‘The Boys’ Season 5 Premiere review: We’re in the endgame, now

Near the end of The Boys Season 5 premiere, “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite,”  Homelander stands over A-Train’s body, and the look on his face is anything but triumphant. It is something smaller and more pathetic than triumph. It is the expression of a man who wanted to be loved and got obedience instead. Who wanted a crowd and got a corpse. Who needed the moment to mean something and received, instead, the silence of a man who died laughing at him.

Antony Starr, who has been doing extraordinary work on this show for six years now, holds that expression for exactly one beat too long. Not enough to tip into parody, mind you. But just enough to let you feel the edge of it.

That right there is The Boys at its best. And in these first two episodes of what is, improbably, one of the strongest final-season premieres in recent memory, The Boys is at its best more often than not.

Let’s back up.

The Boys has always been a show with a satire problem. Which is to say it’s always been a show where the satire works so well that it generates fans who don’t understand they’re the target. Eric Kripke has spoken about this at length, with a kind of pained bemusement that seems entirely genuine.

See, you write Homelander as a celebrity fascist whose followers cheer when he murders someone at a rally, and you get a not-insignificant corner of the internet posting edits of him to workout music. This doesn’t take away from the show’s craft or good intentions. But yeah. It’s certainly evidence of the show’s terrifying, even prophetic accuracy.

That said, these first two hours finally stop worrying about that problem. The show has always been a critique of unchecked power. Of the mythology that serves power, of the media infrastructure that launders it. Of the ordinary people who find it easier to kneel than to stand.

But it has also, sometimes, hedged those critiques. Diffused them with shock comedy and gross-out spectacle while the argument inside the entertainment. The premiere, for what it’s worth, refuses to hedge.

The Boys Season 5 premiere is meaner, sadder, and more focused.

It presents Freedom Camps — literal detention facilities where Homelander’s political opponents are imprisoned, surveilled, and occasionally murdered for attempting to leave — and it goes full literal. The camera finds a child being separated from their parent. By holding on the child’s face long enough that you cannot look away it is doing exactly what you think it is doing.

The question of whether that constitutes art or editorializing is probably a less interesting question than it appears. The Boys has always been editorial. The genre costume it wears is satire. The thing to evaluate is whether the editorial lands with the force it intends, and here, mostly, it does.

Episode 1’s structural problem is that it has too many logistical pieces to move and not quite enough space to move them in. Six months of narrative compression — the coup, the camps, the Boys’ scattered exile — has to be established almost entirely through behavior rather than exposition. And that’s because the show correctly decides that pausing for recap would be a different kind of lethal.

The result is something that plays, at times, like two or three episodes in a blender. Butcher formulates a plan. He retrieves Kimiko from Manila. Recruits a tunnel-digging Supe who eats soil. And the prison break begins. All of this is propulsive and watchable and occasionally very funny. But it has the feeling of a season clearing its throat.

No more illusions.

What saves Episode 1 from feeling merely functional is the texture it maintains even while moving fast. Mother’s Milk is an alcoholic ruin. Frenchie has somehow become the most functional person in the group, which is a reversal that should feel unearned and doesn’t.

Kimiko can speak now — a Gen V development the premiere absorbs with a jarring, slightly comedic abruptness that I think is entirely intentional — and hearing Karen Fukuhara’s voice coming out of a character defined for four seasons by silence is definitely disorienting in a way the show knows how to use.

And Butcher, at the episode’s end, sits alone with his dog, Terror, cradling the animal with quiet, undemonstrative tenderness. This is a man who has burned away almost everything human in himself and is still trying to protect what little remains.

That image — Karl Urban, face soft, holding a dog — is almost as gut-wrenching as any of the episode’s goriest sequences. It’s a thesis statement about what the final season is going to be about from here on. It’s about the question of whether humanity survives the machinery built to destroy it, in a country that has decided the machinery is patriotism.

The satire stops hiding.

Episode 2, however, is where the season becomes something special. The shift is basic but effective: after the pell-mell reassembly of the premiere, Episode 2 returns to the show’s classic grammar. There is a target. There is a plan. The plan goes wrong. The wrongness reveals character.

What’s exceptional, though, is how much the episode wrings from that grammar. How the wrong turns illuminate not just individual psychology but the season’s broader argument about complicity and consequence.

The testing of the supe-killing virus on a newly-introduced Supe is the episode’s procedural spine. But the marrow is the Soldier Boy material. Jensen Ackles gets to do something pretty interesting with this character in a way he wasn’t always permitted to do in Season 3. The show is now interested in Soldier Boy’s interiority, in the gap between the myth he inhabits and the damaged, needy, profoundly limited person beneath it.

When Homelander thaws him out — a desperate bid for the paternal validation that has always been Homelander’s most legible wound — the scene between them is one of the funniest and most uncomfortable the show has produced in a while. Not because it’s outrageous. Because it’s sad. It’s two men who need each other’s approval reaching for something neither of them is capable of giving. And each of them knowing it, and neither of them willing to say so.

The show’s sharpest edge yet.

The episode ends with Soldier Boy apparently dead and then, in the final image, not dead at all. It’s a decent fake-out, but it matters less than what precedes it. Homelander, alone with his father’s body, hits his own head repeatedly while apologizing to a corpse.

The scene’s power isn’t the reveal. It’s the portrait of Homelander it completes. He has absolute power. He controls a country. And the thing he cannot control — the thing that is destroying him from the inside, this season’s real engine — is the need to be loved by someone who cannot love. This is, the show keeps insisting, how fascism actually works. Fascism isn’t a coherent ideology at all. It’s the organized projection of a narcissist’s abandonment wound onto the body politic. Homelander doesn’t want a country. He wants a father who finally stays.

And then there is A-Train.

The death of A-Train — which occurs in Episode 1’s climax and reverberates through Episode 2’s emotional logic — is the most formally complete character arc the show has executed yet. Sure, it would be easy to describe it sentimentally, but sentimentality is not what makes it work.

The series begins, in its very first episode, with a man running through a woman at full speed. Hughie’s girlfriend Robin gets atomized by A-Train’s body moving faster than human tissue can survive, and what’s left of her is a pair of hands that Hughie is holding. That image is The Boys‘ founding act. It is what the show is made of: the casual annihilation of ordinary people by power that does not slow down. That does not see them, that processes them as obstacles and moves on.

Nothing’s slowing down for A-Train.

A-Train, in the Season 5 premiere, is being chased by Homelander. He’s moving at full speed. He’s going to escape. And then he sees a woman crossing the street. And he swerves.

This means that he dies because he doesn’t want to be what he once was. That’s it. That is the whole of his redemption arc, and it is delivered in a single physical gesture. A body moving left instead of straight. And that costs him everything and gives him, in the moment of his death, the thing he spent four seasons trying to earn. The dignity of choosing to be a real hero.

Homelander eventually snaps his neck for the trouble, and in the last seconds before he dies, A-Train laughs at him. Tells him exactly what he is. Refuses to be the validation Homelander needed. Dies as a hero, not because he performed heroism but because he finally, fully, stopped performing at all.

The callback works brilliantly because the show has spent six years earning the contrast. We know what A-Train did. We watched Hughie hold those hands. And so when A-Train chooses not to do it again, the choice lands as a moral fact. Maybe even an inevitability. The show’s original wound gets to heal, a little, albeit in the wrong direction.

A brutal callback.

A-Train couldn’t undo what happened, but he proved that what happened didn’t have to happen. Most shows that attempt this kind of structural callback end up aestheticizing it. They make it pretty, make it easy. The Boys makes it hurt. And that’s the point.

Granted, there are real weaknesses in these two hours. Episode 1 moves so fast that several relationships feel compressed past the point of emotional credulity. The Kimiko speech moment in particular, played for comedy in a way that papers over how strange it actually is to hear a character who has been silent for four years suddenly talking like someone who grew up on TikTok.

The CGI in the action sequences is visibly inconsistent, which has been a series-wide issue but feels more noticeable now that the show is trading on its own mythology. And the Oh Father material — Daveed Diggs, casting an enormous and instantly charismatic presence as a megachurch Supe who has married into the White House and is using Scripture to call Starlighters baby-eaters — shows up with such efficiency that it doesn’t quite have time to breathe in these first episodes.

The emptiness at the heart of Homelander.

But that last note is, importantly, a setup problem and not a ceiling problem. The show knows what Oh Father is for. He’s the synthesis of religious authority and fascist propaganda, the way the Church gets conscripted into the service of the strongman. The same way Homelander sees himself in the burning light of the divine and the way the divine sees an opportunity.

Diggs, to his credit, plays it with the specific pomposity of a man who knows he is performing but has begun to forget the line between the performance and the belief. It’s a thread the show will probably pull all season.

But for now, these two episodes are a promising opening to a final season that clearly understands what it is. The Boys was never a superhero show that “got political.” It has always been painfully political. It’s a political show that uses superheroes to say things other satires would have softened. And in its final hours, the softening is pretty much entirely gone. No one is safe.

Flags of our fascist fathers.

Weirdly enough, the show’s satire used to be one step ahead of reality. Right now it maybe feels a step behind. If only because the things it depicts are no longer speculative. That’s probably right, and I think the show knows it. I think the show has decided that the correct response to that problem is to stop reaching for a fresher dystopia and to look directly at the one we already have. To make the Freedom Camp look like a Freedom Camp. To let Homelander’s face, in the silence after A-Train’s death, tell you everything you need to know about how power actually feels about the people it destroys.

A-Train died laughing at Homelander. That’s the act of defiance the show is wagering the whole endgame on. That there is still something in us that refuses to perform for the thing that wants to consume us.

Whether it’s enough is the question six more episodes are going to have to answer.

The Boys Season 5 premiere (Episodes 1 & 2) is now streaming on Prime Video.

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Images courtesy of Prime Video.