The Boys Season 5 has been absolutely ruthless right from the start and with the fifth episode, things have gotten even more intense. We already lost A-Train in the very first episode, which set the scene for how unpredictable the show will be this season, and now episode five just delivered another gut punch.
Firecracker, one of the most entertainingly vile members of the Seven, is dead, and Homelander is the one who did it. It was sudden, brutal, and honestly a little bit earned. Here’s a breakdown of why it happened and what the episode set up to get there.
The short answer is that Firecracker made the mistake of making Homelander feel something and the longer answer involves Soldier Boy, a church pastor from Daytona Beach, and the very specific danger of actually winning an argument against a god-complex-having superpowered narcissist.
Throughout The Boys Season 5 Episode 5, Firecracker’s carefully constructed mask starts to fall apart. A call from her hometown puts her on edge, and a meeting with the reverend from her childhood church only deepens the crack. He urges her not to keep going along with the Homelander-as-Messiah propaganda, calling it wrong, and something in her clearly hears him. She still goes on air and drags her church, but there’s a tear running down her face the whole time.
Where things really unravel is in bed with Soldier Boy. She lets something slip about her doubts, about the tension between what she actually believes and what she’s been told to preach. Soldier Boy then takes that straight to Homelander and uses it to plant suspicion in his son’s head.
When Homelander shows up at Firecracker’s apartment, he’s already made up his mind and he tells her to leave the Seven. She then starts arguing back, in a way that almost nobody does with Homelander without immediately getting lasered.
Valorie Curry opens up on why Firecracker was killed on The Boys Season 5
Valorie Curry, who plays Firecracker on The Boys Season 5, opened up about her death on the show and what led to it. The actress described her character’s final moments as when she completely lost her mask and she has no filler left.
Speaking to Direct she says,
She is so utterly broken and at the end of her rope by the time she walks into that room. And also, because of that, I think that the argument that it turns into comes out of the fact that she has nothing left, no filter left. The mask has completely fallen, and so she’s angry at him.
She then opened up about why she thinks Homelander ends up killing her as she added,
Why he impulsively does that, is because she’s winning. I felt she was winning the argument and that was too uncomfortable for him. That was too vulnerable for him. It was too exposing of his humanity, which was exactly what he’s been trying to distance himself from this whole season. So she had to go.
Firecracker’s death works because The Boys Season 5 didn’t frame it as a villain getting what she deserves, even if she absolutely did. It was the death of someone who, for one brief moment, was more human than she’d allowed herself to be in years, and it killed her. Valorie Curry was brilliant in the role right up until the end, and Firecracker’s exit is exactly the kind of death The Boys does best: messy, sudden, and impossible to shake off.
The Boys Season 5 is streaming on Prime Video.
Edited by Nibir Konwar