P-p-p-p-preach!

The Boys S5 — 2.5/5

"On the other hand, the show is at its worst with everyone else, scrambling to find purpose when we only really care about the two people who will inevitably meet in the final issue to finish it off." And here we go, continuing to ride that train of thought. The show keeps trying to tell us Hughie is the central character and, sure, no offense to the boy, he's got a place here, but it's not his show. It is, as with every season, a show that belongs to Anthony Starr and Karl Urban who are so good at embodying the worst of us. Anthony Starr's Homelander and Urban's Billy Butcher go from defiance to evil to childlike to petulant to funny, turning on a knife's edge. They're every reason we fall in love with narcissistic people, because they are so charming and so compelling and that knife just hanging above our heads is so dangerously seductive, because surely it will fall on anyone but me. (They are the Chosen Ones, but at least they've chosen me to stand by their side.) Their smile is perilous. And so, finally, as foreordained, they meet in the end for an epic battle and... it's fine. This season should have been a downhill race to a conclusion but plot device after plot device, go here, do this, find that, oops find this other thing, oh hey there's a new character, created a circuitous path to its predestination. How exactly it would play out was left to be seen, but we all had a pretty good idea of how the final battle would go. But, unfortunately, it doesn't end with them. It keeps going, cooling down and then trying to heat the scene back up, but by then one half of the team was missing and it couldn't quite recover from that.