They really had no idea what to really do with Soldier Boy this whole season.

I dunno man, these are good episodes don't get me wrong but I was really hoping for better with this final season. All the Homelander stuff is great as always, the final 10 minutes were strong too but everything building to that just feels slow and plodding at times. Not a terrible season but really wanted better. Fingers crossed they stick to landing with the finale although there is still so much to deal with in just one hour, has me worried.

The writing is so fucking unbelievably generic and trite, it is as if they are using AI to write it.

this is genuinely disappointing, what happened to this show

We won't be seeing Homelander's brutal rampage, apparently. At this point, I realized the show is moving in a completely different direction from what it initially set up. After the intense ending of the previous episode, this one is strangely downbeat. No aggressive bloodshed, no intense fights, just a quiet acceptance of defeat before everyone gets pep-talked out of it. The throwback to the Season 1 pep talk could've worked if the season had not already done the whole "finding hope" speech several times. They seem to want to show this through Starlight, who ends up helping the very people who hated her. But even that feels underwhelming. Starlight is not exactly popular for her combat prowess, so making her beat some minor antagonists does not really secure her place. They could've let her fight Black Noir 2 instead. As a penultimate episode, it keeps making character decisions that should have happened episodes ago: The Deep's turn, the Kimiko decision, and the show's confused handling of Gen V. Marie's rebuttal to Starlight about being dismissed so unceremoniously almost feels meta, because that is exactly what the show has done to the characters from a spinoff set up to be (supposedly) secret weapons against Homelander. This is a very character-focused episode, but these loose ends should have been tied earlier. Speaking of loose ends, Soldier Boy's arc seems to be over, and they just shelve him again like they did in Season 3. For what? He was set up like Butcher's Homelander for MM (as referenced in this very episode), but his exit is deeply anticlimactic. It feels like they cannot kill off a popular character because Vought Rising is coming. At this point, I would not be surprised if Soldier Boy shows up in The Boys: Mexico too. The episode does have stakes. A major character dies. But even that lands in... a very strangely flat, anticlimactic manner. It should feel emotional and consequential, especially after all the death flags raised in this and previous episodes. But it just happens. Even Homelander's involvement does not make it feel heavier. He strangely just flies away. Which brings me back to Homelander. This whole season has not portrayed him as the raging maniac the show seemed to promise. Sure, he murders people once or twice when they fail to satisfy his god complex, but he is weirdly restrained. This is not the Homelander from Season 2 imagining himself mowing down a crowd with his lasers. He is restrained with Firecracker, with The Deep, even with the protagonists - some of whom get caught (again), btw, and still are not dealt with by him directly. It feels like the season is writing Homelander as someone trying to build a legacy, not as an uncontrollable lunatic finally going off the rails. That could have been an interesting direction if it had been set up more coherently. But with only one episode left, I am not confident. He feels so toned down that I doubt the finale will be anywhere near as bombastic as Herogasm. "Can you at least write a finale that isn't just a dogpile?" one in-universe actor says to the director. "Homelander is rebooting the universe," the director replies. At this point, that line feels more like a super-meta commentary on how the show is setting everything up for spinoffs.