As the fifth and final season of Prime Video’s satirical superhero show ‘The Boys‘ arrives, showrunner Eric Kripke explained how he brought it all together by using a large board filled with loose ends, an idea he borrowed directly from the writers of television’s most famous finale.
For any showrunner, ending a series is a nightmare. “The graveyard is literally filled with terrible series finales,” Eric Kripke admitted recently. But as he prepared to take ‘The Boys‘ to its “gory, epic, moist climax,” he chose not to panic. Instead, he did something smart and called the writers behind ‘Breaking Bad.’
The Board of “Loose Ends” Strategy
With Season 5 now streaming, Kripke has finally opened up about how that AMC show directly shaped the ending of his bloody superhero satire. It turns out the answer wasn’t just big explosions; it was careful, almost obsessive note keeping.
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Before the final season, Kripke talked about his fear of messing up the ending. He had seen too many great shows trip at the finish line. He didn’t name names, but you could feel the shadow of shows like ‘Lost‘ and ‘Game of Thrones‘ hanging over him. He knew he needed a plan. So he turned to the writers of ‘Breaking Bad‘, a show he calls “as good as it gets,” and asked for their secret. Their answer was simple but effective.
“It was just a list of loose ends on their board,” Kripke explained on Sony’s Creator to Creator podcast. “They had no idea what to do with them, that they would keep compiling over the seasons. When it came time to do the final season, they would just start checking them off.“
Full Circle Storytelling and Bringing Back Characters
Kripke took that lesson seriously. Before writing a single word of the final season, he sent his writer’s assistant on a long mission to rewatch the whole show, find every character still alive and identify every dangling storyline and every plot thread left “on the floor” from earlier seasons. They put it all on a giant board.
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“It’s a big challenge,” Kripke told Shawn Ryan. “How do you create the illusion that a detail dropped in Season 1 or Season 2 is suddenly coming back to pay off?” The goal was to look like geniuses after the fact and make fans believe the chaos was planned all along.
You can see the results of that board in the final season. Early reviews praise Season 5 for tying together loose ends and bringing things full circle with Season 1. Kripke himself talked about the importance of “bookends.”
“I was all for as many characters as we could bring back from previous seasons,” he told CinemaBlend. He pointed to Breaking Bad’s habit of bringing back old faces for its final run. “We really tried to do that.”
Emotional Closure and Avoiding a Bad Finale
The show does deliver the big bloody fight between Karl Urban’s Butcher and Antony Starr’s Homelander. But Kripke said the ‘Breaking Bad’ method serves a bigger purpose. The board isn’t just for shock value. It’s for emotional closure.
“There’s a lot of things we’re doing that were bookends,” he said. This is a show that loves to flip superhero cliches upside down. However, in the final season, it wants to make sure that after the blood dries, the story feels finished, not left behind.
As ‘The Boys‘ airs its last episodes, Kripke knows the real world has started to feel a little too close to his satire. But by borrowing the careful planning from Walter White’s final gamble, he hopes to avoid those “corpses in the graveyard.” He might have just pulled off a miracle, a perfect landing for one of the hardest shows to land.
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