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Yeah, okay, so The Boys’ final season didn’t go so well. But honestly, I’m tired of hearing the same complaints over and over again, so I say we should have a change of heart and do things a little differently this time…

Let’s complain about the whole show.

OK, maybe not all of it, but the episode titles at least.

Scorched Words, Shock and Yawn, Copy and Paste

So, The Boys has a specific formula which it follows in almost all forty episodes of its run, with fewer than ten exceptions. The rule is simple: name the episode after a volume, arc, or issue from the original comic series, or one of its spin-offs.

So, what’s the problem? Isn’t that great? It shows a respect for the source material and original comics, even when the adaptation has significantly distanced itself from it.

No. No, it’s not.

The thing is, the writers do this randomly. They just pick whatever title they feel like taking and slap it on. During the earlier seasons, they usually picked the titles of the main volumes, but once they ran out, they started pulling titles from the individual issues within those volumes. And that is just the cause of the real problems, which I’ve narrowed down to the following three:

A. They Don’t Properly Reference the Comics.

When you name an adaptation after an iconic storyline from its source material, it should more or less be guaranteed that it should have some semblance to said storyline, right? But when you’re pulling names out of thin air, well…

For a first example, let’s look at the episode, “Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men”. This is the title of the comic’s penultimate volume, and one of the series’ most pivotal, as it features the climactic final battle between Butcher and Homelander. And what do we get from this episode? Well… the most brutal scene in it resulted in a dead whale (though I will admit, it was better than the ACTUAL final fight we got in the show’s finale).

So what was the point of naming it after the comics’ epic finale—let alone giving it that badass name—for nothing? Why not give it to an episode like the series finale, “Blood and Bone”, which actually adapts the original storyline it refers to? Why would they give this title, which holds so much weight, to a random mid-season installment?

It gets worse when it starts tainting spin-offs too. “We Gotta Go Now” is yet another mid-season installment. It shares the same name as the comics’ fourth volume… but then the creators made a whole spin-off show titled Gen V, which is actually based on said volume, yet has no relevance to the episode from The Boys. Forget the original series—now the spin-offs (which, frankly, had a better sense of episode titling) have been caught in the mix.

But what makes this even stranger is that the show can and has used some titles correctly. “The Name of the Game” is based on the comics’ first volume, and thus rightly shares its title. “Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker” explores Butcher’s past, just like the eponymous comic spin-off does. And “Herogasm”… is pretty straightforward.

So if they could do it right a couple of times… what’s stopping them from doing it all the time?

B. They Typically Don’t Make Sense.

Now, there is an important argument that could be made which I briefly mentioned before: the show rarely follows the comic aside from the series premiere and finale, yet they aren’t even that close to the original in their own right. So maybe using comic book titles is just a courtesy for being an otherwise divergent adaptation.

But I think that just makes it worse. A lot of times, the titles just straight up don’t make sense or do not correlate with their corresponding episode. Maybe this could be brushed off sometimes, but other times, it’s just…

For example, let’s take the episode “The Self-Preservation Society”, which is named after the comics’ sixth volume. In any typical show, a title like that would most likely imply the discovery of some kind of secret organization or covert group, but the episode just delves into Homelander’s backstory and The Boys dealing with becoming wanted fugitives.

Or take the final season premiere, “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite”, which is named after the fourteenth issue. Not once does any character or object explode in this episode, save for one dude’s head, but that took zero inches of dynamite. I guess the real bomb was the one they dropped with these false titles.

C. They Create Misleading Expectations.

And now we come to the episode that sparked my whole idea to write this piece:

“The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother’s Milk”—the penultimate episode.  

Sharing its name with the second issue of the comics, this title, revealed months before its release, had me and many other fans shaking. The title, of course, refers to the series’ beloved trio of tritagonists: Frenchie, Kimiko, and M.M. Theories and discussions went rampant as we feared what could be brought to these three beloved characters. And later we came to find that they were given… jackshit, apparently.

Aside from the fact that this episode deeply ruined the stakes of the final season, it had basically no reason to hold these characters’ names in its title. The episode was, for the most part, a standard episode of the show. One could argue the episode held significant moments for each of these characters… and you know what? I agree. This episode did include scenes that were deeply crucial to all three, but none of them defined the episode. They were still intertwined with the larger plotlines regarding more crucial characters, such as Hughie and Butcher, but they were more so cherries-on-top than foundational moments… except for one of them (no spoilers)…

My point is, these random titles can be ridiculously misleading. What we were led to believe would be an iconic stand for this beloved trio turned into a worse-than-average episode, where we were forced to watch two furries sniff each other’s asscracks, instead of what was promised in the title.

The Answer to All Our Prayers

The Boys has already ended its run, so these titles are beyond fixing, but what should they have done instead if they really wanted to reference the comics? The solution, I find, comes in another TV series adaptation: Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

Every episode of the series uses the chapter titles from the novels to reflect their source material. For example, the episode “A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers” directly follows the plot points of the chapter and gives the title some actual relevance. With this system, viewers know what to expect from each episode, and the titles pay homage to the series whilst making logical sense.

Alas, with a goldmine of iconic comic titles at their fingertips, The Boys treated them like scraps of paper in a raffle. Instead of becoming meaningful homages, they became arbitrary labels, disconnected from the comics, the series, and the viewers. And that is fucking diabolical.

Contributed by Emon Hossain

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WORKS CITED

“Blood and Bone.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 5, episode 8, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2026. 

“Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 2, episode 7, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2020. 

Ennis, Garth. Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker. Illustrated by Darick Robertson, Dynamite, 2012.

Ennis, Garth. “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite.” The Boys, no. 14. Illustrated by Darick Robertson and Peter Snejbjerg, Dynamite, 2006.

Ennis, Garth. Herogasm. Illustrated by John McCrea and Keith Burns, Dynamite, 2009.

Ennis, Garth. Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men. Illustrated by Russ Braun and Darick Robertson, Dynamite, 2012.

Ennis, Garth. “The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother’s Milk.” The Boys, no. 2. Illustrated by Darick Robertson, WildStorm, 2006.

Ennis, Garth. The Name of the Game. Illustrated by Darick Robertson, WildStorm, 2009.

Ennis, Garth. The Self-Preservation Society. Illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra et al., Dynamite, 2009.

Ennis, Garth. We Gotta Go Now. Illustrated by Darick Robertson and John Higgins, Dynamite, 2009.

“Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 5, episode 1, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2026. 

“The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother’s Milk.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 5, episode 7, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2026. 

Gen V. Created by Craig Rosenberg et al., Amazon MGM / Sony, 2023-2025.

“A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers.” Percy Jackson and the Olympians, created by Rick Riordan and Jonathan E. Steinberg, season 1, episode 5, 20th Television / Disney+, 2024. 

“Herogasm.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 3, episode 6, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2022. 

“The Name of the Game.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 1, episode 1, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2020. 

“Nothing Like It in the World.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 2, episode 4, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2026. 

“Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 2, episode 3, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2020. 

Riordan, Rick. “A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers.” The Lightning Thief, Miramax, 2005.

“The Self-Preservation Society.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 1, episode 7, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2019. 

“We Gotta Go Now.” The Boys, created by Eric Kripke, season 2, episode 5, Amazon MGM / Sony, 2020.