‘The Boys’ Burning Question, Can Homelander Kill Soldier Boy And Vice Versa

Few rivalries in ‘The Boys’ carry the weight of the one simmering between Homelander and Soldier Boy. The Vought poster boy and the original American Supe share a tangled bloodline, an ego problem visible from orbit, and a habit of leaving craters wherever they actually meet. Ever since season three introduced Jensen Ackles’ grizzled war hero, fans have been arguing the same question across every corner of the internet.

Could either of them actually finish the other off if it ever came down to a real death match. The show has danced around a clean answer for two full seasons, but the lore, the on screen feats, and the writers’ own teases have left more than enough breadcrumbs to piece together a real verdict.

Homelander’s Best Shot At Killing Soldier Boy

Homelander is built like the upgrade he loves to call himself. His X-ray vision, laser beams, flight, and super speed remain unmatched on the show, and Vought literally engineered him from Soldier Boy’s DNA to surpass the original. On paper, that range of abilities is exactly the kind of toolkit you would design to put down someone like his old man.

The catch is that Soldier Boy is essentially the show’s hardest ceiling for durability. He has tanked assault rifle rounds fired point blank into his mouth, acetylene torches, power saws, and blades being struck against his eyes, and Russian scientists spent decades trying to harm him without success. Punching him into full submission is a tall order even for someone of Homelander’s calibre.

Homelander’s clearest path to a kill almost certainly runs through stamina and aerial superiority rather than fists. He has been shown using flight to escape any fight he is losing, which means a winning scenario likely involves blitzing Soldier Boy from above and frying him with sustained heat vision rather than slugging it out at ground level. There is also the brute force argument that Homelander overpowered Butcher, Soldier Boy, and Hughie all at once when the three of them tried to pin him down, which fans point to as evidence that the raw ceiling really does sit on his side when nothing depowering is in play.

Why Soldier Boy Could Be Homelander’s Worst Nightmare

The wildcard, of course, is the chest blast. Soldier Boy’s explosive radiation power was a brand new creation invented for the show, with no equivalent in Garth Ennis’ original comics, born from years of Russian experiments that turned his body into a walking nuclear reactor. When that blast hit Kimiko, it stripped her healing factor and her super strength entirely, and the same beam incinerated Crimson Countess in an instant.

That is the whole reason Butcher dragged him out of Russia in the first place. If one of those radiation explosions actually connects with Homelander, he would temporarily revert to a normal human, giving someone a small window to finally kill him. Whether Homelander’s body could fully shake off the depowering effect remains one of the show’s biggest open questions, but the mere threat of it makes Soldier Boy uniquely dangerous in a way no other Supe has ever been.

Skill is the other half of the equation, and on that axis it is barely a contest. In a hand to hand fight, Soldier Boy holds the edge because he has demonstrated actual combat training, while Homelander has always relied on heat vision and brute strength rather than disciplined fighting. Soldier Boy is also the more disciplined of the two emotionally, keeping his composure even after learning Homelander was his biological son, while Homelander tends to lose control under pressure.

The receipts go further than that. Soldier Boy is the only person ever shown enduring direct attacks from Homelander with no visible wounds, weathering punches and being hurled into walls before getting back up to throw his own counters. That alone puts him in a tier no other Supe in the show has ever occupied.

What Their On Screen Showdowns Already Revealed

Their first proper clash came at Herogasm and the play by play tells a layered story. After Soldier Boy vaporized the TNT Twins and leveled their entire home, Homelander arrived calling himself the upgrade, only for Soldier Boy to dismiss him as a cheap knockoff before the two flew at each other. They traded blows fairly evenly until Homelander gained the upper hand and began strangling Soldier Boy, and Butcher only saved the day by hitting Homelander with his own temporary heat vision.

The season three finale flipped the dynamic almost entirely. Inside Vought Tower, Soldier Boy started charging his nuclear blast at Homelander and Ryan, and even with Starlight, Kimiko, Hughie, and Mother’s Milk all piling in, he overpowered Butcher in melee combat and continued to dominate the fight. It only ended because Maeve hurled herself out of the window with Soldier Boy in tow, sacrificing her own powers to save everyone in the building.

So the receipts cut both ways. Homelander takes the brute force tally in the confined Herogasm setup, where he was swinging at full chat without distractions. Soldier Boy takes the technique and explosive output tally when given the time and space to charge up, and crucially, neither has actually killed the other yet.

How Season 5 Is Reframing The Father Son Question

The whole debate has been complicated by the final season. Jensen Ackles was officially confirmed as a series regular for season five, which premiered on Prime Video on April 8, 2026, with showrunner Eric Kripke promising the season would dig into the father son relationship between Homelander and Soldier Boy that the show had not yet fully explored.

Rather than racing to a rematch, the season has so far paired them up as uneasy allies. In episode five, Soldier Boy teams with Homelander to interrogate leads about the missing V-One compound, and along the way Soldier Boy starts warming to his son, even affectionately calling him his weirdo. When Mister Marathon reveals a plan to kill Homelander, Soldier Boy reacts unpredictably, suddenly showing an almost paternal hesitation toward the man he was originally brought back to assassinate.

In a season five interview with Screen Rant, Ackles described his version of Soldier Boy as deeply disconnected from his own emotions, adding that the one thing the character genuinely struggles with is the feelings he has for his son. Ackles framed Soldier Boy as someone who easily detaches from anything that means something to him, with Homelander being the lone exception that breaks the pattern.

That softening could quietly rewrite the entire kill question. If the show keeps leaning into the family drama, the answer to who could murder who simply becomes a thought experiment frozen in season three. Either way, the verdict from the show’s own logic is clear enough, with Homelander holding the higher power ceiling, the flight advantage, and the wider toolkit to win a clean fight, while Soldier Boy holds the one weapon that could actually depower and finish Homelander for good. The only real question left is whether ‘The Boys’ decides to let father and son settle it once and for all before the series ends.