(Warning: Spoilers for The Boys season finale.)
For the briefest of moments, it seemed like the penultimate season of The Boys might end on a hopeful note. “If we’re ever going to win against monsters, I think we need to start acting human,” Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) implores his Boys cohort in the finale. Unfortunately, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) missed this pep talk, as the Prime Video series continues its quest to spill the most fake blood on any TV show in history.
Even by the standards of the previous three seasons, the series hit gory new heights in Thursday’s finale, from the sound and visuals of Frenchie (Tomer Capone) sawing Kimiko’s (Karen Fukuhara) leg off to prevent a virus from killing her to Hughie’s dad, Hugh (Simon Pegg), accidentally walking through other hospital patients. There are some things you can’t unsee, like Hugh standing in the middle of a bedridden person as their intestines fall to the ground. Ain’t no doctor who can fix this. In the finale alone, The Deep (Chace Crawford) punches his hand through someone’s head, and a shapeshifter masquerading as Starlight (Erin Moriarty) bites a man’s throat out—among other acts of violence.
However, none of this compares to who is on the receiving end of Butcher’s previously undisclosed supe power. In this case, my jaw-dropping response had more to do with the identity of the deceased than the volume of blood spilled during this game-changing scene.
“I used to freak out when I saw blood. Now I barely blink at it,” says Hughie. He makes this observation while trying to get his co-workers on board with his plan to work with friend-turned-enemy Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit). Given the nature of the series, it reads like a knowing wink toward an audience likely desensitized by the escalating stylized violence that is in danger of tipping into exhausting rather than envelope-pushing territory—if it hasn’t already hit this breaking point.
But when Butcher snatches Neuman with his chest full of tentacles and tears her in half, drenching Hughie in her blood, Hughie’s mouth-agape reaction matched my own. While the body count on The Boys is incredibly high, they rarely wipe a regular character clean off the board—especially as Neuman connected with Marie (Jaz Sinclair) on spinoff Gen V.
In fact, none of the Boys have died a permanent death, despite many near misses. To do away with Neuman when she had chosen to get out of the political game for good is particularly cruel, which is likely the point. When you make a deal with the devil (or, in this case, Homelander), you’re gonna get burned. Whereas other deaths are not so final, it is clear from the mess left by Butcher that Neuman is not getting back up after this one.
First introduced at the start of Season 2 as a bright young progressive political hope (hello, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez surrogate), Neuman’s secret head-popping power and ambition clouded her desire to do good. Painting only the right wing as having a nefarious agenda doesn’t leave much room for nuance. But suggesting that Neuman is as much of a threat as Homelander (Antony Starr) reads like false equivalency—even if Neuman’s kill count is high.
Speaking of inflicting harm, Butcher’s tally continues to grow. No one hates supes more than Butcher, so his path to becoming one is infused with conflict. Taking multiple doses of Temp V last season led Butcher down this path, causing inoperable brain tumors and a prognosis of 12 to 18 months to live.
While Neuman’s exit is a surprise, it would be truly shocking if Butcher had bitten it instead. Despite how close Butcher has been to death, it never seemed like he would shuffle off this mortal coil with only one season remaining. So, the Butcher versus Homelander showdown is still on the cards, and this superpower mutation has given the foul-mouthed Brit the ability to cause carnage via chest-bursting tentacles.
“You’re all fucking welcome,” Butcher says after dispatching Neuman like he is the father of this group, wanting to receive a thank you for stepping in against the playground bully. Instead, Butcher is the bad dad figure he experienced growing up. With Hughie, Starlight, Kimiko, Frenchie, and M.M. (Laz Alonso) scattering to the wind as fugitives after this assassination, Hughie’s attempts to install some humanity have been blown to shreds.
To add more misery to their situation, while Nirvana’s evocative “Heart Shaped Box” plays, we see the Boys getting picked up one by one, with only Starlight escaping (thanks to her powers returning). We can’t even enjoy the fact that Kimiko and Frenchie finally kiss in the finale because they are quickly separated—Kimiko breaking her silence by screaming “no” is now rattling around my brain.
Look, this is for sure a bummer conclusion to a season that has skewed bleaker than previous outings, offering little escape from the reality of the current political landscape. But things have to get shit before they get better, right? Right? To borrow from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, “The night is darkest just before the dawn.” And it is pretty damn dark as creator Eric Kripke sets the table for the concluding season by moving characters into place.
This year, some of the story beats have felt repetitive or like they are taking things too far (yes, even for The Boys), but they have also managed to dish out poignant and emotionally resonant interactions. Neuman’s phone call to Hughie in the finale is one such sequence, underscoring why I will miss a character who has been Machiavellian at times. Doumit nails the internal conflict and Neuman’s fears for her daughter, which sadly play out when Zoe (Olivia Morandin) is placed in the same children’s home her mother grew up in.
Neuman has been consistently interesting for all the wrongs she committed, even if her role as an AOC stand-in has felt politically muddled when viewed against the other superheroes mirroring real-life political figures. Whereas the parallels between Season 4 newcomer Firecracker (Valorie Curry) and some of the more extreme and conspiracy-obsessed Republicans are more obvious, the AOC allusion suggests a message that all political figures are corruptible—no matter the side.
The Boys never pretends to be subtle, including a finale occurring on January 6th. In a divisive country, The Boys has drawn a line in the sand that some characters try to cross back to where they used to be. Neuman ticks that box, and this course-correcting ultimately makes her death all the more inevitable, even if it is still shocking when Butcher rips her apart. Neuman tries to be two things, but this bloody ending is not what she means by living a dual life.
In this world, you can’t get your heart back and keep your life—no matter how super you are.
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