Kripke continues to step on his own dick.
Starr pushed back on the trump shit as hard as he could
Kripke also admitted both that he wanted to make homelander like trump on SNL, AND that the V1 was literally a Macguffin.
Two ideas. If you hate cloning, have Black Noir be a twin brother since they're fucking IVF babies. Only the second one was catered to and made into a very bad thing on purpose. Hell, IVF results in multiple babies all the fucking time, they just fetus deletus the unwanted ones.
Second Idea, instead of V1 have the damn Uranium be the source of SB's immortality with V1 being a fucking placebo.
That would mean SB's attempt to kill Homelander accidentally put him on his level.
Meanwhile everyone is scrambling for the V1 and Homelander just laughs in space.
So the entirety of S5 was pointless.
First off, Starr was 100% on board with the anti-Trump bullshit. He's repeatedly defended the show publicly and it's take on Homelander as a Trump expy AND fucking shitted on fans of Homelander, calling them fascist fanboys and invoking the perversion of the concept of media literacy to defend the hackery of the show.
You are thinking instead of Jensen Eckles, who straight up refused to use racial slurs and pretty much fought tooth and claw to make Soldier Boy a more morally ambiguous but still decent person rather than the evil racist cliche that Rogen and Kripke wanted him to be.
Second, the show really should have gone all in on Deep as the big bad and have him doing the framing of Homelander as a monster. Come up with some plot point of Deep being able to gain shape shifting powers (say, he consents to illegal experimentation giving subjects additional doses of V to try and give people multiple powers and gains shape shifting powers) and have him go on a revenge plot to basically destroy Homelander's life and bring him to ruin for never treating him like an equal and allowing him to be kicked off the Seven.
Third, regarding the season and the idea of executive meddling making it shit.
1. There were leaked rumors that the concentration camps were supposed to play a much bigger role in the season and they were supposed to be straight up modeled after Nazi concentration camps. Supposedly a lot of footage of that was shot but ordered scrapped by Amazon, after the wake of the Trump's reelection and that the only reason Kripke didn't ragequit at having to dial back the concentration camp shit was that he demanded to "be allowed to go through with his planned ending for Homelander" with no changes.
2. Second, assuming Amazon double crossed Kripke, I can see Kripke perhaps going all "everyone, heads up! you better lower your expectations for the finale!" being the direct result of said double cross and demanding an ending where Homelander is only presumed dead and basically forced to go into hiding, so they can bring him back for his own spin-off. Maybe even, in a meta "wink wink knod" sort of way they even bring up the clone angle where Homelander is defeated but Starlight demands he stand trial and he gets away with EVERYTHING due to Voight and the GOP conspiring to say that Homelander got replaced by a clone who was hiding as Black Noir created by Canada or some other foreign country who hates Trump to destroy America and ruin Homelander's good name. The same way Luthor keeps getting away with his crimes by blaming a clone impersonating him. And for Kripke to have the Boys and Starlight shit all over the plot twist from the comics as part of the denouncement, recontextualized as a metaphor for how dumb Trump supporters are that they will believe anything to avoid facing how horrific he is.
Granted, Antony Starr has been wanting to get the fuck off the show since season three, and is now 50 years old and knows he only has maybe a decade left if he's lucky before he's officially considered geriatric and can't get leading man roles and transition into making movies. So I double he'll want to continue to play Homelander in a potential spin-off down the line. But I'm sure as shit know Amazon probably WANTS to be able to make a Homelander ongoing TV show eventually, especially as a means to try and salvage the IP, since at this point I doubt Voight Rising will get more than a single season.
