Every Major The Boys Series Finale Death Explained

Spoilers for "The Boys" Season 5 Episode 8 "Blood and Bone" follow.

"The Boys" Season 5 had its share of problems, but on a whole, I would say the endings for the major characters were satisfying more often than they weren't. A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) came full-circle in the Season 5 premiere "Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite," completing his redemption with a sacrifice that directly contrasted his original sin. Firecracker (Valorie Curry) spat away her last chance to be a better person, and all her loyalty to Homelander got her was her head being impaled on a spike.

The series finale "Blood and Bone" gives (most of) the Boys themselves some well-deserved happy endings. M.M. (Laz Alonso) remarries his ex-wife Monique (Frances Turner), giving him the chance to reconnect with his daughter Janine (Liyou Abere) too. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) lost her beloved Frenchie (Tomer Capone), but she seems to have accepted she'll always carry him with her. 

Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Annie/Starlight (Erin Moriarty) are still going strong; Annie's pregnant and they're now running an A/V equipment store together. Annie has resumed being a superhero on the side, but without any of the commercialization of Vought's supes; she and Hughie are out of the spycraft game, but Annie's still helping people.

Conversely, the loathsome villains of "The Boys" get some deserved, brutal, and often lethal fates in "Blood and Bone."

The finale's title refers to a deal Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and Homelander (Antony Starr) made back in Season 3 to fight to the death. "Scorched earth, shock and awe, blood and bone," they agreed, and this episode held up their bargain.

In the oval office, Kimiko hits Homelander with her new Compound V-destroying nuclear beam, taking away his powers. Homelander tries to laser vision Butcher, then fly away, and neither works. Homelander is left truly helpless for the first time in his life. After about a dozen punches to the face, Homelander (who, remember, has never experienced pain or weakness like this before) cries the whimper of a scared baby, begging for Butcher to spare him.

Homelander's last words are "I am the Homelander," which he usually follows with "And I can do whatever the [expletive] I want." This time, he doesn't get to. "No. You ain't nothing... This is for my Becca," Butcher replies, stabbing his crowbar into Homelander's skull and then cracking open his brains all over the President's Resolute Desk.

I cheered, rewound the scene, and cheered again. There hasn't been cranial ultraviolence this satisfying since the ending of "Inglourious Basterds," when Aldo Raine carved a swastika into Colonel Hans Landa's forehead. Homelander's death wasn't just physically agonizing and humbling, he died rejected by everyone. His godhood delusions were shattered, the entire world saw him for who he was, and even his son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) — born after Homelander raped Becca Butcher (Shantel VanSanten) — chose to help Butcher kill his dad. 

Homelander has spent the better part of a decade as the scariest, most loathsome, and yet utterly untouchable villain on television. He needed to die in bloody catharsis, and he did. 

Expiring shortly before Homelander is The Deep (Chace Crawford). He's nowhere near as dangerous as Homelander, but is definitely just as hateable.

Erin Moriarty had previously said she wanted Annie to kill The Deep; remember, back in the very first episode of "The Boys," The Deep assaulted Annie by coercing her into intimacy. Well, she got her wish! Annie does indeed deliver a killing blow to The Deep, but one that comes with an extra dose of karma.

As a parody of Aquaman, The Deep can communicate with marine life. While he regards sea creatures as friends, he's gotten many of them killed through carelessness or cowardice. That culminated the last few episodes after an oil pipeline he'd previously endorsed as environmentally friendly burst and killed millions of sea creatures. Deep's "friends" warned him he was barred from the ocean on penalty of death.

Annie and Deep's fight takes them to a lonely beach. In a truly above and beyond display of grace, Annie tries to sternly tell The Deep he shouldn't throw away his life for Homelander. But when she scolds him to take some accountability for his own self-inflicted problems instead of blaming her, he screams a horrified "No!" The Deep has passed up many opportunities to change for the better in favor of getting worse, and this turns out to be his last one.

Starlight blasts him into the nearby ocean, where he's instantly swarmed by sharks, then a giant octopus stabs him with a tentacle that bursts out through his mouth. (Note the mirroring image of how Deep forced himself on Starlight.) His body disappears in a plume of blood, dragged into, well, the deep and never to be seen again.

Goodbye, and good riddance.

This season revealed that Vought PR exec Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) had, after being named Vice President, married supe preacher Oh Father (Daveed Diggs). Though it was a marriage of political convenience, it worked out since the two shared a love for BDSM.

Oh Father's power is a bellowing voice that produces sonic waves, doubly fitting for a preacher spreading the corrupt word of Homelander's church. His voice is so powerful that he previously broke loose a ball gag during some fun time with Ashley. This episode, she gives him a ball gag made of titanium... and it's his undoing.

As Oh Father is about to unleash a sonic scream at Hughie, M.M. garrottes the ball gag around Oh Father's mouth, and the sonic backlash implodes his head. (Compare Black Bolt's death by mouth removal + sonic scream in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.") A preacher killed by his own lying voice, how appropriate!

As for Ashley herself? She has a brief attack of conscience and lets the Boys into the White House so they can kill Homelander. But after the dust settles, she tries to claim she'd been fighting the regime from the inside all along, and absolutely refuses to resign as President... so she's impeached in an "unprecedented unanimous vote in Congress," and is last seen being arrested by the FBI. 

Ashley's nervous energy, trying to just stay alive surrounded by temperamental superheroes, made her an endearing character. But the fact is, she's also mostly a self-interested coward. Her managing to stick around like a cockroach but getting knocked back down the ladder of power is a more fitting ending for her than dying.

Ashley isn't the only villain spared in "The Boys" finale. Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) gets off basically scott-free. Kimiko takes her super-intelligence powers away, but even that's a win for Sage; she can enjoy herself now, whereas previously she found life unbearable because of how much smarter she is than everyone else.

Then there's once and future Vought CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito), last seen locked up in Vought Tower during Episode 5 "One-Shots." Now that Homelander is dead, he's been freed, and the Boys watch a broadcast of him announcing his return as "interim CEO" of Vought. To paraphrase what Homelander said to Stan back in Season 3 after the latter was forced out in a "temporary leave of absence," interim assignments have a bad habit of becoming permanent.

Ever since his guest appearance in "Gen V" Season 2, Stan Edgar had been saying it was only a matter of time before he regained control of Vought. And he was right! But for "The Boys" to stay true to its themes, Stan is a bad guy who had to come out on top. He's the most chilling version of an empty suit — an avatar of corporate power that cares about profit only. That's one reason he disdains supes and harbors no fear of them; Stan can reshape the world with money and soft power better than anyone with super-strength can.

The supes, Homelander included, were only ever an extension of the greater rot that is the Vought corporation. As is true in real life, it's one thing to take down bad actors, but much harder to uproot an entrenched system. One character in "The Boys" who understands that well? Billy Butcher.

Billy Butcher finally got his man in "Blood and Bone," but there's no joy or relief on his face when and right after he kills Homelander. He looks more haunted than anything; it's trite but true that revenge is a poor substitute for what you lost in the first place.

As the Boys enjoy some beers and cigars at their victory, Butcher feels alone. Becca is still dead, Ryan rejects him, and he walks into his room to find his beloved, senior aged bulldog Terror has died. So, Butcher decides to truly go scorched Earth. Taking out a remaining vial of the supe-killing virus, he heads to Vought Tower, intending to release the super-contagious virus through the building's sprinkler systems and then let it spread across the planet.

It's just a matter of time before another Homelander pops up, Butcher tells Hughie, who tags along to try and stop him. Hughie clocks that Butcher, who sees his late little brother Lenny whenever he looks at Hughie, keeps Hughie around as his conscience — to keep him from going too far. When Butcher goes to release the virus, he pauses when he again sees Lenny by looking at Hughie, who then shoots him. Hughie immediately regrets that impulsive self-defense, but Butcher tells him it's alright, and he dies peacefully.

Cut to the surviving Boys assembled one last time for Butcher's funeral, where he's now buried next to Becca. Not even Hughie can pretend there's a chance that Butcher made it to Heaven, but says that at least in Hell, he must be "kicking the [expletive] out of the Devil." Maybe Butcher and Frenchie can give Homelander a good kicking together down there, too.

"The Boys" is streaming on Prime Video.