Vought Rising Series: The Boys Prepare for the End of Homelander and the Origin of Vought Rising?
With only two episodes left until the finale of The Boys Season 5, the series seems more interested in building its past than resolving its future. Season 5 operates on two levels: the first is to wrap up the story that Eric Kripke has been developing since 2019: Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), Homelander (Antony Starr), the collapse of Vought, the super virus, and the fate of all the characters in the series. The second is to convince the audience that it’s worth staying in this universe when the original series ends. Episode 6, titled “Though the Heavens Fall,” is a media power shift: the moment when The Boys ceases to be a series in itself and becomes an extended prologue to its upcoming spinoff, Vought Rising, with Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) rebuilt as the new face of the franchise.
The fifth season of The Boys seemed to have everything put together to give us an epic conclusion where each of its episodes would be a race against time. The fourth ended with most of the boys trapped by the supers, while Billy Butcher left with the virus that could kill everyone with compound V in their blood. Without forgetting that our protagonist had already turned to the dark side. When their episodes really began, it took them practically no time to get everyone back together without much work, and they made Butcher good once again. Although it seemed that the threats were more latent with some significant deaths in the first episode, from the second episode until now, everything has been relatively normal and feels without progress.
Since the discovery of the powers of V1, The Boys, it became a race to find this compound. However, this has taken its time, which has been used to introduce us to several supers from the past and delve deeper into Soldier Boy. Curiously, Soldier Boy will be the protagonist of a new spin-off that is being prepared for this series, which will be called Vought Rising. This will show us a story where Homelander’s father and his team from the 50s try to solve a mystery. Now it is explained why most of the episodes of the fifth season have shown us ‘heroes’ from the past.
Vought Rising Series: Soldier Boy at the Center of the Post-Homelander Universe?
The driving force of The Boys 5×6 is the search for V1, the original version of Compound V that grants supe immortality. In a rare moment of control over his unstable radiation power, he offers a Faustian bargain: he offers Bombsight (Mason Dye), a figure who will be central to Vought Rising, the opportunity to burn the Compound V from Bombsight’s blood, thus returning him to human frailty so he can grow old alongside Golden Geisha, the woman he loves.
It should be a small, intimate scene, a subtle emotional undertone. But at this point in the story, it demonstrates that Soldier Boy can deliberately strip a Supe of their powers, demonstrating control over an ability that throughout the series was triggered as an involuntary reflex by stress or PTSD. This act of “de-deification”—a subversion of the superhero trope where divinity is replaced by the right to age and die—has direct consequences for how Homelander’s story ends. If Soldier Boy can reverse the V1 process on Bombsight, he can do it on his son as well. The Boys has two episodes to answer whether he’ll want to.
The Boys Season 5 Episode 6: The V1 and Homelander’s Possible End
The Boys Season 5 has a well-defined problem: Homelander, with the V1 virus in his system, is invulnerable. The supe virus, Butcher’s nuclear option, would kill all superhumans, including allies. Stripping Homelander of his powers, however, would reduce him to John—the name he never chose, the person he could never be—and expose him to justice in the cruellest way possible for someone who built his entire identity on biological superiority. For a being born in a lab who has never known vulnerability, being reduced to an “ordinary human” would be an infinitely crueler punishment than execution. Seeing Homelander forced to confront his crimes, feeling the fear and weakness he despises, would be the definitive end of The Boys‘ thesis on power.
Clara Vought as the Link Between The Boys‘ Past and Future
The emotional bond between Soldier Boy and Homelander is Clara Vought, aka Stormfront (Aya Cash), a central figure in both their pasts and the protagonist of Vought Rising. Clara is the ghost that haunts them: the former loved her, the latter carries her as a primal obsession. The fact that Soldier Boy hands over the V1 to Homelander because “it’s what Clara would want” makes Vought Rising the story of this woman before she became the linchpin of the world’s fate.
The prequel series will arrive in 2027, with a cast that includes Cecily Strong, Mark Pellegrino—reuniting with Jensen Ackles after Supernatural—and Brian J. Smith in recurring roles. Vought Rising is promoted as a “murder mystery” and is set in the 1950s, a time when the cultural machinery of American exceptionalism was in full swing: the middle-class dream, anti-communism as a civil religion, the entertainment industry as a propaganda machine—ideology at its purest. A crime. Suspects. 1950s Supes who hadn’t yet learned to hide their true colors.
The Boys‘ Ending: Superheroes After Deity?
The Boys are at a crossroads. On one hand, it has the opportunity to deliver one of the most subversive finales in modern television if it chooses to de-deify its icons. On the other hand, the weight of Vought Rising threatens to dilute the power of that ending in favor of its continuation. In the age of endless content, a series’ rebellion isn’t about how much it can expand, but about knowing when to end. Because, at the end of the day, what makes this story great isn’t the immortality of its serums, but the inevitable fall of its gods.
ifferent old acquaintances of Soldier Boy. In number four, we see them look for V1 at the base where this hero was supposedly created, and there they find one of their former companions in an emotional meeting. Episode 5 also followed Homelander and Soldier Boy in their search for V1, but this time the search led them to Marathon Man. This hero also did not possess this compound, but he led the father-son duo to another hero named Bombsight, who could have it.
Finally, this episode 6 of the fifth season of The Boys concludes the search for V1 precisely with Bombsight. The curious thing is that this character also has a long longevity and is one of those confirmed to appear in Vought Rising. So it’s definitely not the last time we’ll see him. It’s quite likely that we’ll get to know Quinn, Marathon Man, and Bombsight better when it launches Vought Rising. However, its introduction only comes to mess with what the fifth season of The Boys had already built and take away moments of development from its own characters.
Should Both The Boys and Vought Rising Stand on Their Own Merits?
It’s okay for series to have spin-offs. It is a common practice when a production is quite successful, and The Boys has already shown its pull in terms of audiences. In fact, it already had another spin-off in the form of Gene V, which actually worked to advance the main plot. However, what they are doing in season five will affect him more. We still don’t know the quality it could have, Vought Rising, but it seems like a mistake that they want to push it by bringing down the fifth season. After all, it seems that this is an introduction to this spin-off and not a conclusion.
Compared to Gen V, this series managed to stand on its own two feet. Although it did have several mentions of the original series, it did not depend entirely on it to tell its story. In addition, its plot functioned as the basis for developing the virus in the fourth season of The Boys, which apparently would be the final solution in the fifth. Even in the second season of Gen V, the series went its own way. So much so that his revelation that Marie, the protagonist, could be as strong as Homelander seems forgotten in this fifth season, and we doubt that she will play an important role in the remaining two episodes. As you already saw with Gen V, the spin-off worked in favor of The Boys and not vice versa. The boys’ previous seasons did not serve to build a Gene V, while this fifth season wants to serve as the foundation of Vought Rising by introducing your characters. Could it be that Amazon is not confident in this new spin-off and is using the popularity of the main series to boost it?
Will the Fifth Season Be Able to Correct Course in Two Episodes?
We are already in the final stretch of both the fifth season of The Boys, like the series in general. There are only two episodes left to close plot threads and give us a satisfactory conclusion for its characters. However, with everything there is and an estimated 80 minutes to see, it really seems doubtful that they will correct the path. The sixth episode ended with Homelander injecting V1, which could at least mean a brutal outcome. However, in terms of history, it seems very unlikely to us that they will be able to do justice to everything that came before. Especially since they used most of their episodes to advance a totally new plot and other people’s characters.
Why not introduce V1 sooner? Why leave the virus that they built for so long as the final weapon so relegated? They really had everything to focus on their characters this fifth season and decided against it. This already points us to a disappointing ending. After all, we already have the very recent history of Stranger Things. Precisely in its last season, they stopped concentrating on their characters loved by so many to focus on new additions and new plots that made the outcome feel very rushed. Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for The Boys to finish memorably, and perhaps in the future, fans will only see this fifth season as a way to refresh their memory before they start watching Vought Rising.
