The Boys Season 5, Episode 5 Pays Homage To A Classic Twilight Zone Episode

Contains spoilers for "The Boys" Season 5, Episode 5 — "One-Shots"

"One-Shots" tells a handful of amusing (Terror the dog) and less amusing (the tragic, yet fully deserved downfall of Valorie Curry's Firecracker) stories about the various characters running around the world of "The Boys." One particular segment also reveals that a supe with some serious sway is actively working to end it all — and it's not Homelander (Antony Starr).

"The Boys" Season 5, Episode 4 established Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) as Homelander's latest dangerous enemy, but her segment in this episode shows that her endgame for humanity is even worse than the leader of the Seven and his god complex could ever hope to muster. As it turns out, Sage's masterplan to cause the end of the world is not only genocidal, but it bears surprising similarities to the classic "The Twilight Zone" episode "Time Enough at Last." 

Sage has calculated that the release of the supe virus pits supes and humans against each other in an all-destroying "World War Supe." She plans to ride things out in a bunker, be the lone survivor (with the possible exception of Colby Minifie's Ashley Barrett), and fulfill her dream to read all day, every day, unbothered by anyone. This is her sole reason for working against Homelander: She knows he'd be pestering her forever if he was still around in the post-apocalypse. 

Sister Sage's "The Twilight Zone" plan may have a dark side that she hasn't considered. After all, the seminal Season 1 episode of Rod Serling's sci-fi anthology, "Time Enough at Last," ends with the main character having all the books he could ever want, but no eyesight to read them.

"Time Enough at Last" is a must-watch "The Twilight Zone" episode that still hits hard. It stars Burgess Meredith as geeky book aficionado Henry Bemis, who's hiding in his bank workplace's vault to spend his lunch hour reading when a new type of nuclear weapon ends the world. As far as he knows, Henry is the sole survivor. He starts out appropriately wrecked, but soon figures out that he has enough supplies to last a lifetime, and a massive stack of books from a local library to read without anyone ever telling him to do anything else again. Unfortunately, he breaks his glasses just as he begins his dream life, and his "time enough at last" turns from a personal paradise to a massively ironic hell. 

Firecracker and Sister Sage both joined "The Boys" in Season 4, and the former dies in "One-Shots." Could "The Boys" be sneaky enough to use the same episode to stealthily hint that Sage will suffer the Henry Bemis-like fate of losing her eyesight, robbing her of her beloved books? 

"The Boys" Season 5 is streaming on Prime Video.