‘The Boys’ Season 5 Episode 5 review: “One-Shots”

The final minutes of The Boys Season 5 Episode 5 matter a lot more than anything that happens in the Supernatural reunion sequence. More than the celebrity bloodbath in Mister Marathon’s mansion. More than Terror the bulldog’s erotic dreamscape, even.

We see Firecracker drop a Jesus figurine, one that she has carried since childhood, into the trash. We learned in the beginning of the episode that this was the one object that survived whatever terrible early years Firecracker’s Florida parish gave her shelter from. Yet she dumps it into the trash before walking down the hallway to tell Homelander she loves him.

He then drives her head into a bronze eagle.

She deserved better. She also, the show insists with considerable moral rigor, earned exactly this. “One-Shots” holds both truths without flinching, which makes it the season’s best episode yet. And in its quiet way, it’s also one of The Boys‘ finest hours overall.

The formal gamble this week is real.

The episode deploys an anthology structure, telling its single day through five character-specific POV vignettes. They include Firecracker, Black Noir II, Terror, Sister Sage, and Soldier Boy. And then it loops back to close Firecracker’s thread at the end, making her the alpha and omega of everything in between. So in an episode deceptively packaged as yet more filler (like last week’s haunted mansion outing), The Boys Season 5 Episode 5 ends on a huge turning point for the season.

Written by Judalina Neira and directed by Phil Sgriccia, “One-Shots” earns its titular conceit by using it to do something the season’s procedural plotting has systematically prevented. It lets characters exist as people before the tactical machinery reasserts itself.

The episode opens with the cold commercial for the Democratic Church of America. It has a Sam Elliott sound-alike voiceover, patriotic sweep, the full apparatus of Vought’s media infrastructure now running at full power in service of a man who wants to be God and will accept “Prophet” as a temporary compromise.

The numbers keep moving.

More and more Americans now accept Homelander as a messianic figure. The goal, though is still 70%. Homelander bridles at his “Prophet,” though. He wants to be “Savior.” He wants to be “Lord.” To cap this, he announces Easter as the date for unveiling the Homelander Bible. Which of course contains the Old Testament, New Testament, and Brand New Testament — that last one written entirely by AI. That’s a nice satirical grace note, by the way. Of course The Boys would have a machine-generated scripture for a machine-generated savior.

Firecracker sits in this meeting and visibly hates all of it. The episode’s first and most important piece of information about her is that the accent she performs on television — the exaggerated Southern evangelical persona, the red wig, the Truthbomb cadence — drops entirely when her childhood pastor calls. She meets with him in a diner wearing plain clothes, speaking in her own voice.

It reaffirms that Firecracker has been playing Firecracker. The real woman underneath that wig has genuine religious history. A father figure she actually loves. And a line she can’t seem to make herself cross. Because Homelander is now on the wrong side of it.

Praying for help.

Firecracker’s pastor, Reverend Dupree, asks her to help him save his church. Praying Mantis, a Vought-controlled acid-spewing supe, has attacked his church and others in her Florida hometown. The Democratic Church of America charges franchise fees to join, and he can’t afford it. He doesn’t want to join, either, out of principle.

The reverend is about to lose what’s left of his congregation to a theology he correctly identifies as fraudulent. So he asks the person he raised as a daughter to do something about it. To make matters worse, Firecracker’s expected to go on her news program and openly celebrate Homelander for it. Like the good soldier she is, she does it. She does it while fighting back tears as she sells her false pride in what has occurred.

The television segment that follows is the episode’s most quietly devastating sequence. Firecracker goes on air and accuses her pastor of harboring Starlighters. She implies he groomed children, maybe even her. She does this in her performance voice, in her wig, in front of the camera, and Valorie Curry keeps the tears just behind the performance the entire time. So that you can see both layers simultaneously. You see the woman Firecracker performs and the woman Firecracker is. In the same face, in the same shot.

The true believer.

This scene calls into question something the show has left productively ambiguous across two seasons: whether Firecracker has ever believed in any of the propaganda she’s spewed or if she’s always just been going along with what she’s ordered to do.

The episode’s answer is somewhat conclusive. She believed in some of it, performed more of it, and crossed into territory she sincerely finds unconscionable. And ultimately, she calculated that compliance costs less than resistance.

In other words, she sold her soul not for power or ideology but for survival. The tragedy is that the calculation was wrong. It was always going to be wrong. She just couldn’t see the end of the math from where she was standing.

Sister Sage and the apocalypse she craves.

The Sister Sage/Ashley vignette contains a pretty massive reveal for an antagonist’s who’s been keeping us guessing for quite a while. And it arrives in the middle of the episode, funny enough.

Sage gets Ashley drunk — both of her, the primary head and Back Ashley, the secondary one the show uses for a running joke about dissociation-as-superpower — and reveals her MCU-esque titled “Phase Two.”

She wants the supe virus released. But she also wants humans and supes to annihilate each other in a global war. “World War Supe,” as she callously dubs it. She wants to survive in a Colorado Springs bunker and emerge into the silence to read her books alone and unbothered. Sage certainly doesn’t want her peace to be disturbed by Homelander’s demands, and that’s why she hopes that Soldier Boy will prevent his son from becoming immune and immortal.

“Time Enough at Last.”

The Twilight Zone reference hanging around this scene — the Burgess Meredith episode, “Time Enough at Last,” in which a man survives nuclear holocaust and finally has time to read every book he wants before his glasses break — is the episode’s most important piece of intertextual scaffolding.

The show uses it to ask whether Sage’s plan carries the same ironic fate-trap. Where the smartest person alive, who found a cure for cancer that the medical establishment rejected and watched her grandmother die because of it, has channeled every subsequent grievance into an apocalypse architecture. Will she also find that the silence she engineered contains its own catastrophic joke?

The reason she wants Homelander dead, the episode reveals, is completely personal. It’s that he’s too needy. He would never stop bothering her. Sage, the most elaborately dangerous character the show has introduced in five seasons, wants the world to burn so she can read without interruption. That’s the punchline. It’s also one of the more terrifying character motivations the show has produced. Mostly because it’s so relatable. But also because it contains no vanity, no self-deception. She knows exactly what she wants, and what she wants is silence.

Terror dreams of Homelander.

The Terror segment functions as the episode’s emotional reset. We simply experience a a day-in-the-life of the Boys rendered through the subconscious of Butcher’s English bulldog. Who appears, by the way, to have romantic feelings for Homelander and a chocolate problem.

The show uses the conceit to deliver exposition it couldn’t plant anywhere else without stopping the episode’s momentum. Kimiko and Frenchie’s relationship continues fracturing. Frenchie wonders privately whether he could settle down. MM tells Butcher he feels fully at peace with the certainty that he’s going to die trying to kill Homelander. Butcher and Hughie argue about what to do with the V1 when they eventually find it.

Butcher still wants to destroy it. Hughie wants to use enough of it on Starlight and Kimiko to make them immune to the supe virus. He even invokes Becca’s name — the show returning to its moral center as the final episodes approach. After Terror nearly dies from Frenchie’s chocolate soufflé and the group saves him together, Butcher agrees. He’ll give Hughie enough V1 for Starlight and Kimiko. Assuming they find it in time.

The Supe in Supernatural.

Soldier Boy’s vignette shows him threatening Stan Edgar in a Vought holding cell — the same supe-proof room that held Queen Maeve, now containing a perfectly non-superpowered corporate executive. Edgar calls out that Homelander will never kill him because he needs him as a father figure too much.

Edgar then directs them to Los Angeles and Mister Marathon: a living archive of Vought history, the speedster who held A-Train’s spot in the Seven before A-Train beat him in a race and took it. He’s now a washed-up actor making bad superhero films for Sony Pictures. It’s a gleeful joke about the intricacies of Marvel and Sony sharing Spider-Man, and it thankfully doesn’t overplay its hand.

The LA sequence announces itself as self-aware comedy from the first shot. The homeless population, the traffic, the actors gathered at Marathon’s mansion playing cards and discussing which of their colleagues have already been arrested as Starlighters. It all plays like a Hollywood-in-hiding fantasy in which the creative class’s response to fascism is to gather in mansions and wait for someone else to solve it, quite obviously paying tribute to This is the End, down to the talent involved.

A who’s who of who’s next.

Seth Rogen, Kumail Nanjiani, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Will Forte, Craig Robinson are all here. And the celebrity-packed poker game ends in a bloody fight, with actors turning each other in to the Freedom Camps over casting disputes, Channing Tatum reportedly ratted out by Will Forte, Michael Cera possibly next because Christopher Mintz-Plasse keeps losing roles to him.

The satire is broad, but mostly engaging. The actors here are the moral equivalent of the worst supes, backstabbing their way through the apocalypse with the same petty opportunism they deploy through awards season.

Then comes the moment everyone’s been waiting for. Jared Padalecki’s Mister Marathon teams with Supernatural co-star Misha Collins, playing Malchemical, a noxious gas supe. The Supernatural reunion — Ackles, Padalecki, Collins, the three leads of Kripke’s previous show sharing a screen for the first time in this universe — lands as warmly as the context allows. Which means it lands funny and ends in Jensen Ackles’s character killing both his co-stars’ characters, which is the specific flavor of fanservice The Boys earns by committing to the bit.

The cost of pillow talk.

The chain that runs from Soldier Boy’s bedroom to Firecracker’s death is the episode’s most elegant piece of plotting. Soldier Boy mentions, on his way back from LA, that Firecracker expressed doubts about Homelander’s divinity during their pillow talk. He delivers this information like it’s a dinner party anecdote.

Homelander then processes the word “pillow talk” and seems to reveal he has never experienced it. He’s been with women but never stayed. Or never been stayed with. The joke is funny. The implication is bleak. A man who has never participated in post-intimacy conversation has now learned about it specifically through news that someone used it to betray him. It’s also fitting that the first information Homelander receives about what closeness looks like after sex is that closeness produces betrayal.

And this is the final brick in his theology. God don’t need other people. They don’t stay. Or talk afterward. Gods kill the people who make them feel human, even for a second.

“We all need love, don’t we?”

There are two words that Firecracker utters that seem to be what make Homelander kill her. She says, “We all need love, don’t we?” She then adds, “Even God.”

You can see his face change. Where previously he was starting to allow himself to show emotion and buy into her love, after hearing that, he steels himself and kills her. She notably says “even God” rather than “even you,” a grammatical distance that reveals she still sees him as a man, not a deity, which is precisely the truth Homelander cannot survive hearing. The eagle wing goes through her head. The symbol she spent two seasons building drives through the skull of the person who built it.

The episode’s title carries its three meanings cleanly to the end. One-shots as comic format (the anthology structure) and one-shots as the single issue a creator does for someone else’s book (the Supernatural reunion, Padalecki and Collins doing their one-off). But also one-shots as what Homelander now gives the people around him the moment they make him feel something: a single swift movement, no prolongation, no cruelty beyond the act itself. He doesn’t want to hurt Firecracker. He wants to stop feeling vulnerable. The eagle is the fastest available tool.

The season’s most formally complete death so far.

The Boys Season 5 Episode 5 ends with Firecracker’s body slumping off the wing, and the season turns toward its final three episodes with the clearest possible statement of where Homelander has arrived. He killed the last person who loved him for himself rather than for his power, and he did it because the love frightened him more than the alternative. A god who needs love is still a man. A man who kills the love is something else.

The show has three episodes left to figure out what that something is, and whether anything can stop it.

The Boys Season 5 Episode 5 is now streaming on Prime Video.

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Images courtesy of Prime Video.