The Boys Season 5 Episode 7 Marks The Titular Team's First Major Death

Spoilers for "The Boys" Season 5, Episode 7, "The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother's Milk" follow.

"The Boys" has been promising "scorched earth" for a long time now, and hey, better right before the series finale than never. For a series that indulges in brutal violence all the time, the titular Boys have been kept surprisingly safe ... but no more. The latest episode ends with Frenchie (Tomer Capone) dying at the hands of Homelander (Antony Starr) hands. Frenchie passes away in his beloved Kimiko's (Karen Fukuhara) arms.

Frenchie and Kimiko consummated their relationship back in Episode 2 of this season, "Teenage Kix," and their shared arc has been about the future of their love. Frenchie has been at work manufacturing a superhuman-killing virus for Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), and Kimiko is going back and forth on whether she should take the immortality-bestowing (and virus proof) V-One formula. Does she want to live forever, especially when Frenchie won't?

Well, her decision has been made! Frenchie's death is a sad moment in a vacuum. But on the other hand, the show hasn't known what to do with his character since Season 3. Once "The Boys" moved away from episodic "how do we kill this superhero?" stories, Frenchie's chemistry skills got downplayed and his subplots had become repetitive drags. I can't help but feel the show should've been clearing house sooner. In Season 5, the only heroic character to die prior to this was reformed villain A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) in the season premiere, "Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite"

Frenchie's death at least confirms "The Boys" isn't going to completely pull its punches at the finish line. But with one episode to go, it's looking unlikely it'll go as far as Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's original comics did.

Frenchie's last words to Kimiko are, "Je t'aime [I love you]. From the first." Those are the same words he said to her right before they both died in the comic ... because Butcher planted a bomb to blow them up.

Let's run down how "The Boys" comic ends. Masked "hero" Black Noir is revealed to be a clone of Homelander. Noir kills Homelander, and Butcher kills Noir, but that's not enough. Butcher plans to wipe out every superhero alive. Since the rest of the Boys don't support that, he kills them — except Hughie, who kills Butcher.

We've known the show wasn't doing the Black Noir twist for years now, and it seems the whole ending is being reworked. The series finale, "Blood and Bone," is reportedly an hour long and that does not seem like enough time for both the climax of defeating Homelander and the epilogue of Butcher's final dark turn. I probably should've predicted this earlier, after Season 5 walked back Season 4's ending suggestion that Butcher was going to be a villain in favor of him reteaming with The Boys.

Changing the source material isn't innately wrong. "The Boys" has done it before, with some successes. But I'm not yet ready to count how Season 5 played out among them. After an excellent season premiere, the narrative largely stalled into a MacGuffin hunt that had viewers crying "filler," with too much set-up for the prequel "Vought Rising" and too much character inconsistency — looking at you, Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). 

I might end up eating crow when "Blood and Bone" premieres, but I'm not cooking any birds just yet.

"The Boys" is streaming on Prime Video, with the series finale scheduled for Wednesday, May 20.