For five seasons, Eric Kripke’s adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic-book acid trip has enthralled and entertained audiences with one diabolical bar fight staged against the corpo-fascist echelons of the American elite after another.
After seven years of watching caped celebrities juiced-up on pharmaceutical-grade godhood collide with the titular rag-tag insurgency of traumatised malcontents, The Boys has finally staggered towards its curtain call.
The premise behind The Boys has always rested on a pleasingly ugly foundation: superheroes exist, albeit as intellectual property assets manufactured by the fictional conglomerate Vought International, while Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and his coalition of anti-supe insurgents dedicate their lives to exposing and dismantling these superhuman mascots of late capitalism.
The fifth and final season carries the burden of concluding that mission in a cultural ethos where our political realities seem to have developed the disturbing habit of stealing the writers' material in real time.