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This review contains spoilers for The Boys season 5 episode 6.
If you’ve been following my reviews of The Boys’ final season, you’ll know that I haven’t really been enjoying it. After a fairly strong start, the ensuing episodes have felt more like The Boys fan fiction rather than the real thing. Treading water, running around in circles, so much unnatural dialogue—for Kimiko especially—and way too many characters on the chessboard to stitch into the story without a bunch of scenes feeling filler-y or straight up annoying. The show felt like it had run out of steam, so I was pleased to find this sixth episode pretty damn delightful!
In episode 6, The Legend (Paul Reiser) returns to help The Boys find the elusive Bombsight (Mason Dye) who finally shows up when his aging sweetheart Golden Geisha is kidnapped from her Vought retirement home and threatened by Butcher and co. Bombsight indeed has the V1 everyone’s been looking for. He’s been saving it for Geisha, trying to convince her they should live together forever, but she doesn’t find immortality particularly appealing, so when Soldier Boy convinces him to hand the V1 over in exchange for sapping his powers away and giving him the gift of mortality, along with a precious, limited amount of time with his lover, Bombsight agrees. Soldier Boy then hands over the dose to Homelander and he injects it immediately.
That’s the bones of the episode. Still, there’s a bunch of meaningful stuff weaving in and out of the story to make it feel impactful. There’s one particularly frustrating thread, which I’ll get to later, but this installment has enough unexpectedly sweet moments to sell the resolution of the V1 plot.
I was honestly relieved to see Karen Fukuhara have some screentime here where she isn’t just expected to spew jarring, sweary nonsense. When Kimiko shyly admits she doesn’t want to kill elderly people at the retirement home, Butcher surprises us by refraining from doing so—one of his only true kindnesses in this season. Kimiko also finds her burgeoning relationship with Frenchie mirrored in the turmoil between Geisha and Bombsight. Kimiko doesn’t really want to live forever either. Frenchie must accept that. Of course it hurts to know that everything ends, but even Homelander gets a taste of what likely awaits him thanks to some brutal home truths from The Legend in this episode. “I’m not scared of you,” he says. “I feel for you. You’re a fucking whack job, but that’s talent.” Reiser delivers the dialogue with his typical gravitas. The fact that Homelander lets him go unharmed speaks to this, as does the seed of doubt buried deep in his twisted mind. It’s a nice touch.
Annie and Hughie also share some quality moments as they work on a plan to kill Homelander using the virus. Annie’s pity when seeing Firecracker’s fate rings true because we feel the same way. Firecracker was fucking deplorable, but we were upset when she sold her soul and Homelander killed her anyway. The series decided not to dehumanize the character. That shows a level of thought and depth that has been lacking a bit this season. Without having the characters constantly say it out loud, it reminds us that we cannot stray too far into the dark; there is simply no light there.
On a different note, when Annie and Hughie first stop to look at the clouds and forget about the horrors that await them, it doesn’t seem frustrating or a waste of time; it’s just nice. It feels like these two have been arguing about the same shit forever. It’s good to remind ourselves of why they’re together in the first place.
I’ve felt nothing for any of these characters this season until now, apart from Firecracker. I used to care about them so much. The show’s just been too interested in being wacky, soapy, or shocking to create these kinds of moments for the audience lately, and that’s one of the key ways that it’s failed, at least from my perspective. Hey, that’s the only one I’ve got right now. I’m seeing this episode before it’s released and y’all haven’t come to the comments to tell me how wrong I am yet (jk I don’t read the comments).
We’re pretty much done with the sweeter moments here, but I do need to talk about The Deep. His strand of the plot is so savage and stupid that it can’t go unmentioned this week. Having previously filmed a PSA singing the praises of a Vought petroleum pipeline that Noir vengefully punctures as payback for Bourke’s murder, the resulting “fish holocaust” sends The Deep right over the edge and creates yet another moment of absolute gold where Chace Crawford scrambles across a beach to rucisitate an oil-poisoned fish called Jeremy. It plays out like a true betrayal of the one thing The Deep genuinely still cares about, and it’s just fantastic. I maintain that any of Crawford’s scenes with marine life in The Boys should be hung in a museum.
So. Now it’s time to talk about Soldier Boy and Bombsight. In the back of our minds, we may be aware that Bombsight is at least partially written into this plot so that we can get a taste of what lies ahead in Soldier Boy’s prequel series, Vought Rising. Still, the episode is fairly effective at combining that approach with the mothership story. Dye and Jensen Ackles wrestle with the material, but ultimately convince us that Bombsight and Soldier Boy’s history carries enough weight that we’d be interested in seeing how they got to this moment.
After Ashley confirms that Soldier Boy is warming up to his biological son, we also see him and Homelander fight over their romantic connection to Clara Vought. Soldier Boy takes some time to process his anger, but decides that Homelander should get the V1 anyway, as it’s what she would have wanted for him. That definitely feels true. Clara was obsessed with pushing him as far as he could go, but we also learn that she once felt the same way about Soldier Boy.
There is some connective tissue missing here that Vought Rising will probably attempt to fill, but because we’ve only got Soldier Boy’s wildly fluctuating feelings and the persistent fan theory that Clara is actually Homelander’s real mother to go on at the moment, it does feel frustrating when Soldier Boy flip-flops over to Homelander’s side again. It’s just another “because fuck them, that’s why” from Soldier Boy.
Equally frustrating is Sister Sage’s “intelligent” plan to manipulate them all, which goes poorly. It is truly hard to buy her superpower being anything other than useless or an outright disaster at this point. Good luck having her on your side, Butcher!
Will the gang find another way to take down Homelander? With two episodes left, I sure hope so.
New episodes of The Boys season 5 premiere Wednesdays on Prime Video.
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