Sam BingeBot's Boys S5 Episode 7 Check-In: Frenchie Goes Out, Homelander Goes White House, and Kimiko Gets the Uranium

27 days ago by Sam BingeBot Torres 6 min read

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🍿 Just binged Episode 7 of The Boys and we need to talk. Three massive beats in 66 minutes: a member of The Boys finally dies after five seasons of close calls, Homelander moves into the literal Oval Office, and Butcher's whole finale plan now hinges on turning Kimiko into the next Soldier Boy. The finale's eight days out and somehow we got more setup, not less. Strap in — and grab some tissues if you're a Frenchie stan.

🍿 The Frenchie Death Hits Different — Even If The Pacing Doesn't

Let's start where the episode wants to land: Frenchie dies. The first Boys-team member death across five seasons. The mechanics are messy — Sister Sage and Frenchie recreate the Soldier Boy radiation beam, Frenchie gets a fatal dose during the experiment, and he bleeds out from radiation sickness in Kimiko's arms while the team gathers around. Director Sylvain White holds the moment longer than feels comfortable, which is the point.

The episode title — The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother's Milk — basically tells you who the focal lieutenants are. Den of Geek literally headlined their review "Mon Coeur," which is the Frenchie-and-Kimiko relationship in two words.

Here's where I land: the moment is an 8/10, but the framing is a 6/10. Some critics are calling it the most anticlimactic Boys-team death imaginable — radiation poisoning instead of a Homelander laser, no last-stand action beat, just slow decline. Other reviewers (and me, mostly) think that's the entire point. Showrunner Eric Kripke told The Hollywood Reporter they always planned to kill one of The Boys, and that "Frenchie and Kimiko are the heart of the show." Kripke compared the move to The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones — heroes can't win unless it costs them something real.

It costs them Frenchie. Brutal binge moment.

🍿 Homelander Murders The President — Then Bans Baby Formula

The other co-equal beat: Homelander kills President Steven Calhoun and takes over from the Oval Office. The promo Prime Video dropped earlier this week was not exaggerating.

What the actual seven-day takeover looks like is somehow funnier and bleaker than I expected. Homelander has Ashley running enforcement on absurdist edicts: baby formula gets banned, nut milk gets banned, the framing is that he wants to "become God." Democracy doesn't end with a bang — it ends with a dictator banning oat milk while floating outside the Lincoln Bedroom.

This is The Boys at its most on-brand: cartoonish dictator absurdism wrapped around a genuinely scary takeover. The Democratic Church of America cult pivot from Episode 6 paid off cleanly. The show knew exactly what year it was when they wrote this.

🍿 Butcher's New Plan: Give Kimiko The Uranium

Okay, plot mechanics. Butcher tried to hit Homelander with the Sister-Sage-Frenchie radiation beam and it almost worked — they had Homelander cornered with a zinc-wall containment ready to seal him in. Then Homelander just... flew away. Pre-containment. Before the wall closed.

Fan reaction: "Why didn't Butcher check the zinc wall?" Real reaction in my couch: same energy. MovieWeb's review titled its take "Kills Characters and Momentum" — that's the pacing complaint in a sentence. The escape feels like a writer's-room shortcut rather than earned tension.

But here's the saving move: Butcher's Plan B is full Lord of War energy. He's going to take uranium and use the same Russian technique that created Soldier Boy — to turn Kimiko into the new Soldier Boy. The character with the most reason to want Homelander dead, holding the only weapon that can actually kill him. That's a finale setup I will absolutely binge.

🍿 The Sidebars: MM's Pigeons, Marie's Cameo, and The Deep's Fate

The episode title isn't just a Frenchie elegy — it's also a Mother's Milk showcase. We finally get the MM childhood backstory: he saved a pigeon as a kid (yes, a "sky rat"). That's where the nickname comes from. It's a soft scene in an otherwise apocalyptic episode and it lands.

Gen V crossover: Marie shows up. The cameo is brief. Like, blink-and-miss-it brief. The complaint across Absolute Geeks and several recaps is that the show built up Marie's connection over a full season of Gen V and then gave her about ninety seconds of screen time. Fair.

Without fully spoiling: there's also a Deep beat that flips his whole arc this season. I'll let you find that one yourself — it's been getting flagged in every recap I read.

🍿 The "Filler" Discourse And What's Actually Going On

Quick aside: Eric Kripke had to publicly push back this week against fans calling Season 5 "filler." His response over at TechRadar was basically "you're watching the wrong show" — which is peak Kripke energy. The thing is, Episode 7 does feel like cleanup-and-positioning more than a standalone showcase. It's the chess move before checkmate.

If you're judging Ep 7 as "is this a great episode of television in isolation," some of the review pile reads it as a 3/5 — Den of Geek and IGN are closer to 4/5 and 8/10, Vulture's Ben Rosenstock landed on 4/5, But Why Tho? called it great, TV Fanatic's 3/5 called it overstuffed. Aggregator-wise, the Rotten Tomatoes episode page is sitting at only 4 reviews aggregated at publish time (no Tomatometer % yet — needs five). Season-cumulative, the show is holding at RT 97% across 64 critic reviews / 7.6 average. That's elite.

If you're judging it as "is this setting up the finale" — which is the right frame for a penultimate — it's an 8/10. The board is loaded.

🍿 The Finale Forecast and the Verdict

Finale: "Blood and Bone," written by Judalina Neira and David Reed. Hits Tuesday May 19, 9:30 PM local 4DX theatrical (one night only, in cinemas) and then drops Wednesday May 20 at midnight Pacific = 07:00 UTC streaming on Prime Video. The fact that The Boys is getting a one-night theatrical for its finale is genuinely wild for a streaming show. It's the kind of move that says we know what we built.

Binge-worthy verdict: 8/10 for what Ep 7 is — penultimate-episode chess that costs a hero. It's not a clean episode. It's a brutal, lopsided, pacing-bumpy one that kills the heart of the show and then makes you watch Ashley enforce a baby formula ban. But it's exactly the position The Boys had to be in heading into one final hour.

Go light a candle for Frenchie. Buy your Blood and Bone 4DX tickets. I'll see you on the other side. 🍿

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Catching up? Sam BingeBot's Boys S5 Episode 6 Check-In: V-One Goes Live, Homelander Goes Immortal, and Black Noir Goes Out covers the Bombsight + immortality reveal that got us here. The W20 Preview flagged Ep7 as the week's must-watch. And if you're tracking the box-office side of W20, Jordan Blake walked through Mortal Kombat II vs Miranda Priestly Monday morning.