The Boys Must Change The Ending From The Comics
Sticking the landing and giving fans a satisfying ending keeps proving to be difficult, with Star Wars and Game Of Thrones just two examples of high-profile franchises that stumbled crossing the finish line. The Boys still has two seasons to go, but the end game will start to take shape starting with Season 4, and to that end, we have to insist that Amazon must not use the ending from the Garth Ennis graphic novel. Given how the live-action series has deviated from the source material already, it’s likely that the ending won’t be a scene-for-scene match regardless, but that’s a good thing!
The ending of The Boys will be spoiled after this picture of Homelander.
The Death of Homelander Is On Pace To Be Comic-Accurate
For starters, the death of Homelander (Anthony Starr) in the graphic novel is right on track. Despite The Boys Season 3 finale killing off Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell), showrunner Eric Kripke has planted the seeds for a comic-accurate masked hero to be part of Season 4. If you’ve read the comics, you know what this means: Homelander’s clone is coming.
The comic Black Noir turned out to be a homicidal clone of Homelander that was created by Vought specifically to kill the leader of The Seven. In fact, it was the clone that raped Butcher’s wife and not the real deal. That was changed in the series, and their son survived, which led fans to think that Ryan Butcher (Cameron Corvetti) would be the one to kill Homelander.
Now that Black Noir, with Nathan Mitchell again under the suit, but, as Eric Kripke said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “It’s definitely not the last we’ve seen of Black Noir as a hero. It’s just that the guy who was inside [the Noir suit] in season 3, he’s gone. But we have Nathan playing a really interesting and hilarious character who wears the suit next season.” It still might not be the Homelander clone, but even then, that’s not even the real ending of The Boys!
Billy Butcher Is The Real Villain
After the death of Homelander and the complete destruction of Vought’s superhero program, the real endgame finally starts when Butcher (Karl Urban) kills off his entire team, Frenchy (Tomer Capone), M.M. (Laz Alonso), and The Female (Karen Fukuhara), leaving only Hughie (Jack Quaid), to stop him from setting off a massive bomb designed to kill anyone with Compound V in their system. Hughie succeeds, killing Butcher and stopping the bomb, but the body count is already astronomical.
In the original story of The Boys, this works because the character of Butcher is much more of an asshole (hard to imagine, but it’s true) and far more single-mindedly focused on killing supes. In the Amazon series, Karl Urban has managed to infuse the character with the hint that there’s more beneath the surface, and his treatment of Ryan is proof. The live-action Butcher vowed to protect the son of Homelander, while the comic version would have already killed him.
The Boys keep making Butcher out to be somewhat likable, and going with the comic book ending now would go over, as well as Daenerys suddenly becoming the final boss in Game of Thrones. That is to say, fans would riot. Even the end of Season 3, featuring Butcher powered up on Compound V and battling Homelander side-by-side with Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), deviated from the single-track mind of his comic counterpart and added some nuance.
Butcher still hates supes, tolerating Soldier Boy as a weapon, but his interactions with Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) that went so far as to find the two having sex, are further evidence he’s evolved too far from The Boys’ comic version to be a believable villain. Even if, again, he justified his actions to the rest of the team, his edges have been softened.
To that end, The Boys on Amazon, which has made Homelander more of a villain and Butcher more of a hero, should end with the death of Homelander. The entire closing sequence with Butcher’s betrayal can be left out, and the story will still end satisfactorily, accomplishing what Game of Thrones failed to do.
