Eric Kripke is bracing for the ending

The Boys has started its fifth and final season on Prime Video, and showrunner Eric Kripke is already looking past the chaos to the part that usually causes the most trouble: the finale.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Kripke said he is not exactly relaxed about how the series will wrap up. In fact, he described his feelings as “anxious.”

“Excites is the wrong word. What makes me most … anxious about the final season is really hoping we land the plane,” he said.

He added that finales carry extra weight because viewers often reassess a whole show based on its final episode. “It’s super hard to do a finale. Fans will retroactively judge the show based on how they feel about the finale. If we stiff it, they will definitely say, ‘Well, that show wasn’t as good as we thought it was.’”

Kripke said the pressure feels even sharper because this is his first time finishing a series. “It’s almost like you’re trying to secure your legacy with these finales. And it’s the first finale I’ve ever done, too, so it’s not like I have any experience with it. So I’m mostly anxious and girding my loins.”

No giant farewell episode, despite the stakes

There is at least one small mercy for anyone expecting a bloated goodbye episode. Kripke told Collider that Episode 8 is not turning into a prestige-TV endurance test.

“It’s not. It’s like an hour and five. We’re not doing that huge, super-sized 90-minute thing,” he said.

He added that the creative team did not think stretching the episode much further would improve it. “I don’t know if we would have had… I think the audience might have ended up getting bored had we gone that long. But no, we’re like an hour five, an hour six max, I think? But yeah, they’re all jack-packed, these episodes.”

Based on the first two episodes that dropped today, leaker Cryptic4KQual, and Kripke’s own estimate for the finale, the season’s runtimes appear to be:

  • Episode 1: 1 hour
  • Episode 2: 59 minutes
  • Episode 3: 1 hour 2 minutes
  • Episode 4: 1 hour 2 minutes
  • Episode 5: 1 hour 5 minutes
  • Episode 6: 1 hour 1 minute
  • Episode 7: 1 hour 6 minutes
  • Episode 8: 1 hour 5 minutes

So no, not every finale needs to act like it has somewhere better to be for 90 minutes straight.

The show keeps running into real life

Kripke also spoke about how The Boys has continued to lean into political satire in its final season, only to be followed by real-world events that make the fiction look oddly familiar.

The Hollywood Reporter pointed to one Season 5 storyline involving a character being compared to Jesus, something that echoed more recently when pastor Paula White did the same about Trump.

Asked what it has been like to watch the headlines unfold after the season wrapped nearly a year ago, Kripke said, “It’s not a great feeling. It’s a sinking feeling. It’s never great when the world out-crazies your superhero show with exploding penises.”

He said several other ideas that seemed exaggerated at the time have also started to resemble actual events. “The stuff that has come to pass since we wrote it - including internment camps, sending federal troops into cities… even tiny references like that clown in charge of the military. [In the show we have a character named] General Mayhem…”

Kripke said the writers thought they were pushing the show farther into speculative territory than before, only to find that reality had other plans. “When we were writing [the season] - and I swear I’m not making this up - we genuinely thought it was a little out there, that this is the furthest we were venturing into full-on sci-fi - or at least speculative fiction. And so much of it has come to pass already.”

“It's really upsetting. I don't know what else to say about it.”

What comes next

The first two episodes of The Boys Season 5 are streaming now on Prime Video. Episode 3 arrives on April 15.

The series is expected to include deaths before the end, though the final shape of the story is still being kept under wraps. Even the press did not get an advance screening of Episode 8, which is one way to avoid spoiling the last chapter, or to make sure everyone sweats together.