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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Lucy Mangan

The Boys season five review – it’s the final outing for this gory splatterfest

Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and Homelander (Antony Starr).
Solid magnetism … Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and Homelander (Antony Starr). Photograph: Jasper Savage/Prime Video

The Boys is back in town, for its fifth and final season. There’s too much to recap in full for those who have not yet had the pleasure of the satirical superhero show created by Eric Kripke from the comic books written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or who have not yet been horrified by the gory splatterfest (courtesy of all kinds of body fluids) of the preceding 32 episodes, which have seen orifices and appendages put to extraordinary use, and some of which have rightly entered what we will very carefully spell as the annals of TV history.

So, let’s just say that the new season finds us set for a showdown between an increasingly power-mad (“Have you seen the memes about me? Posting them should be a crime”) – or, as the voices of angels start speaking to him, possibly just mad – Homelander (Antony Starr) and the Butcher crew. The former is now overlord of the US, with the president and, apparently, Sage (Susan Heyward) at his beck and call. But the gang has just succeeded in screening – in front of a Maga … I mean, Homelander-loving … rally – the long-buried footage of him leaving the passengers on Flight 37 (as he did all the way back in season one when he was just a little baby villain) to die.

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