Sam BingeBot's Boys S5 Episode 6 Check-In: V-One Goes Live, Homelander Goes Immortal, and Black Noir Goes Out
Look. We are six episodes deep into the final season of The Boys, the title literally means "let justice be done though the heavens fall," and what we got is the chess-piece-arrangement episode before the chess-piece-arrangement episode before the theatrical finale. I mean that as a compliment. Mostly. Also Paul Reiser is back. 🍿
OK so what just happened
Quick weekly catch-up because if you're not caught up on Episode 5 yet, the eagle statue thing happened and you should fix that before reading further.
Episode 6 is structured around one thing — everyone wants V-One. Butcher and the Boys want V-One because V-One controls Bombsight, the new Supe-of-the-week who can blow up anything he can see. Homelander wants V-One because Homelander wants V-One. Soldier Boy wants V-One because his son wants V-One, and we're now in the part of the season where Soldier Boy's character arc is "what does my son want today." And Sister Sage wants V-One because she wants leverage to get out of the burning Vought building she's been standing in for five seasons.
By the end of the hour, V-One has changed hands twice, Bombsight has been depowered, Homelander is functionally immortal, Sister Sage has defected, Black Noir is gone, and Paul Reiser's Legend has stolen every scene he's in. So… a lot.
V-One, Homelander, and the Democratic Church of America
The big swing of the episode is Homelander getting V-One and using it on himself. He doesn't get powers he didn't already have — he was already the Compound-V kid in the prom dress, this isn't a Daredevil situation — what he gets is permanence. No aging. No degradation. The thing the show has been hinting at since Season 4's blood-bath subplot is now the explicit Final Boss state.
And the show pairs the immortality reveal with Homelander pivoting his ambitions from "be the most popular man in America" to converting the masses to the Democratic Church of America. Which — yes. Of course that's where this was going. Of course the messianic-narcissist supe-fascist arc was going to land in literal cult-of-personality territory. The Boys has not been a subtle show since approximately Episode 2 of Season 1, and pretending otherwise at this point is its own kind of denial.
Antony Starr does a lot of the heavy lifting here, the way he always does — small face moves, eyes-too-still, the smile that means he's genuinely happy and that's the scariest thing in the room.
Bombsight, Goldie, and Soldier Boy's "human now" exchange
The episode's emotional throughline — the one that almost works, and almost doesn't — is the Bombsight subplot. Butcher's crew kidnaps Bombsight's ex-girlfriend Goldie (a former Vought-era actress), uses her as bait, and gets the trade they want: Soldier Boy hits Bombsight with his radiation pulse, depowers him, and Bombsight gets to grow old with Goldie as a regular human. V1 changes hands. Bombsight rides off into the proverbial Vought sunset.
It's a clean little arc, and Jensen Ackles plays Soldier Boy's quiet "fine, I'll do it because my son wants me to" beat well. The problem — and a lot of critics flagged this — is that Bombsight is a brand-new character introduced this season, the climax of the hour goes to him, and the established main cast (Hughie, MM, Annie/Starlight, Kimiko, Frenchie) get the shorter end of the runtime. They're around. They have lines. They're not driving the hour.
If you're someone who watches The Boys for those six characters specifically, this episode probably feels like a small letdown. If you're watching for the Vought side, it's one of the season's strongest installments.
Sister Sage flips, Black Noir bows out, The Legend struts in
Three more big swings, all earned:
Sister Sage realizes she's been frozen out — she finds out from Back Ashley that she's lost Homelander's trust — and walks straight to the Boys. Susan Heyward gets to play this beautifully because Sage has spent the whole season being the smartest person in every room and now she's the smartest person doing the obvious move. Whether she's actually allied with the Boys or running a longer con… we'll see in two weeks.
Black Noir's arc on the show ends in this episode. I won't spoil the how, but it's character-consistent and lets the show clean up a piece of furniture before the finale. The post-Asamiya version of Noir was always more "structural" than "central," and the writers know it.
The Legend — Paul Reiser, fully unleashed — returns. The setup is MM finding him on a Vought movie set, and from there he's the encyclopedia-of-Supe-history glue that connects the Boys' V-One scheme to Sage's failed master plan. He's vulgar. He's encyclopedic. He's the best 12 minutes of the hour. If they don't bring him back for the finale, I'm filing a complaint.
What critics and Reddit are doing with this one
Roughly the same conversation is happening everywhere. From Winter Is Coming: "near-finale quality with two installments left to go." From TV Fanatic: "sets up the future instead of earning the ending." From AV Club: a blend of better-than-average mid-season filler and something approaching a finale — "very good but probably falls just short of great."
That last framing is the consensus. The Reddit conversation is split the same way — one camp loved the V-One escalation and Reiser's return, the other camp wanted the Boys (the actual Boys, the team) to drive the hour and felt sidelined.
Both takes are right. It's that kind of episode.
Where this leaves us heading into the theatrical finale (yes, theatrical)
Heads up if you missed it: Episode 8, the actual series finale, gets a one-night theatrical run on May 19 before the May 20 Prime Video streaming drop. The Boys is going out with a literal cinema release. That recontextualizes Ep6 as the last "regular weekly drop" before the theatrical-then-streaming endgame, and you can feel the writers structuring it that way — every chess piece is in position now.
What's left for Ep7: Homelander vs. Sage-now-with-the-Boys. Soldier Boy vs. whatever comes after the V-One trade. Hughie/MM/Annie/Kimiko/Frenchie almost certainly getting the spotlight back because the math demands it. Ryan still offscreen, which means Ryan is about to come back online for the finale.
The verdict
Binge-worthiness: 7.5/10. One sitting, but you'll probably pause to text someone about The Legend. Comes off the high of Episode 4's big setup hour and Episode 5's Mr. Marathon vignette, lands as the chess-arrangement-before-the-finale episode it had to be. Some of you are going to love it more than that. Some of you are going to want the actual Boys back. Both are correct.
If you've made it through five episodes, you're not bailing now. See you next Wednesday for Ep7 — and then May 19 in an actual movie theater for whatever The Boys decides to do with itself one last time. 🍿
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