‘The Boys’ Season 3 Ending, Explained: Who Died? And What’s Next In Season 4?

After six insane weeks that started with a man jumping inside another man’s urethra and ended with a terrifying smile from a small child, The Boys Season 3 is over. And spoilers past this point, not everyone made it out alive. We’ll get to those deaths in a second, as well as what happened to the rest of the cast, but one of the biggest cliffhangers for The Boys Season 4, which reportedly starts filming in August, is that Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) only has 12-18 months to live.

When Decider asked about how dangerous this will make Butcher in Season 4, co-star Jack Quaid, who plays Butcher’s teammate Hughie, exclaimed, “Oh shit. I didn’t want to think about that.”

“It’s going to be an interesting one to tackle,” Urban added. “I have a policy of not going to [showrunner Eric] Kripke and asking him about what he’s going to write in the future. But I guess the interesting thing is, what sort of state does that render him in, and does his move towards death… How does that affect him mentally? How does it affect him physically? So I’m really looking forward to seeing. It’s an exciting sort of place to be, and hopefully the next season won’t be my last.”

While co-stars Quaid and Karen Fukuhara seemed downright depressed about the possibility of Urban leaving the show (Fukuhara simply stated, “no!”), chances are there’s still life in Billy Butcher yet. His death sentence was handed down to him by using the show’s “temporary V,” a chemical formula that grants superpowers for 24 hours. Butcher, knowing that using it would kill him, injected himself with the V anyway in order to help take down villain Homelander (Anotny Starr), and ultimately his one-time ally Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles).

Still, given there’s also the permanent version of Compound-V out there, as well as many other options in a world with superpowers, one could expect that Butcher is down, but not out.

While Butcher is falling, Annie January (Erin Moriarty), aka Starlight, rose higher than ever in the finale. After reconciling with Hughie thanks to an emotional monologue about pizza rolls, Hughie decided not to use the temp-V himself, and instead does what he should have done since the premiere: supports Annie, instead of trying to be the hero himself. During the climactic battle, while cornered by Soldier Boy, Hughie blasts the lights in a TV studio in Vought Tower, supercharging Annie and allowing her to fly.

“I love flying in the show,” Moriarty told Decider. “The only other time I have flown is when Homelander and I fly together. And what I learned is it’s really fun. But the cool thing about it is that it’s kind of a full-circle thing where Hughie has been threatened a little bit. His masculinity has been threatened by her power. And then he ends up being the one that helps her fly, right? Because he infuses power into the building even more, and into her. And so she’s able to fly… I liked that little plot point that it couldn’t have happened without Hughie.”

By episode’s end, despite the power-up Annie has made the big decision to literally throw her superhero costume in the trash, and join The Boys full-time as “just” Annie January. But that decision, and Butcher’s death sentence aren’t the only big changes to the show in The Boys Season 3, Episode 8 “The Instant White-Hot Wild”. Here’s who died, and everything else you need to know about the ending of the season.

Who Died in The Boys Season 3 Finale?

Unlike the bloody massacre that ended Season 2, there are only a few deaths at the end of The Boys Season 3 — though they’re all extremely important to the show. The big one is Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell), who dies after getting punched through the midsection by Homelander. Though the silent Supe had come back to Vought Tower to help Homelander kill Soldier Boy, the former discovered one key piece of info: Black Noir knew that Soldier Boy was secretly Homelander’s father the whole time they had been friends. For this betrayal alone, Homelander killed Black Noir. And while it’s possible Noir could survive even this (hey, weirder things have happened), chances are that’s it for Black Noir and his army of supportive cartoons.

Two other more minor deaths happened, with big ramifications. The first is Vice Presidential nominee hopeful Lamar Bishop (Graham Gauthier), who was killed by The Deep (Chace Crawford) on the orders of Homelander. This was all to position secret Supe Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) as the new Vice Presidential nominee, running with Dakota Bob (Jim Beaver). After simmering in the background in Season 3, seems like Season 2’s secret head-popper is about to take one of the highest offices in the land in Season 4… Or at least she will, if The Boys don’t stop her, first.

The second “minor” death is the poor, unnamed Guy in the Crowd (Water Bottle), played by Ryan Manning. In the final scene of the season, Homelander flies down into the middle of a protest supporting him, and introduces the crowd to his super-powered son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti). The aforementioned Guy throws the aforementioned Water Bottle and hits Ryan. That’s when Homelander does the thing he’s literally dreamed of doing since Season 1: he heat visions the guy in the head, slicing the top of his skull off and killing him in front of the crowd and cameras. For a moment, it’s unclear what will happen, until Todd (Matthew Gorman), the nebbishy dude who loves Homelander and married Mother’s Milk’s (Laz Alonso) ex-wife, starts cheering. Then everyone starts cheering, and Homelander realizes that murdering a man in plain daylight hasn’t terrified people… They love it. And as mentioned before, the camera cuts over to Ryan, who slowly smiles: he loves it, too.

Heading into Season 4, it seems like we’re going to get a Homelander unfettered by the rules of society… Something that makes him even more dangerous than even a dying Billy Butcher.

The Boys Season 3 Ending Explained:

Those deaths, and the final Homelander scene, aren’t the only big things that go down in The Boys Season 3 finale. It all comes down to that final battle in Vought Tower. At first, it seems like Homelander and Soldier Boy might team up to take everyone else down, right up until Homelander brings out Ryan to introduce him to his grandfather. This, though, is seen as a sign of weakness by Soldier Boy, who wants to kill them both and move on.

With Ryan in danger, Butcher immediately turns against Soldier Boy, despite wanting Homelander dead. And when Soldier Boy begins to explode, potentially taking out Homelander, Ryan and all of Vought Tower, Queen Maeve (Dominque McElligott) — who also wants Homelander dead — finally steps up as a hero, jumps out of the Tower with Soldier Boy, and seemingly dies when he explodes.

She doesn’t die, though. Down one eye thanks to Homelander, and sans powers thanks to Soldier Boy’s explosion, she instead leaves town with her girlfriend to live a normal life on a farm somewhere. A happy ending for Brave Maeve? Perhaps.

Where we leave everyone else varies wildly. Soldier Boy, post-explosion, is put back into cryogenic freeze by Mallory (Laila Robins). Having helped take him down, Mother’s Milk finds some peace with the memory of his grandfather’s murder, and reconnects with his daughter. The Deep is crying in his bed alone after his wife left him and wrote a tell-all book. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kimiko (Fukuhara) seem happy having realized that what they have together goes past romance into being each other’s hearts. A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) has been rejected by his brother, and despite now having a working heart has started to realize that all his growth over this season means nothing in a world where Homelander can kill him with a thought. And perhaps most surprisingly of all, Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) grows a bit of a conscience and deletes footage showing that Maeve is alive.

So there you go! That’s where we leave everyone at the end of The Boys Season 3. With a presidential election on the horizon both in the show, and in the real world, as we head into Season 4 not only has the game changed, again, but we’re most likely going to get a whole lot more of the prescient political skewering the show is so good at. That is, if Homelander doesn’t kill everyone, first.