In just a few short hours, The Boys will be done. It was roughly 6 PM on Friday, May 19th, when I started working on this piece internally, but I didn't commit it to digital ink until the morning of May 20th. I’m currently working my day job while feverishly avoiding Reddit and, to a lesser extent, my e-mail (screw you, THR, for constantly sending out mid-day “X EXPLAINS THAT ONE SHOCKING DEATH” e-mails on the day the episodes came out) because I hope the show will somehow pull off a surprise. I do not have high hopes.

That being said, spoilers for The Boys (excluding the series finale) follow.

The Boys might already be done for you. The episode is available as I’m writing this, but I’ll be publishing this before I see the finale, and I’ll hopefully publish some thoughts on the finale independent of this piece. But I just wanted to talk a bit about where I’m at with the show. A show that has surprisingly tracked my professional career, debuting when I was a lowly freelance writer with a few listicles to my name and ending with me as an editor with multiple tenures and at least one major controversy under my belt.

In just a few short hours, The Boys will be done. It will be the second time I have been able to say such a thing in my lifetime, having just gotten back into comics shortly after the comic launched. I don’t care for the comic, and I think I’ve been pretty vocal about that. I find The Boys to be mean-spirited and crass in a way that is intensely unpleasant. I’ve long outgrown the desire to see extreme violence and obscenity and sex exist in stories just for the sake of having them. That being said, I think the basic premise of the book — superheroes are assholes and a team of equally bad assholes keep them in line — has a lot of potential. I also think the book’s final two twists are genuinely some of the best in comics. Spoilers for a 20+ year old comic, but the first twist is that Homelander was framed for many of his worst acts by Black Noir, a Homelander clone who has been trying to fulfill his lifelong destiny of killing the original, and the second is that the book’s real big bad is Billy Butcher, whose “all supes must die” mission statement includes killing every ally and The Boys themselves after dealing with Vought and Homelander.

I feel pretty comfortable including those spoilers because the show isn’t going to use either. I thought it was going to try to pull the rug out from under everyone and use the Butcher twist, but going into the final hour of the show, I don’t honestly think there’s a twist planned at all. And that really sucks? I’m a huge supporter of the idea that media should differ from its source material. I don’t want an exact 1:1 adaptation of The Boys; I already experienced that story. But I think if you’re going to take the bold step of tweaking the narrative of an adaptation, you have to at least try to replace it with something better.

The Boys, so far, has not. It did, once upon a time. Seasons 1 through 3 of the show are honestly great, balancing the crass, mean humor with a genuinely entertaining narrative about existing in a world where superheroes are the worst part of your day. It sure feels like the show was meant to end with Season 3, though, and a raucous finale that saw Homelander, Soldier Boy, Billy Butcher, and Lady Maeve duke it out in Vought Tower with the future of Homelander’s son, Ryan, hanging in the balance.

It’s all downhill after that. The promise of a Homelander no longer shackled by worrying what people thought about his wild power level and the ticking time bomb of Butcher’s terminal cancer diagnosis seemed to put the pressure on for the show to race towards a conclusion. But it just kept meandering and side-stepping. Where Homelander once willingly fired lasers from his eyes through a crowd, he now spends entire episodes futzing with the notion that he should be perceived as the literal son of God. The titular Boys have spent most of the season running in circles, in search of either the elusive all-powerful V1 serum or the secrets to a supe-killing virus. They spent an entire episode in an abandoned Vought lab where a dying supes’ powers made them all angry at each other, the kind of bottle episode that would serve as an intense moment of character exploration if it were done in an earlier season. As a final season episode, it just feels like filler.

There’s been no urgency these last two seasons. No narrative drive. More time has been devoted to setting up the ill-conceived spin-off, Vought Rising, due out next year. I get wanting to keep the brand going, but a show set in World War II where two of the show’s most unforgivable characters are the leads, but have to survive to be antagonists in the main series? Why do I want to watch a show where two racist superheroes can’t possibly face their comeuppance? (There’s also another spin-off, The Boys: Mexico, which doesn’t have a lot of details available as of this writing, but I’m quietly speculating will be a vehicle for The Deep, who, as of this writing, is somehow still alive???)

In just a few short hours, The Boys will be done. And in a sense, that’s a shame. Warts and all, there is still a lot to love here. I think the casting has been fucking phenomenal. This is the show where a lot of us first discovered Jack Quaid, who has now kind of slipped into the “nerd-superstar who isn’t quite an A-lister but keeps getting hired” role typically held by the likes of Bruce Campbell. Karl Urban has been fantastic throughout the entire run; I could probably just watch an entire show of him being a smartass to people. Could we get that Dredd sequel now? And Antony Starr’s Homelander is genuinely one of the most unforgettably terrifying and laughably pathetic villains to make their way to TV.

And I can’t write about the positives without mentioning the special effects. The Boys really shone when it went all out on a practical set piece. The show doesn’t have as many as it used to. I think those peaked in Season 3, with the building of a giant penis tip set to show off a supe who could shrink and that entire extended sequence of The Boys and The Seven fighting on the high seas.

Ultimately, I find myself heading into the series finale of The Boys with more apprehension than hope. Season 5 has been a drag so far, more focused on setting up the next steps than on closing its current doors. I think it should have leaned more into those endings that made the comic special. I think it should have shocked everyone who wasn't in the loop by killing Homelander way earlier and letting Butcher take his rightful place as the show's chief antagonist. And I think it probably could have had one less supe this season whose powers included a super-extended version of their genitalia.

I don’t think there will be another show I have quite a love/hate relationship with. The Boys is ultimately going to be better than the comic overall for me, as it was tonally much more interesting, but it’s so far not stuck the landing in a way that will make it an all-timer. The promise of those early seasons just weirdly petered out, and I’m left with something I find confusing and unsatisfying. I am, unusually for me, at a point where I’m just ready for it to be over with.

In just a few short hours, The Boys will be done. And all I think is…good.

The Boys is now streaming on Prime Video.