The fourth season of The Boys aired on Amazon Prime Video earlier this year. The season was dinged by some fans for feeling a little slow, but it ended with a huge crash as sociopathic superhero Homelander essentially took over the country, becoming its de facto leader. According to showrunner Eric Kripke, this latest season was designed to set things up for a fifth and final season, which is in production now. As Kripke told Entertainment Weekly, Hughie (Jack Quaid) "solidly learn what it means to be human," Butcher (Karl Urban) "completely committ to being a monster," and Homelander "successfully t over every single thing and chang the country into basically a Homelander-led kingdom."
Now that all that is in place, Kripke and company are ready to blow our minds in the final season. "It's just such a gift to know, as a filmmaker anyway, when your story's ending because you know when to just blow the doors off it and completely change the world of the show," he said. "You don't have to maintain it because you've got six more seasons. You've got to squeeze out of it that it's time to bring on the endgame. So, that's what that finale was built to do."
Personally, I thought the fourth season was pretty much in line with what had come before; we got the same edgy humor, the same bludgeoning satire, the same hyper-violence. And the finale definitely teed up something very exciting things to come, particularly when it comes to the show's breakout character.
Homelander is "all trauma" in the fifth and final season of The Boys
Fans of The Boys have come to love the full ensemble, but there's no question that Homelander has made the biggest impact on the wider culture. And the more deranged and megalomaniacal he gets, the more compelling he becomes.
“He’s literally all trauma," Kripke told Variety. "I think what he plays so beautifully about it is he wants to be a god, but he’s a man. And it’s kind of slowly, or maybe not so slowly, driving him insane. So dealing with things like aging, dealing with insecurity, dealing with a need for love — all very normal human things, these are all things he finds detestable. He needs them, but he’s revolted by them all at once.”
Homelander has been played by Antony Starr since the beginning, and he's been active in shaping the character. For instance, he had a lot of input when it came to Homelander's visit to the lab where he was raised in the fourth season, which was one of the season's most celebrated episodes. "Eric and I like to say we've co-parented pretty damn well," Starr told EW. "What was on the page was already good. It just struck a chord in me that I thought we could go in a slightly different direction."
Homelander seems to repel and attract people in equal measure. He is a disastrous dysfunctional human being, at once the most powerful person on the planet and someone who hasn't progressed emotionally past the level of a toddler. Something about those contradictions results in a character people can't ignore. “People hate the character, love to hate the character, and then there’s this weird thing where they empathize with the character,” Starr said. “It’s really interesting meeting fans, which I do quite a lot. They do really feel like, ‘What the f---? What’s wrong with me? I love Homelander, but he’s so bad.’ I take that as a signal that we’re going in the right direction, that it’s a bit more challenging for people than just spoon-feeding them.”
The Boys spinoff Vought Rising will be a period drama
The Boys may be ending, but the Boys cinematic universe — because of course a successful show must beget a cinematic universe — is just getting off the ground. So far so good; the first season of spinoff show Gen V, about college-aged supes, has been well-received and has a second season on the way. And beyond that, Kripke and company are working on Vought Rising, a prequel series that will revolve around Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and Stormfront (Aya Cash). Obviously it'll be set in the past, since Stormfront is very much dead in the main timeline of the show.
"No one's really done a period superhero show that deals with U.S. history, with Joseph McCarthy and Judy Garland and Ronald Reagan and Hoover," Kripke said. "I think it's just such a fascinating idea for a show whetherThe Boys existed or not."
"Quality control to me is the most important thing, that each one of these series is fun to watch on its own," Kripke added. "It doesn't need the other one to exist." I'll say that he seems to be doing a good job so far. The second season of Gen V will be out in 2025 while the fifth and final season of The Boys will likely be along sometime in 2026. There's no firm release date for Vought Rising yet.
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