*Warning – contains major spoilers for The Boys season 5 episode 7.*
Final seasons are tough. Once you’ve decided to end a show, and have announced you’re doing such, analysis of just how you’re doing that can be intense – particularly in the case of high-profile series with dedicated fanbases.
You just have to ask the team behind Game of Thrones. That show’s final run managed to please almost no one, and in the process blunted feelings towards the show as a whole. Where it was once talked about in the same breath as series such as Breaking Bad and The Wire, that is now far from the case.
It also feels like its example has, in many ways, spooked showrunners ever since. Ryan Condal, the showrunner of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon, told us ahead of that show’s second season that the fear surrounding sticking the landing “lurks” in his mind – this being many years before he would need to stick said landing.
The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke has clearly been aware of it too when crafting the superhero show’s ongoing fifth season. In repeated interviews he has stressed that he approached writing the conclusion with “absolute terror”.
All this to say, the intense online scrutiny that now surrounds hit shows probably hasn’t been the best for the creative freedom and confidence of writers, even as it has helped to invigorate fandoms and boost viewership, and thus breathe life into series which may otherwise have died on the vine.
Regardless, it’s a part of the media landscape which isn’t going away anytime soon, and this hyper-critical approach has led some fans to enter the final season of The Boys with a instinctively negative attitude. Rather than hope for the best, they have prepared themselves for the worst, and are minded to pinpoint anything that doesn’t match up to their own personal ideal ending.
A few episodes in, another trope of internet criticism crept in, with some fans claiming the season was too “slow” and that some of the episodes were “filler”.
Kripke himself called this out recently, telling TV Guide: “None of the things that happen in the last few episodes will matter if you don’t flesh out the characters. I’m getting a lot of online dissatisfaction, to put it politely. And I’m like, ‘What are you expecting? Are you expecting a huge battle scene every episode?’
“One, I can’t afford that. And two, it would be so empty and dull, and it would just be about shapes moving without having any import.”
I would argue wholeheartedly that he’s right. Plot is important, there’s no doubt about it, but some fans seem to have unreasonable expectations when it comes to the pacing of said narrative.
If The Boys was pure plot, it wouldn’t have lasted anywhere near five seasons – the overarching conflict is a battle between two men, Homelander and Butcher, one which, in the end, will surely be a zero-sum game.
There’s only so many ways you can extend this battle without it coming to a bloody, ultimate end, so instead you fill out the world with interesting characters, and you interrogate them across the seasons – taking them on journeys through which they shift and change.
Of course, fans are well within their rights to have a problem with exactly where those characters are taken, and it seems many do when it comes to season 5. Even though I have been largely satisfied on this front, I’m not here to argue that point.
No, instead I’m here to talk about one specific scene from the most recent episode, the penultimate one from the show’s entire run, and how it proves Kripke and the writers room’s decision to focus on character moments over never-ending carnage and plot twists right.
The scene in question was a long time coming – Kripke has been teasing big deaths on the way since the end of season 4, and all season we’ve been hearing about the life Kimiko and Frenchie wanted to build for themselves once their battle with Homelander was over.
It was obvious this was too good to be true, so it always seemed likely that at least one of them wouldn’t make it out alive.
Still, it remained a hugely affecting moment when we finally saw Tomer Capone’s character Frenchie, one of our heroes and a fan-favourite character since the show’s very beginning, bite the dust at the hands of Homelander.
There are some obvious reasons why this moment works, and none of them are logic-based or plot related. Those who are obsessed with these matters will no doubt point to the question of why Homelander left Frenchie still breathing and largely intact, rather than horrifyingly mutilated as he has so many of his other victims.
I understand this argument, but think it is ultimately missing the point. Suspension of disbelief is key to almost any scripted series, particularly heightened ones in the sci-fi and fantasy realm, and sometimes it’s more important to prioritise the emotion of a scene.
This scene works because we care about Frenchie, we care about Kimiko, and we care about their relationship – all of that is down to character work which has been built up over not only this season but also seasons past, in the quieter scenes the “filler” brigade may think are boring or pointless.
It also works because this is the first time we’ve seen one of The Boys killed. If this season were to go down the plot and action-heavy route which some would have hoped for, we would have already seen most of The Boys wiped out by now, as Homelander laid waste to them in their droves across the episodes.
Yes, The Boys have had plot armour – they’ve had it since the show’s very beginning, and they’ve had to have it so that moments like this matter and aren’t just more blood being splattered against the screen as another thoughtless death.
Side characters can go out like this, and even some members of the Seven, given we’re rooting for their deaths. But The Boys are the ones we’re supposed to care about – their deaths have to mean something more.
Once again, I want to stress, I’m not arguing that this season of The Boys has been perfect. The show’s first season was arguably its high point, while season 3 was also a close contender. Since then, it has been a hugely entertaining watch week to week, with a visual style, sense of fun and dark humour that few other series possess, even as it lost some of its initial shock factor and free-wheeling energy.
All this to say, it’s not going to be mentioned in that category with Breaking Bad and The Wire and it was never going to be.
If we’re talking criticisms when it comes to this season, then for one thing, I’d agree with many fans that it’s dedicated a strange amount of its focus hinting towards prequel series Vought Rising, in a way which feels like that show should have actually been released first.
However, on the matter of “filler”, I have to disagree. Our attention spans may be waning as a species, but episodic TV’s great benefit is that it allows us to sit with characters and to see them in a variety of situations – be they long-term consequential, or merely an interesting adjunct.
All of this ultimately weighs in to our overall feelings about the characters, meaning moments like Frenchie’s death are possible and they hit the hardest they can.
Watching these discussions play out, I am reminded of something the writer Dennis Kelly said to me in an interview at the end of last year, promoting his drama Waiting for the Out. It’s a thought I’ve already reached for this year when writing about the Netflix series Vladimir.
“My bugbear at the moment is that we are currently mistaking adrenaline for drama,” he said. “We currently think that adrenaline and drama are the same thing and they f**king are not.”
This, to me, is the “filler” debate in a nutshell. We could have had the adrenaline-heavy version of this final season where a different member of The Boys is being dispatched each week, and the brutality is certainly present, but it means less emotionally.
Some will still want that, and Frenchie’s death, as impactful as it was, will have done little to change their minds. However, I’d argue that Kripke and his team made the right call. Whether that threads right through the finale, who knows? I haven’t seen it yet, and there are so many ways it could impact my opinion on this season’s arc as a whole.
However, I’ll certainly be going into it with an open mind, and trusting that the writers will be prioritising character above all else – even as there’s still likely to be plenty of guts flying.
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