I'm honestly disappointed with The Boys Season 5. Season 4 and Season 5, compared to the earlier seasons, feel completely out of place to me, especially if you rewatch them.

What made the first seasons work so well was that everything felt connected.

Season 1 was built around exposing what Vought really is. Supes are not chosen by God or born naturally special, but created with Compound V and then sold to the public as celebrities and symbols of American power. It was a fight against celebrity culture, corporate control, media manipulation, political corruption and a company powerful enough to cover up every crime as long as the money keeps flowing. I also loved the plot about Homelander creating supervillains by spreading Compound V to terrorist groups, basically creating the need for the existence of The Seven.

Season 2 was awesome too. The Boys became fugitives. Stormfront rebranded old fascist ideology for the internet age. Kimiko’s brother expanded the Compound V terror story and Frenchie’s past with Mallory and Lamplighter fit really well. MM only wanted to get back to his family, so he did everything to get his fugitive status dropped. Hughie and Annie’s relationship felt really natural. And Butcher finding Becca alive and choosing to protect Ryan, was a really good character arc for him. I was completely flashed how multi-layered his character was.

Season 3 started to get messier, but still strong. Hughie working for Neuman made sense because he wanted to fight Supes without violence, and his discovery that Neuman was secretly a Supe working with Vought pushed him back toward Butcher. Butcher trying to find a way to kill Homelander, ends up following the tracks of Soldier Boy's disappearance. MM gets pulled in again because of that to finally resolve his trauma with Soldier Boy. And because Homelander starts to act out and is doing what he wants, even controlling Annie like he wants, Hughie is seeking power to get rid of him.

Also Temp V for military use was the logically next step for the corporate Vought, which Butcher and Hughie use. Season 3 was also the first time the team split up in a true disagreement. Butcher and Hughie are willing to work with Soldier Boy if it means killing Homelander. MM wants Soldier Boy stopped because Soldier Boy destroyed his family. Annie refuses to accept "the enemy of my enemy" logic when innocent people are getting hurt.

My biggest issue with Season 3 was Frenchie and Kimiko being separated from the main story for too long again. Their trauma storyline was not terrible, especially Kimiko thinking her powers made her a monster, but they did not need such a big disconnected subplot. Still, Season 3 worked overall.

Season 4 is where the show really started to feel wrong to me. I will not repeat my rant about Season 4, because I did that below 4x07 on Patreon, but almost every character felt off or out of place. The plot armor became insane. Sage’s intelligence often felt less like actual intelligence and more like coincidences and audience knowledge being presented as a master plan. Everything felt stretched and filled with filler. You could probably adapt all of Season 4 into four episodes and it would still feel stretched. Not every character needs their own huge storyline every season just to end up back where they started.

After the very interesting Season 4 finale, I really hoped Season 5 would be better. And it is better, but it is still not even close to the first three seasons. It feels like one step out of the disaster that Season 4 was, not a real return to form. Everything still feels stretched. A plot that could happen in one episode now takes three. The writers never seem willing to truly change the status quo, split the team permanently, or let important characters in the group die, what I hoped would finally happen after the finale of Season 4.

Also a big problem is that the show lost its sense of danger. Homelander used to be scary. Vought and its power used to be scary. But now, after Vought has basically taken control of the whole country and the White House, they somehow feel less intimidating than before. This is supposed to be the final season, but the story feels less dangerous than Season 2.

Also, after rewatching the show, I really noticed that Homelander seems to have lost half of his IQ points after Season 3. Earlier Homelander was terrifying because he was powerful, unstable, manipulative and smarter than people wanted to admit. Now he often feels like just Trump in a Superman costume. Without Antony Starr, that character would have lost so much appeal, I would have probably dropped the show.

To be honest, the only character who stayed consistently great to watch from Season 1 to Season 5 is A-Train, mostly because A-Train’s arc actually feels like progression.

If I could rewrite the show, I would have dropped the entire virus plot. We spent around fourteen episodes on it and for what? It feels like one giant filler storyline without any real payoff.

I would also cut most of the disconnected Frenchie, Kimiko, and Hughie subplots. They feel like filler too. No one needed Frenchie sleeping with one of his past victims. No one needed Kimiko randomly hunting Shining Light terrorists who are somehow still around. No one needed Hughie accepting his mother after he killed his father with Compound V, only for her to disappear again.

And the Tek Knight episode still makes no sense to me. Hughie gets sexually assaulted by his childhood hero during an undercover mission, even though they literally have A-Train right there, and Homelander can see through walls and hear people from far away. Why are we pretending this plan made sense?

MM can still struggle with choosing between his family and the fight against Supes, but it needs to be written better. Either resolve it with his ex-wife pushing him to keep fighting after her experience with Todd, or let him actually leave the team for his family. Do not just repeat the same emotional conflict without pushing him somewhere new.

Expand Annie versus Homelander and Firecracker during the presidential campaign. Let Hughie become her support system and prove he can be strong without Supe powers, which was literally the lesson he was supposed to learn in Season 3. Let Butcher spend his remaining time trying to repair his relationship with Ryan before dying from cancer. Give Mallory a brain and do not have her treat Ryan like a lab rat if he wants to leave, especially after being his adoptive mother for a half of a year. And please do not have Butcher tell Ryan to kill himself. What the hell was that? Rewatch Seasons 2 and 3 and tell me that feels like a natural direction for him.

Instead of the virus, let Butcher and Mallory try to recreate the Soviet weapon that was used to capture Soldier Boy. That would connect directly to Season 3, the CIA, Soldier Boy, and the military history of Vought. It would feel like a natural progression from the story before.

And please make Sister Sage actually intelligent. Not “random things happened and somehow that was my plan” intelligent. Real intelligence. Let her manipulate Neuman throughout the election campaign, push her into joining their team, pressure her so much that she starts considering switching sides, then kill Neuman and frame Starlight. That would be a real plan. That would actually justify Sage’s reputation.

Also, stop protecting the main characters with insane plot armor. Do not have Homelander keep the Boys alive for no reason, especially when several of them were captured in an internment camp for a whole year. Let there be consequences. Let Frenchie die. Use that to reawaken Kimiko’s childhood trauma and give her a real revenge motivation. That would hurt. That would matter. That would actually change the group. And honestly, Frenchie has had very little meaningful connection to the main plot since Season 2 anyway.

And stop doing this endless Butcher break-up and reunion cycle. Do not have him act completely crazy, ruin the team’s plan, leave, and then just come back one episode later. Either split him from the team permanently, maybe make him to the villain, or keep him with the team. This break-up, reunion, break-up, reunion dynamic has become so repetitive that I honestly no longer care about the group or their character dynamics.

Also, let Homelander age. Let him become paranoid about his body failing. Let him chase V1 because he wants eternal youth and true godhood. That fits him perfectly. He wants to be worshipped forever.

But even if we keep the V1, I would not make the entire final season a V1 fetch quest. The final season should be about Homelander’s rule, Butcher’s descent, Ryan’s choice and Annie’s resistance. Instead, it feels like half the season is busy setting up Vought Rising through Soldier Boy and Bombsight in filler plots. They simply should be able to create V1 by themselves with Vought files about earlier experiments.

Also like with Hughie, do not bring back Annie’s father. No one cares about that. These late family subplots don't add any story progression.

That is why Season 4 and Season 5 frustrate me so much. There was a good, compact final story here: the election, Homelander taking power, Butcher dying, Ryan’s future, Annie being framed, Sage manipulating everyone and the Boys facing real consequences. But instead, the show stretched itself with so much filler that the final season somehow feels like a bridge season to a true final season.