‘The Boys’ Creator Breaks Down Series Finale’s Boldest Choices: “I Own That Decision”

The fifth and final season of the Prime Video hit comes to a close with tragedy on both sides.

concluded its five season run with a finale that wrapped up the fates of its remaining major characters, with Starlight throwing The Deep into an ocean of angry predators, Butcher humiliating and killing Homelander in the Oval Office — after Kimiko took away his powers.

And Hughie was forced to kill Butcher to prevent him from releasing a virus that would destroy all supes. I always wondered if The Deep would have a redemptive arc — because you get that feeling maybe he could flip, and there’s vulnerability there. But also, he’s been just too terrible of a person to do that. What was the writers’ room conversation around how to end his character?

He was never going to have a redemption arc. I think his behavior in the pilot was really unforgivable, ultimately. And then he just proceeded to do terrible things. Now we very specifically gave him opportunities.

We were giving him opportunities all the time. Just make the right choice, dude! You could honestly go off and be happy if you just accepted your love for Ambrosius, for example. At the very, very end, Annie gives him one last chance to just accept responsibility for the shitty shit you have done.

Don’t be a baby, take responsibility. He has this-like cry of “No! ” So he’s been given plenty of chances, but he’s too oblivious and scared and believes this myth of his own machismo, and it costs him. So I always wanted to see Homelander go out into the world without his powers and see him struggle and be at the mercy of the everyday people he has so much contempt for.

You know someone’s going to kill him even if he gets away. We thought about it. There’s a flaw to that, which is he could just take V again. Just because they take away his powers doesn’t mean that it would be permanent.

You can’t actually let him walk out of that room, because he’s just one shot of V away from being back. Then it was all for nothing. But we wanted that experience — we wanted the audience to have a taste of how pathetic this guy is, and weak, once you take away all of his bluster. I was curious about that choice as well.

He has so much arrogance and pride. So I found myself wondering: Would he really become so submissive so quickly? It’s like Saddam Hussein getting pulled out of that spider hole and Hitler in the bunker. Any authoritarian — once you really take away their power — is automatically and almost immediately pathetic and cowardly, and begging for their lives.

We’ve done the homework. It’s pretty accurate to how they respond when they’re actually facing real death. I feel like Butcher had to be put out of his misery. There was no version of him continuing along happily in life.

I wondered if he couldn’t bring himself to kill Hughie, could he really have brought himself to unleash a genocidal virus destroying every supe? Would he still have pulled that trigger? What’s great about what Karl did in that scene is that it’s open to interpretation. I have my own opinion, and maybe I should not share them as much.

But I 100 percent believe he would have done it. But I think the fail-safe he’s built into his life from the pilot is Hughie. He very specifically brought Hughie on because he doesn’t trust his own impulses, and he needs someone to be check his sociopathy, and that he’s a good enough person to know that he’s not a good person. So I think this is Hughie fulfilling the role he’s been destined to play since the pilot.

But I agree with you: Butcher is a shark, and he wasn’t going to stop, but there was a part of him that’s aware he needed to be stopped. Also, probably outside of Robin getting run over in the pilot, it’s probably the most comics-accurate scene we’ve done. I would say the first episode and the last episode are the ones that are most faithful to the comic.

I always felt ending the show with just the two of them was really right. It’s not about the scope, it’s about the intimacy. No. I’m really happy with it, because — despite the online criticism that nothing happened — we attacked the season to make sure we land every character. We have 15 characters, and they all needed an emotional payoff on the journeys they’ve been experiencing for the last five years.

After this episode, people are going to say goodbye to a lot of these characters. They became like friends or familiar figures, who the audience is never going to see again. So I really wanted to emotionally land the end points of every character, and that was what we were spending our page count on.

The criticism of the final season suggested it held off too long getting into an end game, and I wonder if those fans are going to feel the finale wraps up quicker than they would have wanted. I’ve gone through a journey when I first started to read everything — like on social media or online — and it starts to feel like that’s the whole universe, and it feels scary, and you have a pit in your stomach.

But season five isand at 35 days in, we have 57 million viewers in season five alone. So then you’re like, “Oh, obviously, how many times do I have to relearn the lesson that the online world is not the actual world? ” a fraction of very loud, opinionated people, and God love them. They’re welcome to have that opinion.

But it’s actually not reflecting what’s happening out in the world. And once I saw , I calmed right down.

Finally, I know some are going to be mad about the dog. To me, it’s very clear why, but: Why did you break the classic screenwriting rule — never kill a dog — and kill the poor dog? I’m not passing the buck. I own that decision.

But that was in the comics as well, and it had the same result — where Butcher went completely off the deep end after Terror died. I always felt like that was a perfect trigger. That dog represented the last of his humanity, and so if that dog was going to die, Butcher’s humanity was going to die with it.

What I’ll tell people is that we gave Terror in the show a gentle, sweet, peaceful death, and it was not like that in the comics.

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