The Boys creator Eric Kripke is feeling a “fair amount of terror” about getting the show’s season finale right – and he turned to the makers of Breaking Bad for help.
After all, Kripke has been down this road before: the last episode of Supernatural left many fans dissatisfied, and the impact of a ‘bad’ finale (or even a polarizing one) is enormous on the rest of the series.
For example, look at Lost. It’s generally ranked as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, widely viewed across the world, but the main reason people still talk about it is its incredibly divisive ending.
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Kripke wants to get it right, so he looked at one of the greatest finales of all time for inspiration.
The Boys creator is in “terror” over Season 5 finale
Prime Video
Speaking to The Night Agent creator Shawn Ryan for Sony’s Creator to Creator podcast, Kripke confessed: “I am in a fair amount of terror about a series finale.
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“You can count in one, maybe two hands, the truly great series finales… and, conversely, the graveyard is literally filled with terrible [finales].
“You could have the greatest show for years, but if you stiff that ending, and that’s what’s sending everyone out in the parking lot, they go, ‘Oh, maybe that show wasn’t that good.’
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“How do you tie up the stories? How do you do it in a way that is emotional and satisfying? How do you do it in a way that creates, frankly, the illusion that some detail that you dropped in Season 1 or Season 2 is now suddenly coming back to pay off?”
AMC
In Kripke’s eyes, Breaking Bad “is as good as a show gets” (and most people agree, considering its ‘Felina’ finale is still rated 9.9 on IMDb.) “I was able to ask some of those writers, ‘The way you tied everything together, how did you do that?’” he continued.
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“And they said, ‘Oh, we just had a list of loose ends on our board, that we had no idea of what to do with them, that we would keep compiling over the seasons, and when then it was time to do the final season we would just start checking them off, because we are going to look like geniuses because the Season 2 storyline becomes this.’
“So that, I would say, has been a big challenge. The size of it, you know?”
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Find out what else we know about The Boys Season 5 and Gen V Season 2, and check out what else is dropping this year with our 2025 TV show calendar.