The Boys Series Finale Saves The Show's Happiest Endings For Three Villains

Contains spoilers for "The Boys" Season 5, Episode 8 — "Blood and Bone"

"The Boys" Season 5 is over, and the surviving members of the team get their flowers. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), M.M. (Laz Alonso), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), and Hughie (Jack Quaid) all get happy-ish endings. However, they've all suffered losses and gone through hell. Meanwhile, the show saves some of its nicest endings for three antagonists.

Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) ends the show as the Vought interim CEO, regaining command of his company and remaining his usual unflappable self. Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) allies with the Boys in the end, but she's been a major antagonist for a good while. This doesn't stop her from getting her dream ending. Sage has always hated her superintelligence, so she voluntarily helps unlock Kimiko's Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) chest blast, which depowers her. She's last seen heading toward a Harry Potter theme park, happy as a clam.

And then there is Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie), who survived the ending of "The Boys" Season 4 with some of the show's most mysterious superpowers. Ashley has been inching toward a semi-functional moral compass over time, but she's nevertheless constantly sided with the villains. Yet, she gets to be the president. Sure, she gets impeached, but she's alive and will go down in history as the first female President of the United States, and she even makes peace with her psychic tumor by helping the Boys during the tunnel ambush.

"The Boys" Season 5 is bold and brilliant, but its endgame isn't necessarily pleasant for its protagonists. Both Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) lose their lives before the final credits roll. Kimiko has lost both Frenchie and her brother Kenji (Abraham Lim) over the course of the show's run, and while she has found inner peace, she's effectively alone.

M.M., Hughie, and Starlight all get their family-themed happy endings, but their endings are all very baseline "ordinary life" stuff that doesn't really carry a torch to Sage being freed of the curse of her intellect, Ashley somehow surviving the events of the show and becoming the first female POTUS, or Stan Edgar getting his CEO power back.

Considering the grim fates that "The Boys" hands out to the likes of Homelander (Antony Starr) and The Deep (Chace Crawford), it may seem surprising that the show is so lenient with Sage, Ashley, and Edgar. But then again, not every bad guy is caught in the real world, either, so giving some of the villains happy endings kind of makes sense.