‘The Boys’ finally ended after five grueling, violent, and sometimes awkward seasons, culminating in a bloody finale between Billy Butcher and Homelander.
Despite the fact that the show took a few iconic comic elements from the final, like the setting in the Oval Office and the infamous crowbar moment, the show took one big risk: it went for emotional payoff rather than shock. That probably saved the ending.
Homelander’s Death Needed To Feel Personal
One of the most significant differences from Garth Ennis’ comics is Homelander himself. In the original source material, Homelander ends up being less culpable than readers thought, as Black Noir secretly perpetrated many of the story’s worst crimes as part of a clone twist.
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That’s not something that showrunner Eric Kripke could ever have lived with, and it makes sense. “People love it, and mileage varies, but that just was never satisfying to me to have followed Antony Starr for all these seasons, and then at the very end to find out that he actually didn’t do any of the things that he thought he did; it was actually Noir, who was his clone. So, I was never gonna do that version,” he told Collider.
Throughout five seasons, Homelander was one of the most terrifying villains in television history, narcissistic, emotionally damaged, manipulative, and, despite all the superpowers, disturbingly human. To have pulled the rug at the last minute and blamed another character would have undermined years of story building.
Rather, the series allowed Homelander to be his own man. It was an ugly, tragic, and strangely satisfying moment when Butcher finally killed him after stripping him of his powers. No hope of salvation. No secret mastermind lurking behind the curtain. Two broken men wrecking each other just as the show always does.
Butcher’s Ending Was Dark, But Not Pointlessly Hopeless
It was also a nice touch at the end that made one of the most bleak Billy Butcher storylines in the comic a bit more palatable. Butcher’s anti-Supe crusade takes a toll on him, killing most of his teammates before Hughie shoots him.
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“We knew that we did not want to have Butcher murder all of the Boys. Hughie, being the only survivor, felt wrong to us. The show wisely didn’t go that far. Kripke said it just didn’t seem like the right thing to do for TV to have only one survivor after viewers had invested years of emotion in these characters.“
And, he’s probably right. A few pages of shocking readers is one thing; asking viewers to endure years of relationships only to have them all wiped out in the final hour is another. It wasn’t as if it were a happy ending, though. Butcher still died. The scars are still there. The world is still cruel and unsafe.
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