Season 5, Episode 1 didn’t just close a chapter — it completed one of the most honest redemption arcs ever written for a Black superhero on screen.
Let me be honest with you. When The Boys first aired and we watched A-Train — full speed, no hesitation — run straight through Robin Ward and keep going, I didn’t think we’d ever get here. I thought we were watching a cautionary tale about what fame does to a man. What power does. What fear does. And we were. But the writers had something else in mind too, something that took five seasons to fully reveal itself. And in Episode 1 of Season 5, it all landed — quietly, perfectly, heartbreakingly.
A-Train’s death was not shocking because it was violent. It was shocking because it was earned. And in a genre full of sacrifice scenes, earned is the rarest thing in the room.
To understand why this finale hits so hard, you have to go back to the very beginning. Not Season 3. Not the turning point. The beginning. A-Train was the inciting incident of this entire show. He is the reason Hughie Campbell became a soldier in a war he never asked to fight. He ran through Robin — a woman crossing the street, an innocent bystander — and he kept going. Didn’t even look back. That image, that casual brutality of fame protecting itself, is what The Boys was built on.
So when Episode 1 of Season 5 gives us A-Train approaching that same choice — a woman crossing a street, Homelander gaining on him — and he slows down… I had to pause and just sit with that for a second. Same man. Same speed. Same moment. Completely different decision. That’s not a plot point. That’s a thesis statement.
“He started this show by running through an innocent woman without blinking. He ended it by choosing to stop — knowing full well what that stop would cost him.”
People forget — or maybe they don’t want to remember — just how bad A-Train was for most of this run. And I mean that without judgment, because the show never asked us to dismiss the damage. It asked us to hold it alongside everything else. Jessie T. Usher carried all of it, season after season, without flinching.
He killed Popclaw. The love of his life. Shoved her face-first into Vought’s machine to protect himself and never fully reckoned with it on screen until the guilt started showing in his face in Season 4. He snitched on Supersonic — a decent man, someone the team actually needed — and got him killed. Not out of malice, but out of fear. He used his own community, leaned on Black imagery and Black pain for a corporate rebrand that had nothing behind it, and watched his brother get paralyzed because he couldn’t fully commit to doing the right thing when it required real sacrifice. Every time A-Train stood at a fork in the road, he took the path that kept his jersey on his back and his seat at Vought’s table. Every. Single. Time.
And the show never let him off easy. It didn’t give us a clean moment of growth that wiped the slate. It let the slate stay dirty and watched him try to build something on top of it anyway.
What I love about how they wrote his later seasons is that the redemption didn’t come from one big heroic choice. It came from accumulation. It came from Herogasm — of all places — when A-Train pulled Hughie aside and gave him a real apology for Robin. Not a PR apology. Not a “sorry you feel that way.” A genuine, face-to-face reckoning with what he did to a man’s entire life. That moment landed quietly, and I think a lot of viewers slept on it. But that was the seed.
Then he became the mole. He fed intel to the Boys at real personal risk. And when the moment came where he could’ve run — where running was honestly the smart play — he stayed. He put himself between Homelander and Mother’s Milk. Between Homelander and Hughie. He chose people over survival, which was the exact opposite of the choice that defined him in Season 1.
And before his final run, we got one more beautiful beat: A-Train telling the Deep off. Calling out how pathetic he was. How hollow. After spending years as two men who were both terrified of Homelander in different ways, A-Train looked at the Deep and saw clearly what cowardice looked like from the outside. He’d finally stopped being that. And he needed to say it out loud before he went.
The chase sequence between Homelander and A-Train is visually straight out of the Flash and Superman playbook — a speed god being hunted by a power god — and it works because we understand the stakes emotionally, not just physically. A-Train can’t win this fight. He has never been able to win this fight. The entire series, Homelander was the ceiling of A-Train’s fear. The reason he made almost every wrong call. The reason he stayed silent when he should have spoken, moved when he should have stopped, looked away when he should have watched.
And then he sees a woman crossing the street. And he stops.
What happens next is where the writing team deserves every ounce of credit they’re going to get. Because A-Train doesn’t go out pleading. He doesn’t go out bargaining. He goes out laughing. Laughing in Homelander’s face. Telling him he is nothing without his powers. That without the laser eyes and the invincibility and the cape, Homelander is just a man that nobody actually chose. A-Train, who spent his whole career chasing the validation of power, finally saw clearly that power was never the point. And he wanted Homelander to know he saw it, right there at the end.
“Strip away your powers — what are you?” That line is the whole show. That line is the whole genre, if we’re being honest.”
The echo of the Avengers standoff between Iron Man and Captain America — that “take away the suit, what are you?” mirror — hits differently here because A-Train isn’t the hero saying it to another hero. He’s a man who spent years hiding behind his powers, his speed, his fame, finally stripping that away himself. Voluntarily. By standing still. It recontextualizes the Marvel moment in a way that cuts deeper, because A-Train knows from the inside what Homelander will never admit from the outside.
Here is an interview from Melissa Athoo featureing Tony Starr and Jessie T. Usher about A-Train’s finale.
@melissanathoo The final season of @The Boys has landed! And #AntonyStarr and #JessieTUsher are breaking down that first explosive episode of season 5 #theboys #homelander #atrain
Shots By Shinobi has always been about stories that amplify voices that don’t always get the full frame. And I want to be clear about something: A-Train’s arc is one of the most honest portrayals of a Black man navigating a system built to use him — and being complicit in that system, and trying to get out of it — that I’ve seen in superhero media. Period. They didn’t make him a symbol. They made him a person. A flawed, scared, selfish, occasionally brave, ultimately courageous person. And they let him go out on his own terms, defined by a decision he made for someone else, not for himself.
That is the full circle. Not a comeback. Not a victory lap. A man who ran through someone’s life choosing, at the end, to stand in front of someone else’s. We started this show because of what he did to Robin. We close this chapter because of what he refused to do to a stranger on a street. And he knew Homelander would catch him. And he laughed anyway.
A-Train went out like a badass. Like someone who finally figured out who he was when everything else was stripped away. He didn’t need the powers. He didn’t need the Seven. He didn’t need Vought.
He needed to be the man who stopped running.
Rest easy, Reggie. You finally made it home.