The Boys Showrunner Comments on Season 5, Episode 4

Warning! Spoilers for The Boys Season 5 Episode 4 follow:

A quick recap before we get into spoiler territory. The Boys is a super gory satire of the superhero genre based on the comic book of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. It follows the eponymous team of vigilantes who work to bring down a group of supervillains (The Seven). Homelander, played by Antony Starr, is a demented despot who rules The Seven with an iron fist. The other supes on the team live in fear of his mood swings and his overpowered abilities, which give him carte blanche to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

The Boys Season 5 revolves around Homelander’s attempt to achieve immortality. The Boys, led by Billy Butcher, lead a resistance to Homelander’s fascist rule over America, and hope to use a virus to wipe out every supe on the planet.

Here’s the official blurb on The Boys Season 5:

In the fifth and final season, it’s Homelander’s world, completely subject to his erratic, egomaniacal whims. Hughie, Mother’s Milk, and Frenchie are imprisoned in a “Freedom Camp.” Annie struggles to mount a resistance against the overwhelming Supe force. Kimiko is nowhere to be found. But when Butcher reappears, ready and willing to use a virus that will wipe all Supes off the map, he sets in motion a chain of events that will forever change the world and everyone in it. It’s the climax, people. Big stuff’s gonna happen.

If you’ve seen the latest episodes of The Boys, you’ll know that supervillain Homelander has taken his god complex to a truly uncomfortable, messianic level. He is now demanding not just obedience, but genuine, unconditional love. He believes it his destiny not just to be a god, but to be the god.

Season 5 Episode 4 hammered Homelander’s delusion home, as he forces his cronies to spread his ascension to the world via the power of marketing. And it just so happens that Homelander’s god complex leveled up at the same time as Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as a Jesus-like figure.

The image, which showed the U.S. president healing a sick man in a hospital bed, sparked a backlash from both sides of the U.S. political spectrum. It was later removed, with Trump claiming it was meant to show him as a doctor.

The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke has said that Homelander was always intended to be a proxy for Donald Trump, and that it had become increasingly difficult to effectively provide satire. “When Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and I took it out to pitch, it was 2016,” he explained. “We just wanted to do a very realistic version of a superhero show, one where superheroes are celebrities behaving badly. Trump was the, ‘He’s not really getting the nomination, is he?’ guy. When he got elected, we had a metaphor that said more about the current world. Suddenly, we were telling a story about the intersection of celebrity and authoritarianism and how social media and entertainment are used to sell fascism. We’re right in the eye of the storm. And once we realized that, I just felt an obligation to run in that direction as far as we could.”

Earlier this month, Kripke told TV Guide that he was “bummed out” that Season 5 was written before the presidential election, which took place in November 2024.

“I’m totally bummed out to say we wrote it before the election. It sounds super naive now, but I swear the plan was, ‘Let’s write a 1984 version of what creeping authoritarianism looks like in America,’ and maybe everyone will be like, ‘Whew, we really dodged a bullet.’ But instead, we got hit with the bullet,” Kripke said.

Kripke added that the writers would come up with outlandish ideas that at the time seemed implausible, but have since become reality. “And a lot of things that were far-fetched for us, we’re like — ‘That’s crazy!’ — have come to pass in a way that’s really really f***ing troubling,” he explained.

Now, in an interview with TheWrap, Kripke went into more detail on this week’s Season 5, Episode 4, and how Homelander’s story arc lined up with Trump’s Jesus post.

“My main reaction is, I’m just tired,” Kripke said. “The way that the Homelander is god thing and the Trump image thing lined up — I don’t like it. I’d rather it not happen. One, it makes my job harder in terms of just presenting satire to the world. Second is it’s just bad for the world, right? So I would way rather that s**t didn’t go down.”

Season 5, Episode 4 ends with Homelander pitched to the world as the head of the new Democratic Church of America, but not everyone appears to be on board with the idea of a ‘superhero’ replacing God. ”I think this might be the bridge too far for him, because I think people, by and large, are reasonable people,” Kripke teased.

More parallels are coming, it seems. Kripke has revealed that in Episode 7 of Season 5, Homelander says a line that the writers felt was the “craziest” they could think of, but “it’s already happened.”

“There’s a line — I won’t give it away — but there’s a line in Episode 7 that Homelander says that was the craziest line we could think of, and it’s already happened,” Kripke said.

In May 2025, Starr spoke of his shock at the glorification of Homelander by some The Boys fans, calling it “surreal.”

“We had a bunch of guys that we all kind of knocked them down a little but on social media to say, ‘This guy is not the hero of any story.'” Starr said. “They were really glorifying him, they loved him. Which is surreal.”

Starr added that he was surprised to find some The Boys fans siding with Homelander, given the outrageously evil actions he takes in the show. “What I didn’t expect was that people would be so conflicted around it and, you know, finding themselves finding empathy for this monster.”

And in 2024, ahead of The Boys Season 4, Kripke responded to fans saying Homelander is a hero, saying: “Some people who watch it think Homelander is the hero. What do you say to that? The show’s many things. Subtle isn’t one of them. So if that’s the message you’re getting from it, I just throw up my hands.”

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.