The Boys Season 5 Episode 4: Fans call it 'pure filler' as frustration boils over. Why is nothing at stake?

The Boys returns with an episode that, as fans seem to be saying, can be compared to a treadmill session: Sweat, motion and absolutely no forward momentum after 45 minutes.

A brief recap

Homelander is now fully committed to his deity-like mode, flanked by increasingly nervous yes-men whose loyalty looks one meltdown away from collapse. Firecracker, meanwhile, deserves a slow clap for the way her expression nosedives when she realises her latest assignment is essentially selling off whatever remains of her soul. History has issued several warnings about this exact scenario, clearly, she skipped that class.

Elsewhere, Hughie steps in as the show’s unofficial narrator, spelling out the plot with the urgency of someone worried we’ve all wandered off to TikTok.

Fort Harmony: The Winchester special

The team heads to Fort Harmony in pursuit of the ever-elusive “V1” MacGuffin, and yes, we get more Soldier Boy. At this point, Jensen Ackles is doing the lion’s share of the emotional lifting, injecting some much-needed gravitas into dialogue that occasionally teeters on parody.

The setting leans heavily into the familiar playbook, haunted psyches, paranoia, and characters nearly tearing each other apart before a last-minute reset.

Ryan continues his streak of hiding, brooding, and disappearing at narratively convenient moments. For a character billed as one of the most powerful beings alive, fans are rather upset that he is impressively inactive.

Annie’s subplot, however, delivers a rare flicker of substance. Her reunion with her estranged father offers a grounded emotional beat, forcing her to confront the tension between vulnerability and survival in a world that’s eager to vilify her. It’s a welcome reminder that the show can still do character work when it chooses to.

The verdict

If the episode felt like filler, you’re not alone, and viewers aren’t exactly being subtle about it.

There’s a strong sense that the show has mastered the art of going in circles: big actions, dramatic confrontations… and somehow, everything resets by the next scene. No fallout, no lasting consequences, just a narrative that keeps snapping back to square one. At this point, it’s starting to feel less like tension-building and more like stalling.

The repetition isn’t helping. The same moral arguments, the same team fractures, the same last-minute reunions, it’s all beginning to blur together. Some viewers have already mapped out the formula: Butcher threatens to go nuclear, Hughie pushes back, the team implodes, and then conveniently regroups just in time for a finale. Rinse, repeat.

Ryan, in particular, is testing fans patience. For someone with near-apocalyptic power, his ongoing routine of appearing briefly, brooding, and disappearing again is wearing thin. There’s a growing sentiment that he exists more as a narrative placeholder than an active player, and that the story would lose very little if he actually did something, or didn’t show up at all.

Annie’s storyline hasn’t escaped criticism either. While her emotional arc has merit, placing a reflective family subplot this late in the final season feels, to many, like a miscalculation. When the stakes are supposedly world-ending, slowing down for extended backstory detours comes across as mistimed at best, indulgent at worst.

Even the episode’s “big” developments aren’t landing the way they should. Soldier Boy temporarily containing Homelander? It should be huge. Instead, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s a temporary beat with an obvious outcome. The tension deflates the moment it begins, because no one truly believes it will stick.

And then there’s the pacing problem. Strip the episode down, and the list of actual developments is surprisingly thin, so thin, in fact, that some argue you could watch the opening and closing minutes and miss very little in between.

Underneath it all is a broader concern: the show feels like it’s holding back. With expectations that major character deaths and real consequences won’t arrive until later episodes, this stretch is beginning to feel like narrative padding, time being filled rather than story being told.