The fifth and final season of The Boys is in the history books, and everyone is in their feels about it. While some of the tongue-wagging over the Prime Video superhero show is justified, others are showing their whole derrieres, exposing themselves as viewers who were watching the show with their eyes closed. Key among them is Elon Musk himself.
And no, before you ask, The Boys blatantly parodying the political circus of the historic times that we’re living in wasn’t what got Musk and the rest of the most annoying viewers big mad. Thaat’d be too easy. What’s got the X owner and the rest of his followers in a tizzy is how the show has penned Homelander’s fate. According to them, The Boys’ writers’ room committed character assassination of the blond-haired, blue-eyed, American flag-wearing supe. I don’t think we were watching the same show.
The final season of The Boys sees Antony Starr’s Homelander drop his Trumpism pretense by, well, going full hog and declaring himself a God. And for the most part, his would-be ascension into godhood goes according to plan. He gets juiced on a serum that virtually makes him immortal, he has a vice grip on legacy media defecating his propaganda at his beck and call, and a legion of psychics eighty-sixing focus groups who aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid, all while he commands his followers from the comfort of the White House.
But for all his posturing for five seasons, Homelander went out disastrously when the Boys came a-knockin’. After losing his powers from a chest beam from Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and failing to fly away and out-juke Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), Homelander begs for his life. And when I say “begs for his life,” I mean he prostrates himself, saying he’ll suck Butcher’s dick or eat shit to keep him from the long-overdue ass-whooping coming his way. Butcher took exception to that. After beating him bloody in front of the entire nation on a live broadcast, Butcher buries a crowbar in his head and pops his melon back like a can of soda. And just like that, the big bad is big dead.
How’d ya get this deleted footage, mate? https://t.co/vzecvdu5J0
— THE BOYS (@TheBoysTV) May 21, 2026
Although the demise of Homelander was the most cathartic moment of a finale that otherwise saw most of its characters wind up exactly where they should’ve been, a loud minority of fans were big mad about how pathetically Homelander went out. While we’ll spare you the play-by-play discourse of fans who have issues with the finale having to defend the show killing Homelander like the loser he is, we’ll give you a peek into the Emersonian minds of folks who are pissed off about how Homelander went out in The Boys finale.
You have to be an absolute dingleberry to misunderstand a show that is as on the nose as The Boys lmfao https://t.co/9zL1ODiqPm
— Barto (@bartonovopolis) May 20, 2026
To these unhappy few, their demon was slandered. Generational aura loss, as the kids say. And the one to blame for this wasn’t Homelander and his hubris about wanting to play Julius Caesar and find out, as the saxophone music got louder—it was The Boys‘ writers’ room. More specifically, these guys took umbrage with Homelander being so desperate not to have Butcher put a belt to his spandexed ass to the point of pulling a Menace II Society to get out of it. They were also upset that the whole translucent line between Homelander and Trump made their rotund boy look bad.
In response to a blue-checkmark X user’s post whining about the above, Musk gave a one-word reply, as he’s wont to do, calling the whole thing “Pathetic.”
While showrunner Eric Kripke has been booked and busy on the post-season finale media tour, he made time to check out all the hubbub on the “everything app.” Going off Kripke’s Instagram post (and the kee-keeing from stars Jack Quaid, Valorie Curry, and Starr in the replies), Musk’s one-word review of the season finale might as well have been Christmas Day for them. Hit dogs hollering.
Charitably, much of the misreading of the nature of Homelander’s demise comes part and parcel with pop culture’s embrace of him as an entertaining character, worth making “honorable” TikTok edits of. If he’s not the epicenter of a viral meme, he’s spouting the most vitriolic monologue the show has ever seen. Homelander’s meltdowns were so popular that hip-hop producer Metro Boomin sampled one of the supe’s season three speeches in a song with fellow rapper Future on his aptly titled album Heroes & Villains.
Mind you, a lot of fans’ adoration for Starr’s phenomenal portrayal of Homelander overlooks the fact that the supe is not only a rapist, but he’s also a man-baby who, way back in the show’s early going, was jealous of a woman breastfeeding her baby and would lash out like a petulant child. Oh, and also, he slept with a Nazi who also hooked up with his father, which he didn’t seem to have a huge problem with. In fact, he seemed to get off on it. Dude was a weirdo and deserved everything he got.
All that to say, Homelander dropping any vestiges of his tough-guy facade to the extremes he reaches before his final moments is the most appropriate thing the show could’ve done in its finale. Pathetic is a word to describe Homelander’s end, sure, but we’re not surprised that Musk couldn’t understand why and only sees it as bad because woke. Masterful gambit, sir.
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