Wasted Potential of Homelander
I’ve talked about my frustration with s5 and the finale several times before, but I constantly see people online defending this season and especially Homelander’s ending, saying it was satisfying or “not that bad,” and honestly it’s baffling to me. Sure, I can understand finding it satisfying if you’re a casual viewer who just wanted to see the good guys beat the evil superman in the end. But I never watched this show casually. I’ve been invested in it, its world and its characters from the very beginning, and I can’t stress enough how disappointing and poorly written I think s5 was.
I want to focus on Homelander specifically because, in my opinion, he was by far the best character in the show and the only thing keeping me invested when the writing started falling apart in later seasons.
One thing that has always annoyed me is when people, including Eric Kripke himself act as if liking Homelander as a character is the worse thing ever and means agreeing with him or supporting his actions. I think that’s an incredibly shallow way to engage with fiction. Some of my favorite characters in television and literature are villains or antiheroes. That doesn’t mean I think they’re good people. It means I find them psychologically complex, interesting, and compelling to watch. Homelander was all of those things (at least in s1-2 and somewhat s3). And of course, a huge part of that comes from Antony Starr’s performance, which I genuinely think is one of the best villain performances television or movies have seen in years.
One of my biggest problems with Homelander’s ending is how drastically the show changed its approach to his character. If you go back and rewatch s1 he feels completely different. Yes he had absurd and comedic moments, but overall he was terrifying, manipulative, unpredictable and even intelligent. He felt like someone who was always ten steps ahead.
As the series went on, his mental state deteriorated more and more, which was a perfectly logical direction for the character but the problem is that instead of leaning into the tragedy and psychological complexity of that decline, the show increasingly turned him into a joke. The milk jokes became repetitive and it felt like every scene with him was filmed with the intention of turning it into a meme. The constant refusal to kill the boys despite having countless opportunities made the stakes feel nonexistent. And by the time we reached the final season, the season where he was supposed to be at his most dangerous and unstable he felt less threatening than ever. He was a complete joke (apart from some scenes like the one with the Legend in ep6).
This is the same character who was the only one actively looking for translucent in s1 and who singlehandedly identified the identities of Butcher and co., used the plane crash to lobby for armed supes in the military, secretly smuggled v to terrorists, dismanted Stan Edgar’s power by making alliance with Neuman and etc. Instead Kripke turned him into a one dimensional caricature. He just couldn’t bear the fact that the character he hated became the most popular and praised character in his show because of what Homelander personally represented to him.
I’ve seen people argue that Homelander was always pathetic and that his ending was perfectly in character. I disagree. There’s a huge difference between showing a character at their lowest point and turning them into a punchline and a caricature. Unlike every other supe, he never experienced life as a normal human being, he was born with those powers. His entire identity was built around them. Vought raised him in a lab, abused him both physically and mentally, experimented on him and turned him into a weapon before he ever had a chance to become a normal person. Without his powers, he has nothing because Vought never allowed him to have anything else. No family. No childhood. No genuine love. No identity outside of being Homelander. So when he lost those powers, the realization should have been devastating.
Instead, the scene felt like it was written for laughs and lasted only about 2 minutes. It also happened after one of the most anticlimactic and poorly choreographed fights in the entire show, a fight that didn’t even make sense from a power-scaling perspective (i’ll come back to this).
From what I’ve seen, most fans of the show seem to like Homelander’s ending, and whenever someone disagrees, they get told they simply lack “media literacy” because Homelander was always pathetic and a joke underneath it all. The thing is, we’ve already seen Homelander in dangerous situations where his life was at risk three times before: twice in s3 and once in s5. If we look at those scenes, his behavior is very different from what we got in the finale.
The first example is the Herogasm fight. Homelander is pinned down by Soldier Boy, Hughie and Butcher, and he knows exactly what Soldier Boy’s blast can do. He’s seconds away from losing his powers, and he knows it. Yet he doesn’t start pathetically begging. Instead, he gets angry and uses that anger to escape.
The second example is the s3 finale where Maeve, Butcher and Soldier Boy are all holding him down. The only thing he says is “You can’t do this,” but even that line doesn’t come across as pathetic begging, it feels more sad than anything else and the context of that scene matters. Homelander had just found out that Soldier Boy was his father. For the first time in his life, he thought he had a parent and a chance at having a family. He wanted that connection so bad... Instead, he got rejected. So his reaction feels more like sad acceptance and disappointment than pathetic begging. Even after that when Soldier Boy pushes Ryan, Homelander immediately chooses Ryan’s side and turns his back on Soldier Boy, despite the huge risk that puts him in. His focus shifts to Ryan’s well-being rather than saving himself.
The third example is 5x04 when he’s trapped in the radiation chamber. He’s weakened, in extreme pain, and completely vulnerable. Yet when faced with Butcher, his reaction is anger, not pathetic begging.
So yeah, knowing all of this about his character, and knowing Kripke’s own views on Homelander and what the character represents to him, his death scene feels like another attempt to ridicule the character to me.
I’m not saying Homelander is some tough sigma dude who would never break down. He absolutely would. He’s a deeply traumatized person with a god complex who endured an unimaginable amount of physical and psychological abuse throughout his life. But that’s exactly why his reactions in those earlier seasons make more sense to me than what we got in the finale. Those reactions feel consistent with the history of the character. The finale doesn’t.
We’re supposed to accept that him begging to suck Butcher’s dick is completely in character just because he’s constantly being told by literally every single character that he’s weak and pathetic? Especially in s5, where it felt like everyone suddenly started reminding him how weak and pathetic he is every five minutes (as if they had already read the script for the finale or something). The same character who endured unimaginable pain and trauma since childhood and still managed to survive all of it? I’m not saying he wouldn’t break down after losing his powers, but those specific lines and the way that scene played out just doesn’t feel consistent with the character we’d been watching for five seasons.
They could’ve done something similar to Light’s ending in death note if they wanted to show how pathetic he really is, but the way they handled that scene made it so obvious they were treating it as a joke. I can’t help but see Kripke’s own feeling toward the orange man reflected in that scene. Does he realize how irrelevant this show is going to be in a few years? He ruined his best character for nothing. I know Antony did his best to push back against Kripke but he is just an actor, there’s only so much he can do.
The show completely ignored the tragedy at the core of his character. Yes, Homelander was a monster. Yes, he deserved consequences. But he was also a victim of the system that created him. Those two things can be true at the same time. The best villains are often both responsible for their actions and products of the environments that shaped them. So what did the boys accomplish in the end? Vought is still undefeated and Stan Edgar is still at the top. So what was the point?
The show already proved it knew how to handle Homelander’s vulnerability in a compelling way. That scene in the s2 finale after Ryan chooses Butcher over him remains one of my favorite scenes in the entire series for that reason. It was tragic, pathetic, human and unsettling all at once. THAT is the kind of emotion I wanted from his ending.
Another major problem for me is how badly the show nerfed him throughout s5. If he had been defeated through a clever plan that exploited a genuine weakness, or something I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But that’s not what happened, the show simply made him weaker whenever the plot required it and killed him with the dumbest way possible (as much as i don’t care about Soldier boy as a character it would have been better and made more sense if it was him instead of Kimiko which literally came out of nowhere. So dumb).
As i mentioned earlier, the final fight was horrible. Homelander is supposed to be the strongest supe in the world, that’s literally one of the central premises of the entire series. Yet somehow he struggles in ways that make no sense when compared to what we’ve seen him do before. The power scaling completely falls apart. I don’t understand when people defend it and say power scaling isn’t important. It absolutely is important when the entire premise of the show relies on the fact that Homelander is so powerful that nobody can realistically defeat him.
For years the show teased Homelander finally snapping. They marketed the final season as if everything was building toward this massive collapse. The posters, the interviews, the promotional material, all of it suggested that we were about to see the most dangerous version of Homelander yet. And then… nothing. Flight 37 video? Ended up being not that important. V1? Not important. Episode 6 ended with Butcher of all people saying “Run” and then the next episode? Nothing. He wasn’t even struggling with Homelander in the final fight what was he so afraid of?
Homelander spend most of the season doing nothing, never fully unleashes the threat the show spent years building up and then dies in one of the most anticlimactic endings imaginable.
For years I thought Homelander had the potential to go down as one of television’s greatest villains. Now all I can think about is how much potential was wasted.
