It’s not common to pray for a show to end quicker than it should, but The Boys is the exception that proves the rule. With just eight episodes, its final season was already slight — but it didn’t take long for the superhero satire to burn away all anticipation or goodwill its previous seasons had built up. Tuning in for Season 5 has become a weekly humiliation ritual, with each episode more painful than the last. Even if its penultimate episode delivered a few well-earned emotional blows, it also rubbed dirt in the wound for fans who expected a team-up between the Boys and the Guardians of Godolkin.
The Boys’ college-set spinoff, Gen V, did a lot of work to set up our heroes’ final battle with Homelander (Antony Starr), particularly in priming Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) as the strongest weapon in the Boys’ arsenal. Those who tuned into Gen V Season 2 rightly assumed that she and her pals from Godolkin University would be joining the Boys in some capacity. After all, they needed all the help they could get. Alas, that was never to be. Marie was nowhere to be seen until this week’s episode of The Boys — which again, is the second to last — when she and Jordan Li (London Thor) appear to deliver some intel to Annie January (Erin Moriarty). Each is understandably keen to join the fight in a more active role, but Annie shoots them down: “What good is all that power,” she asks Marie, “if you can’t control it?”
