The Boys season 5 episode 5, “One-Shots,” pays homage to the comics tradition of standalone issues and chapters by zooming in on several of the show’s supporting characters over the course of a very eventful day. The format allows showrunner Eric Kripke to deliver plenty of absurd humor before things get serious in the final three episodes of the series. But he also uses the vignettes to present several characters with big decisions.
“What I really love to write are moral choices,” Kripke tells Polygon. “You could go back over the show, you could go back over Supernatural, and again and again and again the crossroads moments are always a moral choice because I think that just really defines who you are both as a person and as a fictional character.”
[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for The Boys season 5 episode 5.]
During “One-Shots,” Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) decides to save Homelander (Antony Starr). Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) agrees to let Hughie (Jack Quaid) try to protect Annie (Erin Moriarty) and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) from the supe-killing virus by using V-One. The Deep (Chace Crawford) escalates his rivalry with Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) by killing director Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne) with an eel. However, the biggest moral choice of the episode is presented to Firecracker (Valorie Curry), whose childhood pastor asks for help saving his church, which has fallen on hard times since Homelander started his own religion. Even though it’s clear how much the pastor helped her in the past, Firecracker turns her back on him and her faith. She denounces him on television and then receives some instant karma when Homelander kicks her out of the Seven and kills her.
The Boys actually takes place in a reasonably just universe.
“The Boys actually takes place in a reasonably just universe,” Kripke says. “Terrible things happen to good people all the time, just like they do in the real world. But by and large, when you make the right moral choice on the show, you tend to be rewarded, and when you make the wrong one, you tend to be punished. Firecracker and Deep make nothing but the wrong choices. They’re presented with many opportunities to do the right thing, and they just choose not to.”
Kripke has an uncanny ability to predict the weird twists in U.S. politics, from an assassination attempt on Donald Trump to Trump releasing an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure. Firecracker’s dismissal echoes the fate of many of the high-profile women who have fully supported Trump’s agenda, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired on April 2, and Kristi Noem, who was replaced as Homeland Security Secretary in March.
“It’s all so predictable,” Kripke says. “When we wrote it two years ago, we were like, this is for sure what’s going to happen to every single person in Trump’s orbit. He just demands everyone sacrifice everything they hold dear, and every value they’ve ever had, and then he kicks them out. So that was the least surprising surprise ever.”
The first five episodes of The Boys season 5 are available to stream now on Prime Video.
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