“The Boys” bids a grim farewell to America

When last I spoke to Eric Kripke about “The Boys,” Donald Trump had just been re-elected. This followed a fourth season, filmed in 2023, that closed with a politician’s murder. That finale debuted days after Trump survived an attempt on his life.

Kripke told me what he’d told many other journalists: the rule guiding him and his writers is that what’s bad for the world is good for the show. The creator and showrunner then warned that the events of his superhero satire’s fifth and final season would be, in his words, “pretty bad.”

Even so, he held on to a glimmer of optimism. “I’m really hopeful that we are not prescient about some of these events,” Kripke told me. “I would love to be accused of being an alarmist.”

Two years into Trump’s second term, we now know that Kripke was not being alarmist. On the contrary, in some ways, “The Boys” version of present-day America looks more humane than ours.

Take its Freedom Camps, prisons for political dissidents where three of the story’s namesake heroes, Hughie (Jack Quaid), Marvin Milk (Laz Alonso) and Frenchie (Tomer Capone), were taken. They’re terrible places, but they don’t seem overcrowded. Each detainee has their own bunk. Fresh water is available. Virtual paradises, from the look of them, compared to the squalid conditions of ICE’s migrant detention facilities, as described by former inmates.

That said, Trump’s war on science guarantees that he and his cabinet will never have access to serum like Compound V,  a concoction created by the mega-conglomerate Vought International that confers superhuman abilities to normal people.

However, Trump did tweet out a meme depicting himself as Jesus on Easter in the same year that we saw the show’s villainous superhero Homelander (Antony Starr), a lab-created human made immortal by Nazi-derived science, designate himself America’s one true god.

Homelander also scheduled his divine ascent to coincide with Easter and planned to purge all non-believers to launch his new world order. Trump also loves purges, although everyone and everything he’s tossed aside has survived. He’s also as mortal as the rest of us.

When a superhero satire’s guesses about how bad life could get are outdone by reality, then the fiction has lost its escapist function. Still, the show’s dark, gruesome conclusion, one that might have been seen as controversial in a MAGA-free timeline, is worth digesting.

It holds that saving our country requires killing our populist gods. Figuratively speaking, I should say.

The entire Marvel and D.C. Universe conditioned us to worship such false idols, portraying wealthy, aristocratic heroes as our greatest defense against alien threats and vigilantes working beyond the reach of the law as the true keepers of justice. When “The Boys” launched in 2019, it seemed as if we’d reached our saturation point. That was before the pandemic brought Marvel’s timelines to our television screens and “The Boys” to what is now called Prime Video. It was also before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos began conspicuously flaunting his oligarch status and stroking Trump’s ego.

“The Boys” literalized Trump’s 2016 campaign brag that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any votes by showing Homelander murdering a man in public, after which his polling soared. He turned his followers on their neighbors and hunted his former teammate, Annie “Starlight” January (Erin Moriarty), when she decided to use her abilities as Vought advertised, protecting the weak and defending what’s morally right.

In the series finale episode, Vought’s America was saved from destruction not by the leader of The Boys, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), or any man, but by Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), a super who developed the ability to negate Homelander’s powers. Stripped of his invulnerability, Homelander wilts into a bawling wimp, begging for his life on his knees. Instead, Butcher beats the Man of Squeal to death on live TV, prying open his skull like a walnut for good measure. Not long after that, Hughie realizes Butcher also needs to be laid low to prevent more suffering. The icons of a dark age must be culled for the light to return. All of them.

This is a recap, not a suggestion. (When people drop veiled hints about their party plans for when “It” happens, that needs to be specified.) It’s not even a full summary of Season 5 highlights or a complete list of major character deaths. Better to preserve some mysteries in case you haven’t watched.

Then again, you may never get around to that, and that’s fair. “The Boys,” through no fault of its own, became an example of TV history repeating. Like “The Man in the High Castle” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” before it, our depressing reality erased the distance between us and its fantasy. It was all such a good time until we noticed how closely its plots resembled the news.

That we’re saying this about a show with people who stroll around in capes and latex, fly, read minds, run at bullet speeds and sport mega genitalia – Love Sausage was not unique, it turns out – adds a note of risible humiliation to it all. Historians warned us that America was slipping into authoritarianism, but did any of them predict we’d look stupid enough to make a gory comic book’s spoof of our decline and fall seem kinda lame?

(Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime. © Amazon Content Services LLC) Jack Quaid and Karl Urban in “The Boys.”

Not everything about the post-strongman world envisioned by “The Boys” is dim. Annie’s finale triumph shows her sending her rapist, The Deep (Chace Crawford), to the deep, permanently, torn apart by the ocean creatures he betrayed. (Another parallel between Kripke’s America and ours is that Homelander eventually turns on all his allies, if they don’t turn on each other first.)

Where her victory is personal, Kimiko’s is symbolic. Behind all his hypermasculine posturing and mindless violence, Homelander’s psychological instability stems from being a mama’s boy who was never suckled. Once he claims godhood, he accepts tributes of breast milk from his followers – this, after all but banishing his personal propagandist, Firecracker (Valorie Curry), who ruins her health to pharmaceutically induce lactation for his pleasure.

That it’s a woman who ultimately neutralizes Homelander shielding is a kind of poetic justice. Maybe that message arrives too late. Our country is being led to its ruin by an unpopular political party operating in lock step with Christian Nationalists. The Voting Rights Act is no more, and attacks on our civil rights are accelerating, all in the name of restoring a patriarchal white supremacist hierarchy.

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And yet, women are the vanguard of all movements that shift societies — that’s why right-wing men are desperate to bring them to heel. When male politicians want to claim allyship with women, they find a female running partner or candidate who will do their bidding and quickly get rid of them when they’ve served their purpose. “The Boys” has its own versions of Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, especially within the Vought corporate structure. Most are dead. The wasted potential known as Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) traded her genius for a lifetime of anonymous stupidity. All-purpose lickspittle Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) disfigures herself by growing a sentient, psychic tumor on the back of her head. She fails all the way up to the vice presidency before, at last, taking the fall for all her bosses’ sins. After all that, business as usual continues at Vought International.

(Jasper Savage/Prime © Amazon Content Services LLC) Karen Fukuhara in “The Boys.”

Kimiko’s superpower, meanwhile, is spontaneous regeneration. For five seasons, the audience watched her be torn to pieces, blown apart, shot and stabbed. To become capable of destroying a false god, she subjects herself to massive doses of radiation. Normalcy’s triumph is only possible because a stubborn survivor refuses to accept that fascism can’t be defeated.

Our last glimpse of Annie and Hughie shows that they’re pregnant and out of the world-saving business, while Marvin also recommits to his family. Kimiko, however, leaves America behind for a new beginning in a new country. One day, we may get there, too.

All episodes of “The Boys” are streaming on Prime Video.