Anthony Starr is once again at the center of the conversation around The Boys, and the series finale makes clear why. Even as the show races toward its endgame, Homelander remains the character people remember most, and Starr's performance is still the reason the role feels dangerous instead of merely cartoonish. The finale puts that front and center, but it also leaves a lot of viewers asking whether the story actually earned its ending.

A major thread in reactions to the finale is that Starr has consistently given Homelander more depth than the writing sometimes allows. One of the strongest examples comes from a past character adjustment in which Starr pushed back against a version of Homelander that was too one-note and cruel. That change made the character feel less like a simple villain and more like a volatile mix of childlike insecurity, vanity, rage, and fear. For many viewers, that is the version of Homelander that made the show work: not a pure monster, but a terrifying man with godlike power and a damaged, unpredictable mind.

That is why the final season's handling of Homelander has drawn so much criticism. Some viewers felt the show had spent years promising a larger, harsher reckoning, only to end with something smaller and stranger than expected. The finale's big confrontation is described as almost absurdly contained, with the climactic action largely confined to the White House and resulting in broken furniture, scorched rooms, and a sense that the show backed away from its own scale. For a series that built its identity on escalation, that restraint felt to many like a letdown.

The criticism is not just about spectacle. It is also about what the ending seems to say. Viewers were left trying to parse the message of a finale in which the world is saved, but the political and corporate machinery around it appears to snap back into place anyway. Stan Edgar returning to a position of power, Vought surviving yet again, and the overall sense of a reset left many wondering whether the story was arguing that nothing really changes, or that the only way to win is to become more ruthless than the villains. That ambiguity has not landed cleanly for everyone.

Butcher's ending became another point of frustration. Some viewers expected his arc to resolve in a way that matched the show's moral logic, but instead felt his punishment was disproportionate to the choices he actually made. His role in stopping Homelander should have been a decisive victory, yet the final outcome leaves him punished, isolated, and denied the kind of hard-earned payoff many expected. That mismatch between the stakes and the resolution is part of why the finale feels to some like a season that did not know what it wanted to reward or condemn.

At the same time, the finale still benefits from the cast's ability to make even uneven material feel alive. Starr's Homelander continues to be the magnetic force in the story, and that matters because the show depends on viewers believing that he is both ridiculous and terrifying. The best versions of the character have always balanced those qualities: the grandiose performance, the narcissism, the childishness, and the sudden flashes of genuine menace. Starr keeps that balance intact even when the writing pushes the character toward broader satire.

That tension is part of why the finale has sparked so much debate about the series as a whole. The Boys began as a savage take on power, celebrity, and corruption, but by the end some viewers feel it has become trapped by its own ideas. The villains are still evil, the institutions are still compromised, and the heroes still cannot fully win without becoming compromised themselves. If the ending is meant to show that power simply reproduces itself, it does that. If it is meant to suggest a cleaner moral conclusion, it falls short.

There is also a sense that the show kept promising a truly apocalyptic Homelander payoff and then chose a narrower path. That does not necessarily make the finale wrong, but it does make it feel smaller than the mythology around it. For a character as volatile as Homelander, the audience expected either total destruction or a confrontation that exposed him in a more complete way. Instead, the ending leans into containment, irony, and aftermath. Some viewers found that smart. Others found it evasive.

What remains hardest to dismiss is how much of the show's identity is tied to Anthony Starr's work. Even critics of the season tend to agree that he understands the character in a way that keeps Homelander compelling. He does not play him as a simple tyrant. He plays him as a mess of entitlement, hurt, vanity, and need, which is exactly what makes the character unsettling. In a finale that many found uneven, that performance is the clearest reminder of why Homelander became one of television's most memorable villains.

So the ending of The Boys may not have satisfied everyone, but it did reinforce one thing: Anthony Starr's Homelander is still the show's defining creation. The problem is that the finale asks viewers to accept a conclusion that feels smaller than the character and less decisive than the story promised. That gap between performance and payoff is what will define the final chapter for many viewers, not the shock moments or the last-minute reversals, but the uneasy feeling that the series ended with its best element still intact and its larger message still unresolved.