When The Boys premiered on Prime Video back in 2019, the crass superhero show felt like a comedian with its finger on the pulse, jabbing at everything that’s become an annoying trope in superhero media and giving it the middle finger as it did so. And now that The Boys is over, it’s hard not to feel like the joke turned on itself as its final season squeaked by, becoming what it once parodied. The final season of The Boys had a lot riding on it. That pressure was felt not only by fans wondering how it would tie up all its loose ends after feeling like it’d been spinning its wheels for two of its five seasons and squandering its high-key better spin-off before axing it mid-finale, but also by showrunner Eric Kripke, who admitted to living “in absolute terror of becoming the thing we’ve been satirizing for five years.” For whatever reason, season-five finales are what make or break shows nowadays. The Boys’ season-five premiere trailer seemed ready to rise to that occasion as it set up a destructive all-out war, with key visuals showing Homelander (Antony Starr) lording over Earth and Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) walking over the rubble of Vought Tower. Holy shit, this season is going to be an all-out war. Scorched earth, all that jazz. After four seasons, the fate of humanity was riding on a group of assholes who routinely wallow in their own misery, pitted against an egomaniacal manbaby draped in the American flag—both sides with genocide on their minds. Granted, the show was never going to be Avengers: Endgame bedlam or Roman-candle fireworks like Justice League. But The Boys promised to build to something diabolical and wound up feeling like a spent firecracker by the grand finale.