The creator of The Boys accepts the ending and explains himself
Why did you end the series like this? Eric Kripke provides after-sales service and justifies his choices.
The end of The Boys continues to get fans talking, between emotion, frustration and heated debates.
Faced with the reactions, which are inevitably mixed, the creator of the series Eric Kripke explains in Variety why he accepts this conclusion.
Spoiler alert!
“We finished exactly where we wanted to arrive,” he assures us straight away. “Do some storylines work better than others? Of course. No show is perfect from start to finish. But all of these stories led us to this place. And I’m happy with the result.”
Above all, Kripke reveals that this final face-to-face between Butcher and Hugie had been planned since the very beginning of the series:
“From the very beginning, we knew that this was the end of Hughie and Butcher. It’s not quite identical to the comics, but we still have a fairly faithful ending for Butcher and Hughie, similar to the one in the comics. That was our target from the start.”
Other elements had been set in stone for seven years: “We knew 100% that Butcher would kill Homelander with a crowbar. We didn’t necessarily know where, when or how… but we knew it would happen!”
The showrunner explains that from the middle of season 3, the team already had a clear vision of the final destination of almost all the characters. One of the big surprises of this conclusion obviously remains the role of Kimiko, who ends up taking away her powers from Homelander. A decision thought out very early in the writing of this final season 5:
“We had this Chekhov gun with the power of Soldier Boy, but we didn’t want him to be the one to solve the problem. It was important to us that the Boys actually faced Homelander and that Butcher had the last moments with him.”
The designer says he had to tell actress Karen Fukuhara about Frenchie’s death: “I told her: ‘I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that Frenchie dies.’ She started to cry. These actors have lived with their characters for so long… Then I added, ‘But the good news is that even if you’re not the one who kills Homelander, you’re the one who takes away his powers.’ And she loved the idea.”
Eric Kripke finally insists on the fact that this ending was never intended to be totally happy or totally apocalyptic.
“Nothing will ever be perfect. There are still superheroes in this world. Annie continues to fight with her mother. Kimiko must live without Frenchie. But when a family sticks together, there is hope somewhere…”
For him, the real final message of The Boys lies elsewhere: to stop waiting for a providential savior and learn to protect the people you love yourself.
“When you stop waiting for someone to come and save you and start saving the people you love, you can get a happy ending. That’s what we’re showing with Hughie, Annie and MM, who spent the whole season thinking he’d never see his family again. Now he’s got his wife, his daughter, a new son back and he’s going to raise Ryan, like Butcher asked him to last season. Even Kimiko, even though Frenchie is gone, is finding some form of peace. Nothing is perfect and everything is difficult, that’s life.
