Episode 7 of The Boys Season 5 opens inside Vought Studios, where Homelander’s rise to full-blown dictatorship is being packaged like a religious event. Oh-Father oversees preparations for the grand unveiling, treating Homelander less like a superhero and more like a divine ruler preparing for coronation.
Homelander himself has fully embraced the fantasy.
He casually demands the dismantling of Congress, acting as though democracy is now just an inconvenience standing in the way of his destiny. President Calhoun hesitates, and that hesitation is enough to seal his fate. Using Back Ashley’s mind-reading abilities, Homelander confirms the president secretly doubts him. Moments later, Calhoun is dead.
At this point, fear is no longer enough for Homelander. He wants worship.
Elsewhere, MM and Annie reunite with Jordan Li and Marie Moreau. The mood is noticeably different from earlier seasons. Nobody seems hopeful anymore. Everyone looks exhausted, emotionally drained, and strangely resigned to whatever disaster is coming next.
Emma has been secretly tracking Oh-Father and shares the intel with the group, hoping they can still act before Homelander tightens his grip completely. Marie and Jordan want to keep fighting, but Annie shuts them down. In her eyes, the war is already lost.
That hopelessness hangs over nearly every scene in the episode.
Meanwhile, Butcher, Frenchie, and Kimiko continue their dangerous experiments involving uranium and Soldier Boy’s radiation abilities. Their desperate plan is to recreate the depowering blast capable of stripping Homelander of his powers permanently.
But things are going badly.
Kimiko’s body reacts violently to the tests, and each attempt leaves her weaker instead of stronger. Hughie, already emotionally exhausted from everything that has happened this season, starts questioning whether any of this is worth it anymore. Butcher tries motivating him with another rough-edged speech about finishing the fight no matter what, though Hughie barely seems convinced.
At Vought, Homelander officially dissolves The Seven, proving once again that loyalty means absolutely nothing to him.
Even Deep, who spent years humiliating himself to stay in Homelander’s good graces, gets discarded without a second thought. Drunk, bitter, and spiraling, Deep wanders near the ocean where Xander the hammerhead shark confronts him about an Alaskan oil spill. The scene somehow manages to be ridiculous, sad, and perfectly in line with The Boys’ bizarre humor.
The warning is simple: if Deep ever enters the water again, he dies.
Back at the lab, Frenchie desperately seeks help from Sage, hoping her intelligence can save Kimiko before the experiments kill her. But Sage is emotionally shattered after her lobotomy. For once, the smartest person in the world feels completely powerless.
What breaks her isn’t science or logic.
It’s love.
Sage admits she cannot understand human emotion because it refuses to follow predictable patterns. To her, love represents chaos, and that inability to calculate it makes her feel useless.
At the same time, Butcher, Hughie, MM, and Annie launch a risky plan to abduct Oh-Father from Vought Studios in hopes of learning Homelander’s next move.
Inside the studio, the satire becomes especially sharp. MM and Annie overhear actors complaining about a canceled TV show receiving an AI-generated ending. Annie also notices a grotesque fictionalized version of herself in one of Vought’s productions, leaving her wondering whether trying to inspire people was ever worth it in the first place.
The mission quickly falls apart.
The studio is guarded by psychics, including Synapse, who incapacitates Hughie and Butcher while also temporarily neutralizing Butcher’s powers.
Meanwhile, Ashley, now effectively president, technically has enough authority to deploy the military against Homelander. But despite everything happening, she still refuses to act. Back Ashley finally grows disgusted with her cowardice and stops supporting her altogether.
One of the episode’s stranger but surprisingly funny moments comes when MM and Annie realize being high prevents psychics from properly reading their minds. Using that loophole, they infiltrate a bizarre Vought screen test where Jesus symbolically passes leadership of humanity to Homelander.
Most audience members pretend to believe in Homelander out of fear.
Only six people genuinely worship him.
Those six are quietly released while the others are marked for execution.
Elsewhere, Homelander attempts to bond with Soldier Boy, seemingly desperate for some form of validation from the only person he considers family. But Soldier Boy rejects the entire fantasy immediately.
He bluntly tells Homelander he does not see him as a god and only helped him because of Clara.
Homelander’s fragile ego snaps again.
He knocks Soldier Boy unconscious and returns him to cryogenic containment, whispering “I love you” in a way that feels more disturbing than sincere.
Back in captivity, Hughie and Butcher share another conversation about finishing the mission. Oddly enough, this time it works. Hughie finally regains a small sense of hope, choosing to stay loyal to Butcher despite everything.
Frenchie, meanwhile, reaches Sage emotionally by explaining that not everything in life needs solving. Some mysteries, especially love, are meaningful precisely because they cannot be fully understood.
When he asks if she has ever loved anyone, Sage remembers her grandmother, the only person who ever made her feel valued beyond her intelligence.
That memory finally pushes her to help.
At the theater, Annie reaches a breaking point after seeing how willingly ordinary people submit to Homelander’s propaganda. She questions whether humanity even deserves saving anymore.
MM responds with one of the episode’s strongest emotional moments.
He explains the origin of his nickname, “Mother’s Milk,” revealing he earned it as a child after getting mocked for rescuing a helpless bird. He never cared about the bullying because saving someone made his family proud.
For MM, helping people is simply who he is.
That conversation gives Annie a reason to keep going.
Soon after, Homelander orders the execution of the audience members who failed his loyalty test. Oh-Father unleashes Dogknott and Sheline on them, but Annie and MM intervene just in time and rescue the survivors before bringing them to Marie for protection.
Marie’s involvement, however, feels surprisingly limited considering how much the season teased her arrival.
Elsewhere, Synapse manipulates Hughie psychologically by taking the form of Joe Kessler and exposing Butcher’s past mistakes. But the interrogation is really just a distraction to locate Kimiko and Sage for Homelander.
Hughie eventually overcomes the psychic attack by focusing on Synapse murdering his younger brother. The emotional distraction allows Butcher to regain control of his powers and brutally kill Synapse.
Unfortunately, by then it’s too late.
Homelander already has the information he needs.
At the lab, Sage’s latest experiment leaves Kimiko dangerously weak just as Homelander arrives. Sage and Kimiko hide behind a zinc wall, but Frenchie remains exposed.
When Homelander moves toward the hiding spot, Frenchie sacrifices himself to distract him.
In one final attempt, Frenchie activates the uranium device. The blast barely affects Homelander, proving the experiment failed. Instead, Frenchie suffers the consequences himself.
Believing the project is worthless, Homelander leaves.
Kimiko emerges moments later and finds Frenchie dying in her arms, badly injured from both the radiation and Homelander’s assault. She holds him silently as he dies, ending the episode on one of the season’s bleakest moments.
Review
As a standalone hour of television, Episode 7 works surprisingly well. It has strong emotional beats, sharp satire, dark humor, and several genuinely touching character moments.
But as the penultimate episode of the final season, it feels strangely small.
There’s a lingering sense that The Boys is still moving sideways instead of forward. With only one episode left, the story still spends large chunks of time on side missions, extended conversations, and thematic commentary rather than building unstoppable momentum toward the finale.
Frenchie’s death especially feels underwhelming for a character who has been part of the emotional core of the series since Season 1. The scene itself is sad, but the buildup lacks intensity. Even Homelander walking away without checking behind the zinc wall feels unusually careless for someone portrayed as increasingly paranoid.
The episode does deliver some memorable material, though.
MM’s explanation about his nickname gives the season one of its most heartfelt scenes. Hughie choosing loyalty over bitterness also lands emotionally because the series has spent years testing his morality. And as always, Homelander remains both terrifying and unintentionally hilarious.
His desperate need for validation from Soldier Boy almost feels pathetic underneath all the violence. Antony Starr continues to balance absurd comedy and genuine menace better than almost anyone on television right now.
The Vought Studios subplot also works as pointed satire, especially the AI-written finale joke. Ironically, though, the show accidentally draws attention to its own pacing issues. The criticism aimed at lazy storytelling and empty spectacle starts reflecting back onto the season itself.
Marie Moreau’s long-awaited appearance is another mixed bag. After multiple episodes hyping her as someone powerful enough to challenge Homelander, her role here feels surprisingly minor.
By the end, Episode 7 leaves behind an odd feeling.
It’s entertaining, emotional, and occasionally brilliant scene-to-scene, yet it never fully feels like the explosive setup a final season deserves. Instead of racing toward the finish line, The Boys still feels like it believes there’s plenty of time left, even though there isn’t.
The Boys Season 5 Episode 6 | The Boys Season 5 Episode 8
