I have not looked too deeply into what people are saying about the ending of Amazon’s show The Boys (2019 – 2026), but from what I have seen, opinion seems to diverge into one of two camps: it was either fine, though predictable if somewhat unsatisfying, or it was Game of Thrones level of bad for a final season. I would probably fit more into the former, but there are reasons I think it is unsatisfying that I haven’t seen mentioned by the admittedly few places I’ve looked.

Spoilers for The Boys ahead.

To summarize very briefly, The Boys is about a group of plucky underdogs (the eponymous “boys” which actually consist of several women as well) who are taking on an evil corporation called Vought that employs and runs PR for a group of superheroes. The conceit of the show is that it is supposed to portray how superheroes would probably be treated (like celebrities) and how they would act (like narcissistic divas who care about how they are perceived by the public while misbehaving behind closed doors) and who they would actually work for (large multinational corporations who exploit their vanity in order to control them) if they were plopped down into the real world. The biggest superhero celebrity, the Superman spoof Homelander, is shown to be a raging narcissist who is a hollow shell of a man but for his Superman-like powers and the sycophants who fawn over him (out of some mixture of both fear and genuine adulation) as a result of his power. The show follows how the “boys” attempt to expose the nefarious plots of Vought and the superheroes in their employ, with the ultimate goal of killing the seemingly invincible Homelander (who raped the wife of “boys” leader Billy Butcher and sired a superhuman child as a result). The show, which ran for five seasons, is darkly comedic, gratuitously violent, extremely crass, and lots of fun.

One criticism levied against the show since around season 3 or 4 has been that its satire, which made fun of rightwing absurdity, woke capitalism, and celebrity/demagogue worship, has lost all subtlety. The parallels between the fragile and narcissistic Homelander and the equally thin-skinned and vain Donald Trump became particularly stark, which led to a revolt by rightwing fans of the show. Those left-of-center retorted that the parallels were always there and right-wingers were always the butt of the joke but were apparently just too obtuse to catch on. This may be the case, but I think there is also the issue that the right wing has become more sensitive, i.e., they’ve become “woke” in their own way. There is a lot to say about the loss of media literacy, contributing to a lot of shows having to be much less subtle about their themes (see, for instance, Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh), and that certainly plays a role in the loss of subtlety in a show like The Boys.

Showrunner Eric Kripke, however, attributed this seeming loss of subtlety to the fact that real life started resembling the outlandish storylines in the show. In other words, it wasn’t that the show lost any sense of subtlety, it’s that real life became such a parody of itself that the parallels between the show and the people it satirizes became so similar that it only looked like the subtlety dissipated: the show didn’t lose subtlety, the real world did. I think this is part of it. The early seasons of the show were certainly not all that subtle. The first two seasons did a lot to satirize woke capitalism: giant corporations using things like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ Pride symbols to cynically manufacture an image of themselves as being “diverse” and “inclusive” and all the other buzzwords from twenty-teens woke culture, but without actually having to change their ruthless capitalistic practices. The parody and satire surrounding this certainly wasn’t subtle, but neither was the show when taking on the right wing. The main arc of season 2 revolved around Homelander falling under the sway of a literal Nazi superwoman, Stormfront, who hailed from literal Nazi Germany and who used social media to stoke outrage about racial and sexual minorities and spread great replacement conspiracy theories. The entire season was a big neon sign saying that “all this is a bad thing”, and then even ended with the literal Nazi woman being beaten up by a bunch of women superheroes, one of whom was bisexual, another Asian, and another a deconstructing Christian conservative. When the season aired in 2020, perhaps the fascist movement that has largely overtaken the U.S. since then was still nascent enough that the fascists who are angry at the show now didn’t yet see themselves as clearly in the literal Nazi character, or so clearly see Trump in Homelander, who fell in love with the literal Nazi.

Regardless of how we perceive or interpret this loss of subtlety in The Boys (if it ever had any), to me that was not what made season 5 disappointing. But, before getting into what I think was the issue with season 5, I do want to point out something that I think season 5 did well. Particularly choices made with two characters, namely The Deep (the spoof of Aquaman and parody of real life manosphere influencers) and Firecracker (a parody of Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Christian nationalist women). The Deep was mostly played as a comedic butt monkey, constantly being belittled and humiliated by Homelander, yet he remained steadfast in his loyalty to Homelander. Similarly, Firecracker, who has a crush on Homelander and demeans herself to try to earn his love, only ever disgusts him, though he finds her position as an influencer useful. Even to the very end of the show, after suffering multiple humiliations and selling out every principle they ever had (Firecracker turning away from her cherished Christian faith and denouncing the preacher she loved like a father in order to praise Homelander as God in front of her followers; The Deep shilling for big oil despite the pollution damaging the ocean creatures he loves) they stayed devoted to Homelander. To me, this still maintains what subtlety The Boys ever had in its satire: those who stay faithful to Trump will never earn his approval because he is only capable of loving himself, but they will debase and humiliate themselves until their dying breath to stay in his good graces. In the final episode, The Deep is even offered an out to turn against Homelander, only to refuse the outstretched hand and die in disgrace. It would have been easy for the show to have some kind of redemption arc for these characters (particularly Firecracker, who was shown to be at least somewhat sympathetic at times), but that would have been too easy and not true to the death cult of MAGA they are satirizing, a cult that will willfully follow a narcissistic madman to their own destruction.

To me, the narcissism of Homelander is the greatest parallel he has with Trump. I maintain that everything Trump does can be explained, at least in part, by viewing it through the lens of his narcissism. The Boys did a good job through the first four seasons of portraying this side of Homelander. In season 5 Homelander’s narcissism explodes into megalomania, prompting him to declare that he is God (not even the son of God, but literally God). But to me this didn’t fully follow from everything that came before. The reason isn’t because Homelander might never declare himself God, but that it happened rather too unprompted. I might define a megalomaniac as a narcissist who gets what they want: being surrounded by sycophants who feed into their festering egotism. Getting there requires that the narcissist and his sycophants mutually stoke the flames of the narcissist’s delusions of grandeur. This was certainly occurring throughout the first four seasons of the show, but the leap from where Homelander was at the beginning of season 5 and the end of season 5 (prior to his downfall) happened too fast to be entirely believable to me. Part of this, I think, is because the fifth season focused less on Homelander’s internal struggle with his cognitive dissonance: between the emptiness he feels inside knowing that people fear but don’t love him, but the knowledge of how powerful he is and the fawning praise this evokes from everyone around him, not for who he is but because he could so easily kill them. This obsession with people truly believing Homelander to be God would come to dominate his character in the final few episodes of the season, even prompting him to bring in psychic superhumans to police people’s thoughts about him.

(An interesting parallel, I think, is with the twenty-teens style of leftwing wokeism, which would browbeat people into compliance with their demands but then remain angry and unsatisfied in knowing the target wasn’t a true believer, but only capitulating out of fear. But I haven’t developed this thought enough to discuss it any further than pointing it out here.)

This issue with Homelander declaring himself God without enough character development to fully justify this can be attributed, at least partially, with what I call the third act syndrome. This is where in a movie or later episodes/seasons of a show sort of have to get down to brass tax and pay off what it’s been building up to, which means it can’t spend as much time meditating on character development. It’s the reason that third acts of movies are often the least interesting part (they can still be exciting, but for the most part people don’t watch movies or shows because of the third act, it’s just that the third act must happen for the movie or show to conclude), because it just has to move from event to event and most of the character development is finished or has gotten to the point where the possibilities for how the character could develop any further are narrowed down significantly. This is where the ghost in the horror movie is revealed and instantly becomes less scary, where the action hero must win the shootout or fistfight with the main bad guy, where the superhero must triumph over the supervillain they’ve been pursuing the entire movie, where the will-they-won’t-they romantic couple finally does. Exciting and cathartic to be sure, but from the beginning to the end of this sequence, our protagonist likely hasn’t undergone significant character development.

In the fifth season of The Boys, without much prompting from either his own internal struggle or from the sycophants around him, Homelander goes from being the de facto dictator of the U.S. to declaring himself God. That certainly may have been the endpoint to a raging narcissist like Homelander, but I think it would have been more interesting, and truer to life, if it wasn’t just that he suddenly decided on this, but that the recursive buildup of his grand delusions was facilitated by the sycophants around him.

Think of the way that Trump changed between the end of his first term and the beginning of his second. The big lie about the 2020 election being stolen demonstrates this dynamic well. I can’t know for sure, but I suspect that Trump, back at the end of 2020 and early 2021, knew that he didn’t win the election, even if his narcissism wouldn’t allow him to admit it. Him calling people and asking them to conjure votes out of thin air attests to this. He may have believed the lie at the time, but I suspect he didn’t. But since then, he has been surrounded by people who, whether they believe it or not, have been telling him that he did win the 2020 election. The brain of this narcissist has been marinating in this lie to the point where now, I think, he really does believe that he won the 2020 election. This is why, when confronted by someone contradicting this belief, and without any actual evidence to support it, he resorts to anger and, to alleviate his cognitive dissonance, flees the interaction. The result, though, is that being submerged in this marinade of lies has further bloated his delusions of grandeur to the point that he is going beyond narcissism and into megalomania. This is one of the reasons, I believe, he has surrounded himself with the most obsequious of henchmen, no longer tethered to the so-called “grownups in the room” from his first term, which has led to the radicalization and incompetence observed in the second term.

If they had shown this with Homelander, with the idea of him being God issuing not unprompted from his own mind, but because of the collective delusion mutually cultivated by both Homelander and the flatterers he’s surrounded himself with, I think that would have been more believable.

However, to me even this is not the most unsatisfying thing about how the show ended. Or, at least, it is only partially the reason. The issue I really have with it, though, contains another parallel with the real world. There seems to be, among the opponents of the MAGA cult, a belief that Trump is the problem, and not merely a symptom. While Trump certainly is a very immediate part of the problem, the real problem is that a third of the country continues loving him regardless of how much harm he causes (much like The Deep and Firecracker with Homelander) and another third (the so-called independents and undecideds) has sane-washed him to the point that voting for him is not completely off the table based on everything he’s done over the past decade or more, as if voting for him and his acolytes comes down to some particular policy issue that can approached like any other political platform and be discussed reasonably with the MAGA fanatics. What that tells us is that Trump and his brand of authoritarianism is something people want, or at the very least will not categorically reject on principle. This means that getting rid of Trump (having him impeached, removed from office, and even imprisoned for his crimes) is not going to fix the myriad problems that got him elected in the first place.

This is the same with Homelander in The Boys. In the final episode they are able to take away his powers, which almost immediately causes him to get on his knees and beg Billy Butcher to spare his life, all while on camera, broadcast to the world. He is then killed. A few scenes later it is implied that the world has just gone back to some kind of normal, with perhaps just some fixing to do on the periphery. But the show told us that there were true believers, those who truly (confirmed by the superhuman psychics) accepted Homelander as God. And certainly there would also have been people who, while not true believers, had a vested interest in perpetuating the fiction that Homelander was God (or, at the very least, that his political project was laudable).

To be fair, the “few scenes” I mentioned in the previous paragraph showed Billy Butcher prevented from releasing a virus that would kill off all superhumans and that there was still need for some kind of taskforce to combat dangerous superhumans. It did, however, show that the U.S. political system simply went back to normal (with a normal, democratically elected president), thus re-establishing the conditions, however unhealthy those might have been, from before Homelander took control of the country and started a system of concentration camps for political prisoners and murdering unbelievers.

But why would things go back to normal as soon as Homelander was killed? What happened with all of Homelander’s supporters? What happened to the political strife he and his supporters caused that led to his ascension to de facto dictator? What happened to all the people radicalized by years of an online propaganda campaign to kill or die for him? All the families torn apart as a result of this massive political and religious upheaval? All Homelander’s handpicked politicians who have a vested interest in keeping his myth alive? All the businessmen who were making money off Homelander’s policies (e.g., private prison making money on the concentration camps)?

Even if ninety percent of the population didn’t believe Homelander to be God, there would still be a lot of political and ideological inertia to his popular movement. It was already established that the supporters of Homelander will stick with him regardless how insane he became. It established that people will believe it when video of him threatening to murder a plane full of people (which he would allow to crash after he accidentally damaged the control panel) is said to be an AI fake, so why wouldn’t at least some subset of the population believe that about the broadcast of him begging for his life and then being killed? And surely, now that Homelander moved the Overton window so far to this extreme, some new superhuman will take on his American flag colored mantle.

To be fair this isn’t just a problem with The Boys. I think this instant win condition or mothership trope is very common in a lot of media. From a storytelling point of view this is understandable. If Sam and Frodo can cast the ring into the cracks of doom, Sauron will fall and all his orcs will disperse and no longer be an issue worth spilling ink over. This gives the story a natural end point, a place where the author can say that the story is definitively finished, and gives the audience a sense of resolution and catharsis.

But I (and others) think that these portrayals can have significant effects on how people view the real world. I hypothesize that this is part of the very mythos of western Christian culture, captured in much of our media and reflected back at us, thereby perpetuating what I’m here going to call the Resolution Mythos. Christianity prophesized an end times that would bring with it an ultimate resolution where the good would triumph and the evil would get their just desserts. Liberalism (in the classical sense) prophesized the end of history, with the untethered Individual standing astride a world of ceaseless economic growth and material comforts. Intoxicated by this heady Resolution Mythos, people have lost sight of the fact that they are, in fact, only in the middle of a story that has no end, no final resolution. They themselves are mere prologue to what comes after they are written out of the story. The ancients revered their elders and worshipped their ancestors, which gave them a sense of perspective on their place in the ever-unfolding narrative of society. Modern people, on the other hand, barely know anything about anyone from before their grandparents and will treat their parents’ generation as out of touch nuisances who need to shut up and step aside, lest any impediments unduly impose on our own story wherein we are destined to live out a character arc that resolves in a satisfying conclusion at the end of history itself.

But it’s not just the past that is an impediment to the immediate present, it’s also the future. Having to take the time to go through the grinding slog of meaningful change (or even to bother finding out what the real issues are) is too burdensome a commitment. We instead buy whatever easy fix someone will sell us, blame whoever is convenient, and erect easily defeated effigies to stand in for the problems: if we just incarcerate every lawbreaker, cancel every wayward celebrity, vote out every demagogue, then we can achieve resolution and feel good about ourselves for having done so without actually addressing the underlying problems that created those issues in the first place.

This sort of Resolution Mythos thinking was observed in the opposition to the MAGA project back in 2020-2021. The thought seemed to become that getting Trump out of office would allow the U.S. go back to business as usual circa 2014, before the white middle class had their great awokening to the problems causing them discomfort. And so, we cut the head off the snake and elected a ‘normal’ person to be president and expected the rest of the country to fall back into in place. I think this is one of the reasons that twenty-teens style leftwing wokeism died away after 2020 (among other reasons, such as the tech oligarch heel turn toward the political right, Elon Musk taking over Twitter, backlash against COVID policies and the George Floyd protests, and so on). Trump became, at least for the middle-class white cohort of leftwing wokeness, the embodiment of all the structural bigotry they agitated against. Thus, if they could just get rid of Trump, then all Trump’s orcs would disperse back into the shadows and no longer pose a threat. Structural bigotry and social injustice would be as good as resolved.

That, of course, is not what happened. And to me, it’s certainly not what would happen in the world of The Boys, despite what the end of the show might lead us to believe. This could of course be fodder for a spinoff series, but to me it leaves something to be desired at the end of the show. A part of me wonders if it would have been more interesting to have Homelander die (or just have his power taken away) at the end of season 4 and then focus season 5 on the fallout. On the other hand, a show has to end somewhere, and swimming in the waters of this Resolution Mythos means that even fewer people would be satisfied if the show just sort of ended somewhere in the middle, like all our lives eventually will.