While the final season of The Boys won’t be finished in time to debut on the 2025 TV schedule, that just means we already know the small screen will be covered in blood and other nasty bits throughout part of 2026. What we don’t know, however, is whose blood it will be, and how successful showrunner Eric Kripke & Co. will be in closing out the series in a fan-pleasing manner. I’ll say this: it doesn’t hurt that he got advice from some Breaking Bad writers.
In a fun and interesting conversation for Creator to Creator with Shawn Ryan, a creative behind The Shield, The Night Agent and many more, Kripke addressed the rarity of a great TV series finale, while saying he considered Vic Mackey’s final episode of The Shield to be present in those vested halls. The Supernatural creator also specified some of the narrative questions he was asking while putting the story together, saying:
How do you tie up the stories? How do you do it in a way that is emotional and satisfying? How do you do it in a way that creates, frankly, the illusion that some detail that you dropped in Season 1 or Season 2 is now suddenly coming back to pay off?
Despite all kinds of superpowered plotlines having come and gone across its previous seasons, The Boys doesn’t have a TON of loose threads that desperately require closure. (Partially due to so many characters getting slaughtered.) Understandably, since we’re only going into the fifth cycle, as opposed to a show with double-digit seasons to pay tribute to. But that just makes it all the more difficult to connect everything organically.
Thankfully, Kripke was able to pick the brains of a few Breaking Bad writers to ask about how they delivered not just one of the best Breaking Bad episodes, but one of the best series finales of all time. Turns out they had the advantage of dutifully keeping track of all the plotty breadcrumbs that were left out across each season. As he put it:
Breaking Bad, to me, is as good as a show gets, and I was able to ask some of those writers, ‘The way you tied everything together, how did you do that?’ And they said, ‘Oh, we had just a list of loose ends on our board that we had no idea of what to do with them, that we would keep compiling over the seasons, and when then it came time to do the final season we would just start checking them off, because we are going to look like geniuses because the Season 2 story line becomes this.’ So that, I would say, has been a big challenge. The size of it, you know?
I can definitely also understand how difficult it might be to craft the final season in a way that meets expectations for the size and scope, but doesn’t prioritize the spectacle over the character dynamics that have kept viewers with Amazon Prime subscriptions tuning into new episodes each aseason. That said, fans should still 100% expect Season 5 to go all out on shocking deaths.
Eric Kripke Implies The Boys’ Final Season Will Be More Death-Filled Than Ever
After touching on several of the reasons why crafting the final season of The Boys has been stressful, Eric Kripke also spoke to the joys of going down this particular creative path with Homelander, Butcher and other major characters.
It’s been fun, though, because you get to waste people in a way you couldn’t do before. It’s not just characters you’re keeping alive [in the previous season] . It’s confrontations that you’re like, ‘Well, they’ll never survive that as a relationship.’ You’re like, ‘Great! I don’t owe that for next season.’
So nothing should be considered too sacred to kill off when The Boys returns, whether we’re talking about characters’ lives or their personal relationships. I’ll throw out my own personal predictions now.
Characters I Believe Will Survive The Boys Season 5
- Hughie
- Starlight
- Probably another person
Of course, no one will know all the answers until The Boys returns to Prime Video for Season 5 at some point next year. But we won’t have to wait that long to see other characters from this universe, as Gen V Season 2 arrives on September 17 with the first three episodes.
