blue, from which he has been forbidden entry by Xander (Samuel L. Jackson in a brilliant voice cameo) for his role in the Vaught oil pipeline disaster two episodes prior. A swarm of marine animals then see to his end, which is capped off with his impalement on an octopus tentacle. Oh Father (Daveed Diggs), too, is no more, done in by his own voice in a well-cut comic demise (One that rings somewhat similar to that of his Marvel universe counterpart, Black Bolt, in 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness). There’s nothing left to do but deal with Homelander.
We should feel catharsis. But because of the exemplary work Antony Starr has done in mining the character’s neuroses to reveal the kernels of humanity buried under the suit, instead we feel pity. What everyone’s been saying about Homelander this season is true: Without his powers, he’s nothing. He knows it, too. He’s always known. It’s why he reacts to criticism, disagreement, and dissent with violence, because those are his tools for maintaining power–and the appearance of power. Beneath it all, he’s a scared little boy, which matters in “Blood and Bone” solely on the effect of Starr’s performance across the series. As a flesh and blood man, he’s frankly kind of sad.
When Butcher executes him in the same style as in Garth Ennis’s comic books, the death reads as excessive, even unnecessary. That’s the point. In the comics, Butcher kills a clone of Homelander posing as Black Noir, whose sole order was to serve as a failsafe in case the real Homelander became a threat to national security. It was the clone, not Homelander, who murdered Becca, and who was intentionally caught on camera committing unspeakable acts against innocents, all to manufacture a reason to carry out his mission of killing Homelander. There’s nothing to feel about Homelander’s death in the comics but acceptance, because no other authentic emotion underpins the moment.
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But the show encourages complicated feelings about Butcher executing Homelander. “I know what my dad was,” Ryan tells Butcher later on, “and it’s better that he’s gone. But you’re not a good person either.” Is Butcher as bad as Homelander? Is he worse? The Boys doesn’t moralize either way, but does draw a sharp distinction between Butcher and his comrades, who wouldn’t do the things that Butcher has done—and attempts to do, once Ryan’s rejected him and his dog, Terror, has suddenly passed away in his sleep. Without Homelander, Butcher has no mission, like the Black Noir/Homelander of the comics, so he gives himself a new one: Head to Vought Tower and dump the remaining dose of the anti-supe virus into the sprinkler tank. Otherwise, what else does he have left?
Homelander meant to make the world bend to his image. Butcher meant to rid it of a sizable chunk of its population. Where it took a team to stop the former, it just takes Hughie to stop the latter, though Butcher ultimately hesitates where Homelander goes down swinging. He thinks of his younger brother, Lenny, when he looks into Hughie’s face, and Hughie takes the opportunity to shoot him, preventing him from triggering the sprinklers. In a way, Butcher’s ending feels like a miscarriage of justice, informed by Hughie’s appeals to, and acknowledgment of, Butcher’s own muzzled humanity. Maybe Butcher wasn’t a bigger monster than Homelander. But he was every bit as monstrous as him, and as devoid of purpose as him. The comics got that part right. The show, on the other hand, got everything else.
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Boston-based freelancer Andy Crump is a contributor for Men’s Health, Paste Magazine, Polygon, Thrillist, The Hollywood Reporter, and Hop Culture., and is a member of the Online Film Critics Society and the Boston Online Film Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter @agracru. He is composed of 65% craft beer.
