‘The Boys’ Series Finale: Here’s Who We Think Will Die Tonight, and Why
Seven years, five seasons, and more exploded torsos than any reasonable person should be expected to process have all led to this single Wednesday night. ‘The Boys‘ series finale, titled “Blood and Bone,” is the fortieth and final episode of the entire run, dropping on Amazon Prime Video on May 20, 2026. It is the conclusion that creator Eric Kripke has been engineering since the very first scene of the very first episode, and nothing about the road here suggests it is going to be gentle or clean.
Under Kripke’s leadership, the show transformed into a global phenomenon while consistently deviating from the comic books that inspired it, meaning nobody outside the writers’ room has any real certainty about how the story ends. What audiences do know is that the season has already been extraordinarily brutal, and the finale is positioned to finish the job. Kripke warned as far back as 2024 that there would probably be lots of death in the final season, adding that there was no guarantee of who would survive because the writers no longer needed to keep anyone alive for another season. The body count so far has backed that up entirely.
Before the finale, the season had already confirmed the deaths of A-Train, Firecracker, and Black Noir II, with Noir killed not by Homelander but by The Deep, following a pipeline explosion and a cascade of brutal consequences. Then came the gut punch that hit hardest of all. Frenchie, played by Tomer Capone, died in the arms of Kimiko in the penultimate episode after a lethal confrontation with Homelander, becoming the first member of the core group to be killed off heading into the final stand. With Frenchie gone and the remaining team shattered, the stage is set for a finale that could easily take several more beloved characters with it. Here is who is most likely not walking out alive.
Homelander
Barring a complete subversion of all expectations, the Boys will almost certainly defeat Homelander before the end of the series, as he is now the only major antagonist remaining and even a bittersweet finale would demand his death. The entire five-season arc has been a slow march toward this reckoning, and the show has spent its final run stripping away every buffer between Homelander and the absolute worst version of himself. He controls the White House, he controls Vought, and he has spent the season believing himself to be genuinely immortal after getting his hands on a vial of V1. That kind of unchecked power is precisely the kind the show has always punished in the end.
Kripke told SYFY Wire that Homelander would be wise to heed the lesson that there is a natural order to things and that the more you try to fight it, the more it destroys you, and yet he never does, which Kripke suggested would have consequences. The most widely discussed theory heading into the finale is that Kimiko delivers a blast that burns the V1 out of Homelander’s bloodstream and restores his vulnerabilities, with someone else, almost certainly Butcher or Ryan, finishing the job. Whether he dies a god or dies a broken man stripped of everything he built, Homelander almost certainly does not make it to the credits.
Billy Butcher
No character in ‘The Boys’ has been more openly written toward death than Billy Butcher. Butcher has had a malignant brain tumor caused by taking V24 and has carried a death wish since his wife Becca died in Season 2, and anyone who gets into a fight with Homelander usually dies, which makes his collision course with the show’s most powerful villain feel all but inevitable. He is a man who has been living on borrowed time for seasons, and the finale is where the bill finally comes due.
Betting markets placed Butcher’s odds of dying in the final season at a staggering 91 percent, the highest of any character on the board, with fans and analysts overwhelmingly convinced that the show will not let him survive. Some predictions suggest that Butcher will reach a point where he decides all supes must die, and that Hughie will be the one forced to kill him to stop him from wiping out Annie and Kimiko along with every other powered person on earth. It would be a poetic and devastating close to the show’s central friendship, and exactly the kind of ending Kripke has been foreshadowing for years.
Kimiko
Kimiko’s arc in the final season has been one of grief, physical torture, and an extraordinary new burden. Following Frenchie’s death, Kimiko successfully absorbed enough radiation during Sister Sage’s experiment to gain the ability to strip Homelander of his powers to some degree, making her perhaps the most pivotal figure in the final battle. That kind of narrative positioning in a show like ‘The Boys’ rarely comes without a cost, and the cost here could be Kimiko herself.
Going into the finale, analysts noted that Kimiko is highly vulnerable in her grief over Frenchie, and that her supe status makes her a potential target for Butcher’s virus if he decides to unleash it broadly. In the original comics, Kimiko dies alongside Frenchie, which the series may try to recreate in some form, and Season 5’s promotional material added the new dimension of Kimiko being able to speak, suggesting her arc is reaching a meaningful and possibly final conclusion. Losing her alongside Frenchie would devastate the audience in exactly the way ‘The Boys’ has always been willing to.
Mother’s Milk
Mother’s Milk has always been the moral compass of the group, the character who reminds everyone around him why any of this is supposed to matter. That role in a finale setting is almost never a safe one. Analysts have pointed to Mother’s Milk as a potential sacrifice in the finale, suggesting he could give his life to protect his family and team after all the emotional confrontations the final season has put him through. He has survived longer than almost anyone expected, and the show may choose to honor that by giving him a death that means something.
In the source comic, Mother’s Milk’s death is among the most deliberately cruel in the entire final arc, with Butcher killing the most morally grounded member of the Boys simply as part of his descent into being the monster the story always warned he could become. The show has softened Butcher’s comic-book darkness considerably, but with Kripke having confirmed that Butcher has committed to being a true monster to achieve his goals, the gap between the two versions is narrower now than it has ever been. A version of that fate, even a modified one, remains very much on the table.
The Deep
The Deep has spent five seasons being one of the most pathetic and darkly comic characters on television, a man whose cruelty is matched only by his desperation for validation. That combination tends to end badly in this universe. Analysts going into the finale noted that The Deep is long overdue for a reckoning, with his story potentially ending in an ironic death at the hands of the aquatic animals he has always claimed to love. He has outlived more dangerous and more capable characters than himself purely through cowardice and luck, and both of those things tend to run out in finales.
The Deep already showed his capacity for lethal ruthlessness in the final season by killing Black Noir II after the pipeline explosion, eliminating his own podcast partner in the process. His moral compass has been broken for the entire run of the show, but that last act pushed him into genuinely villainous territory with no plausible path to redemption. One widely circulated theory suggests that Starlight, who has held a years-long grudge against The Deep for how he treated her early in the series, may be the one to engineer his end, forcing him to face the marine animals he has exploited and abused. For a show built on the idea that power without accountability always destroys itself, The Deep dying at the mercy of the ocean feels almost poetic.
The finale of ‘The Boys’ is here, and after seven years of carnage, corruption, and the occasional whale, there is no safe prediction left to make. Kripke told SYFY Wire that finales are really hard and that pleasing everyone is impossible, but that the writers always tried to stay true to what they as creators wanted the story to be. He also confirmed that the finale brings closure to every major arc involving Homelander, Butcher, Hughie, Annie, and the rest of the team, delivering what he has previously described as the show’s version of an apocalypse. Whether that apocalypse spares anyone at all is the only question that matters tonight.
Which character death are you dreading most as ‘Blood and Bone’ finally arrives, and do you think ‘The Boys’ has the nerve to go all the way with Butcher’s ending?
