The Boys Showrunner Eric Kripke Says He Was Never Making ‘Filler Episodes’: ‘Are You Expecting a Huge Battle Scene Every Episode?’

Any series entering its final season has to find a way to wrap up the plot without forgoing character development. Often, it’s a delicate balance to strike, and that’s something The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke has thought about quite a bit recently. His superhero dark comedy has made room for character-driven episodes as the fifth season heads toward an end. “None of the things that happen in the last few episodes will matter if you don’t flesh out the characters,” Kripke told TV Guide. “I’m getting a lot of online dissatisfaction, to put it politely. And I’m like, ‘What are you expecting? Are you expecting a huge battle scene every episode?'”

“One, I can’t afford that. And two, it would be so empty and dull, and it would just be about shapes moving without having any import.” 

This season’s fifth episode, “One-Shots,” was perhaps the final season’s most character-driven thus far. In a perspective shift, viewers experienced The Boys’ and Homelander’s (Antony Starr) ongoing search for V1 — and the dark workings of Vought — through the perspectives of Firecracker (Valorie Curry), Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell), Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), and the English bulldog Terror. This came directly after another episode that dove into the characters’ psyches, “King of Hell,” in which rage-inducing spores prompted most of The Boys to share inner thoughts that have been mostly hidden so far.

“It was important, for example, to really wrap out where Firecracker was. It was important to evolve Soldier Boy and Homelander’s relationship and to hear how hopeless [Laz Alonso’s] M.M. feels in Episode 4. It was important to see that The Boys are fracturing between people who are gathering around [Karl Urban’s] Butcher, and people who are gathering around [Jack Quaid’s] Hughie,” Kripke said.

“At no point during the writing of it was I like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re making filler episodes. So who cares?’ We all thought at the time we’re really getting these important character details,” he said. “We have something like 14 characters, maybe 15. And I owe it to all of them — in that television is the character business — I owe it to all of them to flesh them out and humanize them and their stories.”

Kripke added that the writers room felt that “crazy, big things” were happening in every episode. “It’s just sometimes it’s a giant character movement. But apparently, just because it’s not plot, you’re like, ‘Nothing happened!’ I’m like, ‘Nothing happened, what?’ The craziest, biggest moves happened. It just wasn’t someone shooting someone else and going, pew, pew, pew. And if that’s what you want, you’re just watching the wrong show.”

ALSO READ: The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke says the ‘craziest’ Homelander line in Season 5 ‘already happened’ in reality

“Another thing I’ll say that’s interesting is, it might be — you can tell I’ve thought a lot about it, because I’m not obsessively online looking at people mad at me, you are! — but I think it might be a byproduct of a weekly release,” Kripke continued. 

“For as much as I love the weekly release — because we should take time to have people talking and arguing about the show — my guess is if you were bingeing it or watching it all at once, you would have a very different experience than watching one episode a week that you might find slow or slower than usual, and then you have to wait a whole other week for the next piece. I think that aggravates people, probably,” he said. “To be clear, I’m a proponent for this release schedule, but I’ve been wondering if that was one of the side effects.”

New episodes of The Boys Season 5 premiere Wednesdays on Prime Video.