The Boys Dodged the Comics’ Finale for Years — Then Did It Beat for Beat

Well, here's a turn-up for the books: after years of making it quite clear they're happy to do their own thing, The Boys on Prime Video decided, at the very last minute, to whip out a direct lift from the comics for its series finale. If you're the sort to keep score on these things, you probably raised an eyebrow. And having seen what they actually did, I've got to say – it was a bit of a stumble.

The Setup: Butcher Goes Off the Rails

So let’s set the scene: in the final episode, titled Blood and Bone, Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher finally gets his chance at revenge against Homelander. But if you were expecting any satisfaction, think again. This doesn't bring him peace after losing Becca (his wife), doesn't mend fences with her son, Ryan, who wants nothing to do with him, and – if things weren’t dire enough – Butcher’s dog, Terror, dies as well. All that pent-up rage had to go somewhere, so Butcher opts to unleash a homemade virus that specifically kills superhumans. Lovely stuff.

Borrowed Ending, Borrowed Problems

It all leads to Butcher’s dramatic final clash with Jack Quaid’s Hughie Campbell. The two face off in The Seven's HQ, high up in Vought Tower, and Hughie ends up killing Butcher. If that sounds familiar, that's because it's more or less exactly how things wrapped up in the original comics from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson – surprising, given the show has spent its entire run gleefully messing about with the source material.

• In the comics' big ending ('The Bloody Doors Off'), Butcher's plan is to wipe out every superhuman on Earth, not with a virus but with heat-seeking missiles. Subtle, it is not.
• Butcher pretty much murders everyone else on The Boys team, leaving Hughie alone to play hero.
• Comic Hughie stabs Butcher to death in the Empire State Building. TV Hughie shoots him in the Vought Tower. Same vibes, different postcode.

So yes, there are some key differences. But this finale stays much, much closer to the comics than anything the show has done for ages.

Does This Actually Work?

Here's where things start to unravel a bit, at least if you care about stories making internal sense. One of the reasons the show worked – even when going right off-piste – was its commitment to carving out a logic that’s a bit more emotionally grounded than the comics. But suddenly, for no real reason, we’re back on comic book rails.

The biggest problem is with the whole Butcher vs. Hughie showdown. In the comics, this confrontation makes some sense: Butcher has murdered the rest of the Boys, so Hughie is quite literally the only one left to stand up to him. In the show, though, the rest of the team are all still alive, just off doing… what, exactly? Hughie clocks Butcher’s evil plan, yet just toddles off to face him alone, leaving the (usually hyper-involved) squad out of it.

The episode tries to paper over the cracks with a bit of banter – Butcher tells Hughie he should have brought an army, and Hughie looks sheepish and admits, actually, maybe that would've made sense. Hardly the strongest bit of reasoning, if you ask me.

'Butcher tells Hughie he should have brought an army.' – as if that covers the fact Hughie just sort of forgot to mention the world-ending pandemic to his mates.

The whole thing feels a bit like they desperately wanted a 'faithful' moment, and, in cramming it in, tripped over their own shoelaces. For a show that's prided itself on being a bit smarter than your usual 'bang-pow' adaptation, it's an odd misstep. Personally, I much preferred when they were just riffing on the comics, not copying them wholesale at the eleventh hour.