Now that the fourth season of The Boys has ended, fans are already making predictions for season 5. This will be the show’s final season, and considering how unhinged everything has been up to this point, it’s fair to expect the show to go bigger than ever in an attempt to bring the house down. While we don’t have any insider info for the show itself, the end of The Boys comic may reveal how season 5 ends (oi, beware spoilers for the comic, lads): with Butcher killing most of his team in an effort to kill as many superheroes as possible.

Butcher Vs. Homelander

For years now, the show has portrayed how personal Butcher’s beef with Homelander really is. This king of the superheroes raped the other man’s wife, which is how we got the superpowered tyke Ryan.

Any given episode from the past few years has implied that if Butcher can kill Homelander, he will die happy, a mission made more urgent by the fact that he is now dying thanks to taking too much Compound V in an effort to defeat malevolent superheroes like Homelander.

On paper, that means that The Boys season 5 should be straightforward, right? Butcher will find a way to kill Homelander and then die peacefully, knowing that he has freed both his son and the world from the tyranny of Homelander.

However, now that Butcher has control of a virus that is capable of killing superheroes all over the world once it goes airborne, it looks like we may be getting an adaptation of the very bloody, very depressing end of The Boys comic.

Black Noir And Homelander

Towards the end of the comic, Homelander finally goes fully berserk, attacking the White House and killing the president.

He is eventually killed by Black Noir, who is revealed in this continuity to be a powerful Homelander clone designed to contain the real thing if he ever lost control (although Noir triggers that loss of control by sending Homelander pictures of what seemed to be himself doing things like eating babies).

Butcher kills Noir (revealed to be the man who actually assaulted his wife), superheroes are disgraced very publicly, and it seems like Butcher has accomplished all of his wildly ambitious goals.

Butcher Vs. The Boys

However, it doesn’t stop there: in its final issues, The Boys reveals that Butcher has bombs capable of killing anyone with enough Compound V in them (like the virus that is very much in play for season 5).

In this comic continuity, Compound V is in the food supply as a way of creating random supes, so Butcher’s plan won’t just kill the remaining superheroes…it will also kill countless non-powered people, too.

The rest of his team tries to stop him and Butcher ends up killing Frenchie, Kimiko (known as “the Female”), Mother’s Milk, and others before finally being killed by Hughie

Season 5

Now, The Boys show has veered away from the comic since the very beginning, so there’s no guarantee that season 5 will go down exactly like this.

But now that Butcher has a virus capable of killing superheroes throughout the world (including Kimiko and Starlight) and very little time left to live, it’s likely that he’s going to try to kill as many supes as possible, especially if this is his best shot at killing Homelander.

This will put him on a collision course with his team (since none of them are down with supe genocide), and he will likely kill most of them before it’s over.

Monsters

While we don’t exactly want to see our favorite characters from The Boys suffer or die, it would be narratively perfect for season 5 to end with Butcher as the ultimate Big Bad.

He, his victims, and the audience will likely learn the truth of Nietzsche’s wisdom: “battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.”

And as long as we’re making predictions, here’s one more: instead of Hughie, it will be young Ryan who has to kill Butcher, forsaking both of his evil fathers and becoming the inspirational character Homelander always pretended to be.