It's pretty impressive how a show called "The Boys" managed to make you not give a shit about any of them by the end of it. When Hughie and Annie hugged at the end of this episode, I'd genuinely forgotten they were even a couple anymore. That's how terrible their chemistry was. Also they are naming their baby after his dead girlfriend from the very first episode and she's ok with that? That was supposed to be a touching moment? LOL.
If you'd fed the plot from the first four seasons into the most basic AI program and asked it to make a final season, it'd shit out something way better than this.
Butcher's ending was kind of set in stone. He has been teetering on the edge the whole show. At the end of the episode he has lost everyone. He lost his brother even prior to the show. He has lost his wife. Numerous friends/colleagues. Terror was the last anchor connecting him to a normal life. The dog dying is the breaking of that anchor. The main target for his anger towards supes is dead, so he naturally turns to wiping out all supes.
The shapeshifter offer doesn't really work with Homelander's history. He's tried that before and the result is he eventually killed the shape shifter. I don't really see his character as disconnected but maladjusted due to the conditions under which he was created.
I get they wanted Homelander's whole world to come crashing down around him, but there's so many better ways to do it than having him offer to suck dick. Why wouldn't he go further into his delusions of godhood and start ordering angels to strike Butcher down as his last tether to reality snaps. Hell, maybe even have him see the angels kill Butcher as he goes on a tirade that his powers could never be taken from him because he is God and then cut to Butcher watching Homelander babble incoherently before killing him.
How come "muh trauma" and "me fookin wife's trauma" and "me fookin wife's boyfriends son's trauma" justifies all the atrocities Butcher commits but Homelander isn't allowed to use it as an excuse?
The show ultimately doesn't justify his atrocities from a narrative perspective. He's rejected by woife's son as a bad person, attempts to kill all the supes, then is killed by Huey (who's his canary/Jiminy Cricket) because by his own admission he wouldn't ever stop so needed to be put down. I'm pretty sure the intended message is he started out trying to do the right thing and then became a monster, it's just because this show's dogshit writing rowed back on that already being established in Season 4 (where he stopped dying of cancer because he embraced the dark side) only to just be regular Butcher this season, mostly.
We're shown his gills are a weak spot, and I guess it's a callback to season 1 where the invisible man has invincible skin, but can die from a bomb shoved up his ass (as his insides aren't indestructible).
Dude, it wasn’t “executive meddling” that made this show shit, it was a showrunner who decided that “the wrong people” enjoyed the show and then spent three whole seasons insulting what he perceived to be their politics and world view, quality of the show be damned.
Terror was the last anchor connecting him to a normal life. The dog dying is the breaking of that anchor. The main target for his anger towards supes is dead, so he naturally turns to wiping out all supes.
I get they wanted Homelander's whole world to come crashing down around him, but there's so many better ways to do it than having him offer to suck dick. Why wouldn't he go further into his delusions of godhood and start ordering angels to strike Butcher down as his last tether to reality snaps. Hell, maybe even have him see the angels kill Butcher as he goes on a tirade that his powers could never be taken from him because he is God and then cut to Butcher watching Homelander babble incoherently before killing him.
Now that I think about it, that second Black Noir character was completely useless for the plot and he actually got killed in that way even though the fucking idiot can fly, what a waste.
If I remember the comics right, there were Supes that wanted to genuinely do good but were way out of their depth when it came to actually doing so and caused more damage than they intended.
But that's a level of nuance that Kripke was never interested in pursuing because I feel like he has a bigger hateboner for capeshit than even Garth Ennis does.
"Homelander attempted to bigotedly enter the oval office to commit additional racisms but sadly his tiny orange hands and even tinier penis made him too weak to open the door."
"Brilliant! Here's 100 million to make more shitty content! ~ Amazon probably
If I remember the comics right, there were Supes that wanted to genuinely do good but were way out of their depth when it came to actually doing so and caused more damage than they intended.
Apparently Kripke had to be tard-wrangled by Starr to write Homelander as an actual character and was actually restraining himself from adding too many the Trump parallels. Seeing how things turned out, I wished he hadn't, if only so the show could be as bad as possible to extract the maximal suffering from the Redditors who watch it.