(FOURTH SEASON SPOILERS BELOW)
The Boys‘ recent season finale left plenty of questions to consider before the fifth and final season, such as how the show is currently (and in the future) dealing with A-Train’s disappearance. Other questions involve what powers Ashley will have after potentially Hulking out due to taking Compound V in desperation, and then there’s the possibilities opened by Erin Moriarty‘s Annie January regaining her Starlight powers and zooming into the stratosphere while Hughie was hauled off by Homelander’s minions.
This followed some episodes in which Annie felt her identity metaphorically slipping away while losing said powers, but after she had to take her identity back from the Shifter, the ex-member of The Seven found her way back to herself. As a result, Annie could be much more powerful than her former Supe self, so presumably, she will be back with a vengeance to rescue her vigilante friends and will hopefully squish some Bad Supes in the process.
Showrunner Eric Kripke has also told fans that “lots of death” will surface onscreen because there’s no need to give these characters plot armor with the series winding down. So, who should Annie kill? Or perhaps the better question is who she might kill first. Gotta be Deep, right? Chace Crawford’s character has had it coming from her since he sexually assaulted the fledgling Supe in the series’ first episodes, so a full circle moment like her casually ripping away a few of his most treasured body parts (I mean gills, but what were you thinking?) and feeding them to a shark seems fitting.
Sure, everybody who can kill someone will want to kill Homelander, but let Starlight have Deep. Erin Moriarty agreed when Comic Book asked who Annie should take out first: “You know, which one, come on.” Moriarty then did, in fact, express the desire to kill Homelander, but she believes that the “bare minimum” is Deep:
“[S]he’s got to at least get The Deep, let me kill the fish guy at least, bare minimum for God’s sake… But it needs to be under circumstances where she’s provoked at first because that’s her. She can’t just go and kill someone. They need to attack her and it’s self defense because she’s Annie, but she’s got to get someone and I feel like people weren’t rooting for that as much until this past season. But that concept of a cathartic karma. I think we really need it. So all of the above, all of them.”
Moriarty also floated the possibility of a Starlight-Ashley joint effort, and I do think that watching Ashley kill Homelander would be much more satisfying than watching Butcher do it, since that rivalry has arguably been beaten into the ground. Whereas Homelander has caused Ashley to rip her hair out due to stress, and then he taunted her for it, so viewers would love to see him be taken down by somebody who he belittled for ages and who had no power to fight back. Until now.
Hey, maybe she’ll have super-powered hair (or even Medusa-type hair) that throttles Homelander. Eric Kripke, make it happen.