Homelander was never really the problem itself, he was a consequence of the problem. A product of it. The real problem is Vought International’s ultra-capitalist structure and its criminal neoliberalism. The problem is treating people as products. The problem is conceiving human beings as objects. The problem is that they decided to play god.
Killing Homelander at the end changes absolutely nothing if they don’t dismantle Vought, because Homelander is ultimately just an experiment that went wrong. And honestly, Butcher is right about one thing: eventually there will be another Homelander. Where he’s wrong is in believing that Supes themselves are the problem. They aren’t. The machinery that created them —the establishment itself— is the problem.
The solution was never “kill Homelander” or “kill all Supes”. The solution was to destroy Vought. That’s why the ending feels so morally questionable and ultimately unsatisfying. Like okay, great, they beat up the bad guy and kill him after he’s committed countless atrocities. Fine. But then what? Marie was simply lucky that her powers manifested later in life. That’s the only reason she avoided ending up in a laboratory like Homelander. Otherwise they would’ve done exactly the same thing to her. And knowing that Odessa succeeded, they could easily continue experimenting, continue testing, continue manufacturing more Homelanders. So in reality they solved nothing. They just slapped a bandage over the problem.
And honestly, it feels incredibly USAmerican in the worst possible way, because the United States has this recurring inability to understand that the issue isn’t just individual megalomaniacal narcissists with god complexes, it’s the system that allows those people to rise to power in the first place. A system rooted in neoliberal capitalist individualism, in the destruction of collective consciousness, and in the commodification of absolutely everything, including human beings.
If this series had been written from almost any other political perspective or national context, it would’ve been obvious that the real target should’ve been Vought itself first and foremost. Kill Homelander too if you want, sure, but the actual enemy is the machine. Instead what we get is: the bad guy is dead, but the machinery of evil is still completely intact, just rebranding itself and continuing to exploit people. And somehow that’s supposed to feel like a happy ending?
Vought won. The house won. Nothing actually changed. The world is still the same, the state machinery is still the same, the establishment is still the same.
So the ending just feels deeply hollow.
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