Review: The Boys, "Teenage Kix" | Season 5, Episode 2

Hey free subscribers—just your regular reminder that our coverage of the final season of The Boys is headed behind the paywall.

Five seasons in, and seven episodes from the end, it's nice to see that Eric Kripke and the creative team are still committed to a noble creative goal: making an episode of television that unspools like, you know, a proper episode of television. Even Lost got a little wobbly with its episodic structure towards the end, but The Boys isn't turning into an eight-hour one-act play just because it's in the endgame. "Teenage Kix" is a smartly plotted and efficiently executed installment of the series, which is unfortunately more impressive than you might think in recent years when it comes to popular, long-running streaming genre shows. Plus, it frees up the discussion to focus on the philosophical debate at the heart of the episode:

Is it worth is to kill 10,000 people to ensure the safety and self-determination of eight million more?

Or rather, it would be, if The Boys was seriously entertaining this question. It certainly pretends to act like it is—for a little while, anyway. Butcher takes everyone to his new homebase, where he and Sameer have been refining the virus into an effective strain that will finally kill Homelander. ("Homelander? Or every supe?" Hughie asks. "Don't know," Butcher responds, "but we'll have a laugh findin' out, won't we?") And then the debate, such as it is, begins. Hughie and Kimiko end up on one side, pointing out the insanity of a genocide of a group of people, regardless of whether it will ensure the bad ones currently running the world die as well. On the other side is M.M., Frenchie, and Annie, the last of whom even does the above math out loud, endorsing the plan regardless of whether all the supes die as a result. It's a bold position for half the ostensible heroes on a show to take.