With 2 Lines, The Boys Undoes 3 Years of Setup For 1 Supe As Powerful as Homelander

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Be warned, this article reveals major plot points from The Boys Season 5, Episode 7, “The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother’s Milk.” With only one episode remaining in the season, the heroes are in a desperate race against time to defeat Homelander, who has become even more powerful after injecting himself with V-One. Billy Butcher has one final plan: he’s replicated the radiation experiments done on Soldier Boy, but this time using Kimiko, hoping to give her the ability to strip Supes of their powers. Meanwhile, Ryan Butcher hasn’t been seen since the end of Episode 3, but he is still alive and his role remains unknown.

One possibility for defeating Homelander in the finale is Marie Moreau, a character from the recently cancelled series Gen V. The show established Marie as an incredibly powerful Supe, and a potential match for Homelander. Importantly, she and Homelander were the only ones to survive Vought’s Project Odessa, a program intended to create Supes with god-like abilities, suggesting she has the potential to become as strong as he is.

Mother’s Milk points out that Marie is incredibly powerful, even calling her the “Chosen One” and comparing her to Homelander. But Marie quickly dismisses the idea, jokingly saying the reports of her strength are overblown. This feels inconsistent, though, because the two seasons of Gen V showed Marie steadily growing more powerful, only for The Boys to immediately downplay those abilities.

The Boys’ Use Of Gen V’s Marie Moreau Is Understandable, But Hurts Both Shows

A big question surrounding Season 5 of The Boys has been how it would incorporate characters from the now-canceled spinoff Gen V. It’s a tricky situation for showrunner Eric Kripke and the writers. The ending of the five-season series shouldn’t rely on characters many viewers may not know, but if those characters are included, their storylines need to be honored, respect the investment of Gen V fans, and contribute meaningfully to the overall plot.

Kripke realized he’d been hesitant to feature the Gen V characters too much, fearing they’d steal the spotlight. That’s why they don’t appear until the second-to-last episode, and even then, only briefly. While his caution was understandable, the result unfortunately doesn’t quite work for either show or satisfy fans of either series.

If you haven’t watched Gen V, seeing those characters appear in The Boys can be a little confusing, and it still creates the possibility of unfamiliar faces playing key roles. It’s actually even more problematic if you have seen Gen V, because the show tries to eliminate Marie as a potential threat to Homelander. Not only does Starlight downplay Marie’s powers, but she also refuses to include her in the fight, questioning, “What good is all that power, Marie, if you can’t control it?”

The reason given for keeping Marie sidelined doesn’t quite hold up. Season 2 of Gen V focused entirely on her learning to manage her abilities. While she isn’t fully mastered or without challenges, she’s clearly capable of training and getting better, and wasn’t portrayed as being so out of control that she couldn’t participate in a fight. She’d developed into a remarkably powerful Supe, as the show always intended, and now that progress feels completely undone.

It’s understandable that finding the right balance here is tough, especially since the situation stemmed from earlier choices. Ideally, Marie could have been introduced as a character familiar to fans of The Boys without overshadowing others or taking on too much responsibility, like defeating Homelander. Given the time invested in building up the world for the Vought Rising prequel, some of that effort could have been used to more seamlessly incorporate the characters from Gen V into the main series.

It wasn’t ideal, but it’s preferable to how things are unfolding now: these developments only really matter at the very end, and feel sudden and unexpected (especially since Starlight revisits Marie and Jordan Li near the end of Episode 7). It also doesn’t make sense to downplay her abilities after the entire season focused on her growth, and it will be confusing if she’s then strong enough to defeat Homelander in the finale with seemingly no trouble controlling her powers. Viewers who haven’t watched Gen V will be left wondering what Starlight was worried about in the first place.

This situation perfectly illustrates the larger challenge with how The Boys will end: there’s simply too much to conclude in a single episode. The show still needs to resolve the storylines of over a dozen key characters, and it has to convincingly bring down Homelander – transforming him from an invincible being into someone defeatable, all while still allowing time for character development. This feels similar to the issues the Stranger Things finale faced. Hopefully, the strong character work throughout Season 5 will allow for a satisfying conclusion, but it’s a huge undertaking, and Marie’s role is crucial to making it happen.

The Boys‘ series finale releases on Wednesday, May 20th on Prime Video.

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2026-05-14 20:41