Tedious and trite do not even begin to describe the final season of The Boys. Blind to his own biases, showrunner Eric Kripke has taken every element that made the penultimate season such a slog and doubled down, turning what began as a darkly comic superhero spoof into something resembling Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show laced with lewd language, exploding heads, and gratuitous male nudity.The underlying problem with the series was always structural. Its chief villain, Homelander (Antony Starr), is effectively a deity with the emotional maturity of a toddler and the moral compass of Candace Owens. His principal purpose is to cultivate engagement and adoration. Yet the show has spent five seasons contriving reasons for his sole challengers, Butcher (Karl Urban) and company, to remain alive while Homelander, for no rational reason beyond the need to keep the show going, refrains from killing them. He could have ended the conflict in the first episode. Instead, the series keeps inventing new delays and magical workarounds to preserve a cat-and-mouse game that has long since become stale.Season 5 returns to find the titular crew trudging from one plot device to another. First, there is the Supe-ravaging virus. Then, after learning Homelander may be immune to it, the Boys pivot to Soldier Boy’s (Jensen Ackles) power-siphoning blast as the latest deus ex machina. All the while, Homelander consolidates power, taking over Vought and the United States government before proceeding to assert himself as literal God.