If you didn’t know, I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but we will have to wait until 2026 before we can watch the final season of The Boys, which is made all the more difficult by the show being one of TV’s most biting and on-point political satires in recent memory. With the dust having settled on its explosive season four finale, though, we can at least speculate as to what we can expect from its fifth season and how it might be shaped by its source material, not to mention the outcome of the upcoming U.S. election.
In an all-too-predictable instance of outrage, fans of another brilliantly savage satire, South Park, let their feelings be known after the creators of the animated show, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, announced that they would be skipping coverage of the aforementioned election that sees Kamala Harris pitted against former president Donald Trump. Fans are disappointed because South Park has covered the last few election cycles like no other scripted TV show, churning out episodes covering topics that had occurred a mere week prior with a production schedule that is undoubtedly immensely stressful, but it also allowed them to deal with hot topics while they are still fresh in the public psyche. However, after years of this, Stone and Parker are taking a step back and waiting until 2025 to release their next season, with the latter understandably lamenting, “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”
The Boys creator and showrunner Mike Kripke, on the other hand, certainly still has a thing or two to say on the matter, and even though he couldn’t have predicted the current political climate when he first conceived the show, the upcoming election is in some ways what The Boys been building towards since the beginning, and its results can have a very real effect of how The Boys’ final season plays out. Recently Kripke has been more open about the fact that the show’s main villain, Homelander (Antony Starr), is very much their satire of Trump, and has been since the very beginning, which is abundantly apparent from his intentionally divisive rhetoric, malignant narcissism, thinly-veiled insecurity, and political initiatives such as the establishment of camps for humans (which, in Trump’s case, is a reference to his own similar treatment of illegal immigrants). The upcoming election will be a tight race, and if Trump emerges the victor [gulp], he has promised to double down on his previous policies as well as enacting political retribution akin to a dictator, and it’s likely that these actions would be reflected in the narrative for The Boys’ final season. Of course, he could also lose and revert to the same tactic of crying foul on a fair election, and we all know what that led to. Regardless, expect Kripke and his writers and producers to be watching the election very closely.
Then, we must consider the source material, from which the show has greatly deviated, particularly as time has gone on. There are a great many aspects of the source’s story Kripke and company have opted to change, from MM being a supe at birth, to the rest of the team embracing the use of compound V and using their newly attained powers to take the fight to the supes (though this did serve as inspiration for parts of season 3). Even Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy character was altered greatly from the pants-pissing coward of the comics, not to mention that there have been multiple characters who have used the Soldier Boy moniker in the source’s history.
The list goes on, but perhaps the most noteworthy change from the comics is the Black Noir(s) of the show is not a murderous, rapist clone of Homelander who was actually committing many of the awful acts he has been accused of. In the comics, Homelander would eventually team up with Billy Butcher, but the former eventually murders the Vought-planted U.S. president named Vic Neuman, which is a male version of the same character played by Claudia Doumit in the show, and she has already been killed by Butcher (Karl Urban) before she ever had the chance to ascend to the presidency. Soon after the president’s murdered in the comic, Homeland himself is killed by the clone who posed as Black Noir. Conversely, the Homelander of the show has become, for all intents and purposes, the new leader of the U.S., handed to him by a character created specifically for the show, Sister Sage (Susan Heyward). This is all without mentioning Homelander discovering the sleeping body of Soldier Boy (who is his father in the show), which could spell Homelander’s downfall as Solider Boy may potentially fill the gap left by the Homelander clone Black Noir.
Thus, so much has been changed from the source material that it is difficult to tell where the show might go from here, but there are certain elements in place, such as Butcher’s descent into a more villainous role. But even then, he will likely be given a more redemptive arc, as it could be argued that the comics were perhaps uncompromising to a fault, and the Butcher of the TV show features more emotional nuance than his comic book counterpart.
While The Boys’ final season will likely be an amalgam of the source material, the outcome of the U.S. election, and Kripke’s own intended plans for the show, it is likely that they will lean most heavily into the latter two directions. All we can do in the meantime is patiently wait and check in on the political climate until we start to hear about the inevitable cast of newcomers for the final season.