Too Many Threads
God Forbid We Finish Anything
1 A Coming Reckoning
An uneasy sensation has been brewing in me these past few weeks. Each week, it has either been sustained or has grown, but it has never shrunk. This sensation was aroused with each new installment of the fifth season of The Boys; it was the sneaking suspicion that the close of this seven-year-spanning series would suck. Now, having “experienced” the finale, my misgivings can finally be put to word. There was no rally, no “final victory” where the show, in its last breath, became good again. The finale was not good; it was rather unfulfilling. However, having come through the other side, I am equally beset by a new feeling. The Boys is largely a satire of modern American culture, and I am starting to get the feeling that the show ending as it has might just be its best work. Not because it is at all enjoyable, but precisely because it is not.
Season 5 of The Boys ended having been chock full of odd plot threads, conveniences, useless MacGuffins, and prequel-bait anticipating a show that no one asked for1; all tying into a broadly unsatisfying viewing experience. Fans of the show, naturally, are not especially pleased, as evidenced by a cursory glean of the r/TheBoys subreddit Figure 1. This base, the fandom, has long been spread across disparate understandings of the show. Season four had itself been “divisive,” as it upped the overt satire of contemporary politics, and the show itself has managed to come off as increasingly absurd; a feat, given its premise. The show was always profane, absurd, and a bit silly, but the jump from the first season to the fifth is almost like watching a whole new kind of parody. I do not know if there is a better reflection of the experience of this second Trump presidency than that. With that framing in mind, this piece will be composed of two parts: my long list of complaints about this season; and an attempt at approaching its awfulness as a commentary on America today. My goal in the latter is to try ask what the “finale” of this American administration will look like, and I would suggest that it too will be awful and “unfulfilling.”
I think that, unlike other shows that suffer from similarly awful finales, the unique character of The Boys in its satire of American culture makes this awfulness a kind of ultimate satire. One thing is true though: whatever value I find in this fifth season as a commentary, I am never watching this shit again.
2 The Show
To set the tone of my coming rant, and our exercise in appreciation thereafter, I think it is valuable to give an overview of the show leading up to season 5. I will not be focusing on the comics much2, except to describe some relevant deviations (which will sometimes be presented as footnotes to avoid confusion). We will go over the basic premise, some characters and plot points across earlier seasons, and then summarize the finale. After this, we will give in to anger.
2.1 Background and Basics
The Boys is an Amazon Prime Video show set in a world rife with superheroes (“supes”) that are sometimes super and rarely heroic. It is based on an eponymous comic series, although the show has some considerable differences. In both versions, the center of this world is the mega-corporation “Vought International,” a company that creates supes in both literal and as celebrity personalities. Vought produces a serum, “Compound V,” that, when injected, has the potential to grant recipients various forms of superpowers. In the time of the show, Vought often targets kids, promising parents a shot at great personal wealth or renown-by-proxy for offering their children up for injections. These super-powered individuals then go on to various lines of work that roughly correspond to modern celebrity drivel. For example, they may become unfairly advantaged athletes or tour pageant circuits, flashing their powers as gimmicks for points. Imagine a bunch of child actors or sports prodigies who have powers ranging from noxious burps to invisibility and flight. Vought closely watches and grooms these supes, searching for potential big names that could further add to their already enormous portfolio. Supes whose powers and/or personalities are deemed exceptional (exceptionally lucrative) are offered membership in The Seven, the most prominent superhero team operated by Vought and headed by one John Gillman, Homelander.
Homelander is the most powerful supe in the world, possessing powers of superhuman durability, healing, hearing, smell, speed, stamina, and strength, alongside heat vision, flight, and x-ray vision. Effectively presented as a Superman-gone-bad parallel, Homelander (unlike many other supes) was born in a Vought lab; with no loving family, or family at all, to speak of. He is the product of Vought’s efforts to create ever-more-powerful supes, and was, in his youth, subjected to horrifying experiments. This origin makes for a man who is poorly socialized, with a high inclination for violence and the capacity to execute on it. Homelander’s immense power, mixed with his desperately scarred psyche, makes him as much of a liability to Vought as he is an asset. To keep him in check, Vought employs various tactics and “handlers” to coddle Homelander and safeguard his public image, while still keeping him dependent on them. Homelander is given about the same kind of leeway for shitty behavior as most huge celebrities with good public relations teams, and he takes advantage of that.
In the show3, Homelander, being the awful and awfully empowered man that he is, meets a woman named Becca Butcher and her husband, William (Billy, also called Butcher), at a Vought Christmas party and proceeds to later find and rape the former, alone. Following this, Billy Butcher resolves to kill Homelander, recruiting allies into a generally anti-supe, anti-Vought vigilante group known as “the Boys” at the behest of Grace Mallory, director of the CIA. Butcher is joined by Mother’s Milk and Frenchie, a kind-hearted man with a strong will and a drug addict who knows his pharmaceuticals, respectively. By the time we begin the first season, the original group has already fallen apart, with Butcher continuing the work largely solo.
2.2 Seasons 1-4
Hughie Campbell is an extremely average and kind-hearted man who works at an electronics shop.
2.3 Season 5
3 Trump
Every bridge and building will be built back stronger. What will never recover: damage to America’s standing.
— Seyed (2026)
What will the “finale” of this administration look like?
season 1 to 4/5 jumps the shark like the trump 2 admin has
The end of March came and went, and we continued our involvement in Iran. Despite our supposed “annihilation” of Iranian air and sea forces and our “decapitation” of their leadership, the Straight of Hormuz remains closed, and we very obviously have no good answer for that. Although I had given myself a preemptive cop-out, saying that the war “[…] may drag on in its current state for longer, should Iran refuse to open the strait,” it saddens me that it now clearly will do just that: drag on. It saddens me, in part, because I had thought that President Trump would have TACO’d by now, given how stupid this endeavor is and has been. Indeed, it looked like Trump was doing just that at the end of March when he said that the United States would have “nothing to do with” securing the Straight of Hormuz. Alas, the scale of this embarrassment appears too great for someone like Trump to back out now. That truth is what saddens me more. The United States appears intent on scaling up bombings in Iran, and openly setting more general, even civilian, targets. More people will be needlessly killed, at great cost, and it will do nothing to change the outcome of this conflict. Rather, as we continue to embarrass ourselves, the weight of the coming reckoning to American prestige will only grow.
Out of what I can only describe as an overwhelming sense of annoyance with this whole affair, I want to revisit the idea of American cope one month on. This piece will be shorter than that one. My aim is to detail one example of how rhetoric is adapting to the growing specter of an American defeat. Had Trump cut his losses and backed out sooner, this operation could have been buried under the rug; another violent waste of money that ultimately passed. This is precisely what happened with the strikes last year. But the Islamic Republic of Iran is not allowing Trump to cut his losses. Each day, the United States is continually made to confront its objective failure in the Strait and demonstrates its inability to rectify it. There are Americans who will tell you that we are somehow winning, because we have not “lost”; because we blew up some planes and boats. But in everyone else’s realities, we are losing. We are losing prestige and status. The fact that we clearly cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that our only response is to up the ante of bombings on civilians, is a historic embarrassment for a global military hegemon. This may be dramatic, but I do believe that in many years from now, this moment will be looked at as a defining stage of American decline. The emperor has no clothes.
4 Pian
we really should not take for granted that, for all his many faults and evils, Trump has generally had the inkling of sense to back out of the most embarrassingly stupid things. Think back to when he recalled the paltry American ground support from the Kurdish forces in Syria, and how, after just a few days of blowback, he returned it. To have pulled that incredibly small deployment, at the cost of numerous civilian lives as a result, was deeply stupid, embarrassing, and a betrayal of friendly Kurdish forces. To return that deployment, was an implicit acknowledgement that their removal was stupid and should not have been done.
https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cc317ba850e34c4dadbead6f7b336fb1
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5813874-araghchi-responds-trump-iran-threat/
https://nitter.net/araghchi
https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/04/president-trumps-clear-and-unchanging-objectives-drive-decisive-success-against-iranian-regime/
https://truthsocial.com/(realDonaldTrump?)
https://truthsocial.com/(realDonaldTrump/116351998782539414?)
References
Footnotes
I will probably still watch this because I am a mindless prole, but there is no way that anyone cares about this show. Be honest, you are only watching for Soldier Boy; apparently Black Noir isn’t even in this. Who the hell is Torpedo? Who cares?↩︎
The show is (generally) much better. The comics tend to get gross for the sake of being gross even more so than the show.↩︎
In the comics, it is actual Black Noir, a different supe who is (in the comics) an identical clone of Homelander, that does this act.↩︎