The Boys Butchered Its Ending

Spoilers follow for The Boys through series finale “Blood and Bone,” as well as the comics.

After 39 and a half episodes of buildup — and wheel-spinning — The Boys kills off Homelander in series finale “Blood and Bone.” Having been sapped of his powers by Kimiko’s newly developed laser-blast capability, Homelander goes out a pathetic wannabe, offering longtime enemy Butcher anything to stay alive. Butcher, unswayed, pries Homelander’s cranium open with a crowbar, and his brains spill out like so much breastmilk from a knocked-over bottle. It’s a moment that’s a long time coming, the capstone to a performance that Antony Starr really should have an Emmy for by now, and it’s arriving at least a half-season too late. It’s as if The Boys were so afraid to lose Homelander, and Starr’s scary-good performance, that it held onto him for longer than the narrative, and source material, demanded. In doing so, the TV adaptation fumbled the comics’ superior final act, turning Butcher’s own ignominious death at the hands of Hughie into an ineffective afterthought.

Butcher’s split-second decision to unleash his supe-killing virus in Vought Tower, and Hughie choosing violence by killing Butcher to stop him, is all rushed through to get to a tidy ending where the U.S. government is trustworthy again and Hughie and Annie are expecting. The accelerated pacing and sentimental nature of the finale’s closing minutes underserves both Butcher as a character and the dynamic between him and Hughie. The Boys was always a little too enamored of heroes, and as a result held back on giving Butcher the genuine villain arc the character needed to finally cap off the simmering enmity between him and Hughie. The series ends with a happy ending for the morally-at-peace Hughie, but its storytelling was so scaled down that this seemingly contradictory ending — Hughie kills the mentor who took him in, but saves a world that’s wronged him — was as limp as Deep’s corpse, sent to a watery grave by the sea creatures he was supposed to protect.

The dynamics between Homelander, Butcher, and Hughie have been central to The Boys from the beginning, representing the series’ continuum of violence. Hughie saw his girlfriend die in his arms because of A-Train’s haughty negligence, and turned to Butcher when the older man offered him a spot in his vigilante group. Butcher craved revenge against Homelander for raping his wife Becca, and didn’t care which supes he killed along the way. And Homelander, the maniacal, needy, deranged star of Vought’s superhero group the Seven, did things like abandon an entire airplane of people to their deaths, kill detractors in the street to cheering crowds of fans, and eventually, in the series’s final season, become convinced that he was an actual Christian god meant to rule the U.S. As the series went on, tension grew between the unrepentant Butcher, who decided that the best way to stop Vought developing another Homelander was to create a virus that would destroy all supes, and the hesitant Hughie, who refused to believe that all supes could turn out as awful as Homelander. By the time Butcher willingly took Compound-V in season three to give himself powers so that he could fight Homelander and other supes more effectively, the show was positioning him and Homelander as two sides of the same coin. Homelander’s contempt for humanity and Bucher’s contempt for supes were given equal weight, with Homelander’s actual countless murders and Butcher’s desire to obliterate all supes presented as similarly amoral.

The problem with that framing, though, was that a lot of the time, Butcher turned out to be right. Butcher was supposed to be a warning, a sign of how lost we could become if we used the tools of the enemy against them. But The Boys played the supes for humor, disgust, and shock value, and more often than not, they were worth reviling. Some of them objected to Homelander, but more of them went along with him, offering themselves in service of a world in which they would rule. As the series shook off most of the original comic books’ critique of the American military-industrial complex and leaned into Vought as a company built on Nazi ideology and Homelander as a Trump-like figure, whatever equivalency Homelander and Butcher were supposed to have became increasingly facile. Even when suped-up Butcher did awful things like kill Victoria Neumann, how could that really compare to Homelander staging a coup, taking over the country, opening internment camps for thousands of Americans who disagreed with him, trying to murder his own son, and killing his lover Firecracker and longtime Boys member Frenchie? How to weigh those on the same scale?

Hughie’s moral arguments were littered throughout the series, but they felt weaker and weaker as The Boys made Homelander more and more psychotic and gathered so many willing supes around him. In “Blood and Bone,” Hughie objecting to Butcher loading the Vought Tower’s sprinkler system with his supe-killing virus isn’t out of character. But in the comics co-created and written by Garth Ennis — spoilers ahead! — Hughie’s turn against Butcher feels far more earned because Butcher’s plan to kill all supes was a secret he was working on for more than a decade. For 12 years, Butcher forced original Compound-V developer Jonah Vogelbaum to refine a strain that could be weaponized into bombs, and he placed 260 IEDs around the world to vaporize into the atmosphere and kill any person with any bit of V within them. (Butcher also developed missiles that could shoot supes out of the sky; he was very busy.) He kept all of this secret from Hughie, Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, and the Female (who was given the name Kimiko in the TV show), who when they learn about the plan, feel betrayed and decide to stop Butcher. Butcher, meanwhile, starts killing the Boys’ own allies, and eventually turns on the Boys themselves, to keep his plan alive. Butcher killing Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, and the Female is major storytelling that spans seven issues in the comics after Homelander’s death, with the effect being dawning dread — the by-any-means-necessary Butcher really meant his by-any-means-necessary ideology, and his genocidal plan will kill something like 40 percent of the world’s population. Are we baddies, too, for having agreed with his earlier methods?

In the comics, Hughie’s motivations to kill Butcher are a mixture of revenge for their friends and legitimate fear for how far Butcher has gone in service of what he calls his “job.” And even then, Hughie’s final confrontation with Butcher in the Empire State Building, where Butcher plans to watch the bombs go off, has all the complicated dynamics of their sorta-fraternal relationship. Hughie launches himself at Butcher and smashes through a window, Butcher catches him, and the two fall together. When Hughie refuses to kill the paralyzed Butcher, Butcher says he murdered Hughie’s parents — a lie, because he knows the only way Hughie will hurt someone again is to avenge his family. Hughie kills Butcher and is agonized when he discovers Butcher’s deception, but he also maintains elements of Butcher’s ideology. He threatens Vought’s executives with the IEDs, telling them he’ll detonate if they ever put supes in the military and use them to attack another country. And in the final scene set in Vought’s HQ, Vought’s R&D team admits that even their “new generation” of supes (who are outfitted in all white, not unlike the KKK) are “never going to change” to be less sexually depraved or less dumb. That aligns with Hughie’s final realization that “we should have gone straight at the fucking Corporation in the first place, instead of wasting our time on the dickheads in tights.” Hughie doesn’t want to commit a genocide, but he’s resigned to the fact that someone needs to stop Vought, and if need be, it’ll be him. 

None of this is in “Blood and Bone,” and the characters’ relationships suffer for it. The Boys has separated itself a fair amount from the comics over its five seasons, and one of its biggest changes was revealing Butcher’s genocidal plan in season four. Hughie, Frenchie, Mother’s Milk, Kimiko, Butcher, and Annie went back and forth so often about whether to use the virus that when Butcher finally decided to do so, it felt anticlimactic — and born less out of a desire to end supes and more out of a personal response to being rejected by Ryan, Becca’s son with Homelander, and left alone without his dog Terror, who dies of old age. Instead of taking a principled stand with international ramifications, Butcher is going on a suicide run with one vial of virus in Vought Tower, and without any of his additional actions against the Boys themselves, the concluding standoff with Hughie lacks a sense of real urgency or history. In Ennis’s The Scores on the Doors, when Hughie calls Butcher a “supervillain,” it feels right, and when Butcher tells Hughie, “You stayed yourself, no matter what I’ve done,” that’s a little bit of a comforting lie. Hughie still has the capacity for violence, but with Butcher gone, he won’t be as tempted to use it. He’s taking on the system, and that feels like Hughie both honoring Butcher and realizing that he has more power than he might have thought.

“Blood and Bone” mimics elements of its source material: After Hughie shoots Butcher, Butcher says, “I gave you no choice … You stayed yourself, no matter what I done.” Yet Hughie and Butcher are now such thin versions of themselves, regurgitating the same arguments without any larger infringing factors upon them, that Bucher’s reassurance doesn’t mean much. Where Ennis filled in his vision of America with protestors furious at Vought, and Hughie was energized to take a stand against the corporation that ruined his and so many other lives, The Boys gives its characters happy endings that are so individualistic they become weightless. Mother’s Milk reunites with his family; Kimiko goes to France to eat a madeleine and think of Frenchie; Hughie and Annie run an audio/video store, and although Annie’s pregnant, she’s still doing small-scale crime prevention. The world at large seems absolutely fine. Congress — who knew they still existed on this show! — has impeached Ashley Barrett, and she’s been arrested by the FBI; President Bob Singer is reopening a federal department to oversee supes. Everything’s back to normal, underscoring Hughie’s argument against Butcher’s genocidal vision: Supes still exist, but they’re not making trouble because Homelander’s gone. Vought, and the other corporations who wanted to benefit from Homelander’s reign, are still around, but the government will take care of it. And the Boys might consider Butcher a “hero,” as Hughie says when they’re at his gravesite, but they’re all better off without him. Because The Boys can’t let go of its equivalencies, the world improved sans Homelander and the Boys improved sans Butcher. And because The Boys couldn’t improve on its source material, it stayed minor — in its consideration of these characters and how they represented heroism and villainy — until the end.