The 10 Best Episodes of The Boys, Ranked!

Prime Video’s superhero satire series The Boys has ended after five seasons. It was an inconsistent ride, quality-wise, but certainly one with high highs. 

The Boys was violent and lowbrow in its humor, no question, but at its best, it spoke to the moment in ways contemporary shows didn’t. It’s a show that understands that unsubtle times require unsubtle stories.

Created by Eric Kripke (Supernatural), The Boys didn’t settle for merely adapting the comics by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson. The series not only updated the comic’s 2000s-era to reflect the late 2010s and 2020s, but it also took the original characters and storylines in different directions. At times, the show even improved on its source material.

Even though this setting will live on with the upcoming prequel series Vought Rising, it’s hard to picture that series overshadowing the fresh legacy of The Boys itself. As that legacy is cemented, there are some episodes that fans will look back on the fondest.

Here are the 10 best episodes of The Boys, ranked!

10. Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite (Season 5 Episode 1)

The Boys Season 5 has problems aplenty, but at least it starts well with The Boys Season 5 Episode 1, “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite.” No season premiere on The Boys opens better than this one, where the shoe — or the footage of Homelander (Antony Starr) leaving passengers on a crashing plane to die — finally drops.

After Season 4 got criticized for treading water, “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite” is an appropriate bang of an opener, even if it writes a check the rest of Season 5 hesitated to cash. 

The biggest highlight of the episode is A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), whose redemption arc comes full circle.

Remember, A-Train introduced the audience and Hughie (Jack Quaid) to how bad supes can be when he ran through Hughie’s girlfriend Robin (Jess Salgueiro) at super speed. 

A-Train slowly changed, becoming a true hero in Season 4. On “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite,” his story ends with some genuinely superheroic courage and laughing in the face of death.

9. Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men (Season 2 Episode 3)

On The Boys Season 1, the titular team were spies working beneath the Seven’s notice. Come The Boys Season 2, they’re wanted fugitives, which only raises the stakes and suspense. Several episodes feature the Boys outright on the run and completely outclassed next to the supes.

The most memorable sequence to that end is on The Boys Season 2 Episode 3, “Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men.” In a rare moment of the Deep (Chace Crawford) not being utterly useless, he ambushes the Boys (traveling on a boat) with sharks.

When the Deep tries to block the Boys’ escape on a speedboat with a whale, Butcher (Karl Urban) just crashes into the whale. The cetacean skewering is gruesome, hilarious, well past the point of good taste, and just plain diabolical. 

That’s not all. This is the episode that drops the truth about Stormfront (Aya Cash). After previously endearing herself with an anti-authority attitude, she reveals herself as a murderous Neo-Nazi who brings down an apartment building just to kill some innocent Black people.

8. I Found You (Season 1 Episode 8)

On The Boys Season 1, Homelander was at his most controlled. Part of the tension of the season was him realizing he didn’t like Vought’s leash. The personification of that was his lifelong handler and mother figure, Vought executive Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue).

The Boys has a lot of gory deaths to list, but one of the scariest is when Homelander kills Stilwell on The Boys Season 1 Episode 8, “You Found Me.”

Butcher holds Stillwell hostage, thinking she has leverage over Homelander. Instead, he looks Stillwell in the eye, makes her admit she’s afraid, and then cooks her skull with his heat vision.

Speaking of the title, “you found me” is a phrase repeated throughout The Boys, both the TV series and the original comics. It underlines the luck it takes to search the world and find the person you’re meant to be with.

The episode twists that with a jaw-dropping change from the source material. Butcher’s wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten), is not dead, but raising Homelander’s child, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti).

7. Assassination Run/Season 4 Finale (Season 4 Episode 8)

The Boys Season 4 had all the symptoms of a set-up season, but at least the set-up paid off with The Boys Season 4 Episode 8, “Assassination Run/Season Four Finale,” that closed out the season.

The episode has one of Erin Moriarty’s best performances in the entire show. As a shapeshifter who’d abducted and replaced Annie, she proves she might have a future playing villains.

Almost everything that could go wrong for the Boys in this episode does.

Butcher gives in to his dark side and kills VP-Elect Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) when she was about to defect. With President Bob Singer (Jim Beaver) framed for the crime, Homelander ushers in a new regime.

The Boys rarely got darker than the montage that closes out this episode of all our heroes being captured or left hopeless, all set to an inspired needle drop of Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box. 

6. The Female of the Species (Season 1 Episode 4)

The scene that got the show noticed came on The Boys Season 1 Episode 4, “The Female of the Species.”

The episode introduces Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), hence the title. But the Seven’s side of the episode might be even more consequential.

Homelander and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) try to save a terrorist-hijacked plane. Homelander bungles the job, accidentally lasering the pilot to death, and then decides to leave. Image is what Homelander cares about, so it’s better to let all the witnesses die than try to save them and fail.

We’ve known supes are bad news for episodes now, but this is where his worst self first shows. The sequence forces you to sit with dread, running for several minutes without any real hope. A final shot of passengers reaching out of the plane at their fleeing “rescuers” is the terrible closing note.

Antony Starr’s performance as Homelander is widely and rightfully considered one of the best villain TV performances out there. “The Female of the Species” is the first major piece of evidence for that.

5. Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed (Season 3 Episode 7)

The Boys Season 3 has a lot to like, such as Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy, a faux-Captain America meets John Wayne. As charismatic as he is, especially compared to Homelander, Soldier Boy is no hero. The Boys Season 3 Episode 7, “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed,” explores why.

Hughie learns most of Soldier Boy’s heroic feats were merely PR, while Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) recalls — with some help from cartoon animal hallucinations — how Soldier Boy scarred him to the point of brain damage.

The episode also explores Butcher’s backstory. As he’s locked in a coma by the telepathic supe Mindstorm, he remembers how he abandoned his little brother Lenny (Jack Fulton) to their abusive father.

Butcher’s foul mouth and cockney accent sometimes verge on caricature. Episodes like this are vital to remind us of the damaged man he really is.

Best of all, the episode closes out on a twist that recontextualizes the entire series: Soldier Boy is Homelander’s biological father.

4. The Only Man In The Sky (Season 3 Episode 2)

The Boys Seasons 1-2 follow a Homelander who has the world convinced he’s a hero. The Boys Season 3 goes somewhere even scarier; Homelander starts showing his megalomanical true self in public and discovers a lot of people like it. 

At the end of Season 2, Homelander’s reputation is stained through his romance with Stormfront (publicly exposed as a Nazi). The first two episodes of The Boys Season 3 feature him feeling resentful that Starlight is upstaging him as the world’s most popular superhero.

On The Boys Season 3 Episode 2, “The Only Man In The Sky,” he crashes out.

Rather than saving a suicidal girl on a ledge of a building, he makes her jump. When someone jeers Homelander at his televised birthday party, he goes on a self-serving speech about how much better he is than everyone, and that everyone should be thankful he’s there to save them.

The words are self-delusion, but Starr sells them — as well as the build-up to Homelander’s phony smile melting — with terrifying conviction.

3. The Name of The Game (Season 1 Episode 1)

It’d be hard to get a better introduction to the show than The Boys Season 1 Episode 1, “The Name of the Game.”

An opening sequence of a smiling Homelander stopping a robbery shows us superheroes exist and are revered in this world. Then, Hughie gets a cold splash of reality when A-Train manslaughters Robin.

Annie, invited to join the Seven as Starlight, offers an inside, innocent view into the corruption. At its best, the satire on The Boys tied superheroes into the larger entertainment industry and celebrity culture. Annie, a woman trying to follow her dreams, being coerced into sex by the Deep on her first day, feels all too real.

Karl Urban is likewise perfect as Butcher from the start. He sweeps Hughie off his feet by showing him the true world of supes. The ending of the episode, where he attacks super-resilient Translucent (Alex Hassell) with a crowbar, is an early taste of how bloody Butcher’s vendetta against supes will get.

2. What I Know (Season 2 Episode 8)

The most singularly satisfying season finale of the show is The Boys Season 2 Episode 8, “What I Know,” where all the story threads of the season culminate. The results are spectacular, and it’s nice to see the good guys get a (mostly) unambiguous win.

Special praise for this episode goes to the scene where Annie, Kimiko, and Maeve team up to curb-stomp Stormfront together. It’s The Boys doing something it might criticize other superhero stories for, granted, but the scene keeps the show’s own style with its violence and vulgarity.

Besides, who doesn’t love a Nazi getting kicked while they’re down? 

Ryan and Becca’s subplot comes to a tragic end when Ryan accidentally kills his mom with his laser vision. Billy loses his wife again, permanently this time. The rest of the series is about if he can keep the promise Becca saw in him to be a better man.

1. Herogasm (Season 3 Episode 6)

After Seasons 4 and 5 got mixed reviews, it’s becoming gospel more and more among fans that the show peaked, or at least should’ve ended, with Season 3.

Whether you agree or not, it’s hard to argue that The Boys Season 3 Episode 6, “Herogasm,” isn’t a huge high point. Butcher and Hughie broker a deal with Soldier Boy; they help him track down his old team, he’ll help them kill Homelander.

That leads them to a superhero orgy held in Vermont: Herogasm. It might be the most depraved the show ever got, and The Boys was never shy about exploring how superpowers and kinks can intersect.

But the most transcendent part of the episode is the climax with Homelander fighting Soldier Boy and Butcher (who has been empowered by Compound V). Billy delivers the “shock and awe” fight he and Homelander promised to have back on The Boys Season 3 Episode 1, “Payback,” and the show was never better.

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The Boys is streaming on Prime Video.

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