Spoilers below for the latest episode of The Boys, so be warned if you haven’t yet watched via Amazon Prime subscription.
- The Story Behind How The Boys’ Creator Got Samuel L. Jackson To Make A Cameo
- See Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki And Misha Collins Hilariously Reprise Their Supernatural Characters In The Boys Blooper
- I Wrote Out Jensen Ackles' Filthiest Soldier Boy Quotes In The Boys Season 5, And I Need Two Showers Now
The penultimate episode of The Boys upped the Season 5 body count by having Homelander kill Frenchie off (which still sits wrong with me), which will no doubt give Butcher, Starlight, & Co. even more motivation to rid the world of Antony Starr’s self-assessed messiah in the series finale. We also saw the last of another major Supe in “The Frenchman, The Female and the Mother’s Milk,” as Homelander put an unwilling Soldier Boy back into his cryosleep tube. But not before a final Supernatural callback!
During their final-for-now conversation, after Homelander tried to win his dad over by revealing Soldier Boy-related additions to Voughtland, Ackles’ character made it clear that he did not want a lasting relationship with his offspring, and that his decision to give up the priceless V1 formula was guided entirely by his love for Aya Cash’s Clara (a.k.a. Stormfront). As he put it in the ep:
I gave you the V1 because of Clara. Because that's what she would have wanted. This was never gonna be a 'playing catch on the front lawn, fixing up the old Impala' bullsh-t. You're too weird.
Soldier Boy
Just about anyone familiar with Supernatural presumably perked up at that moment, since the show's Winchester brothers were well known for driving (and fixing up) a 1967 Impala that they named "Baby."
Obviously that wasn't as ginormous a Supernatural connection as the surprisingly bloody reunion episode with Jared Padalecki and Misha Collins, but it so very obviously counts. Not just because of Ackles hiimself, of course, but because The Boys creator Eric Kripke also created and ran the monster-filled drama (which also co-starred Jeffrey Dean Morgan) for its early seasons. And he pointed out that the Impala reference almost didn't make it in there.
Soldier Boy Didn't Originally Reference The Impala
Speaking with Collider about the episode, Kripke revealed that the scripted version of that scene featured a reference to a boring old car company with ZERO links to Sam and Dean Winchester. Booo! Here's how the Impala comment eventually made it into the ep:
Of course, we did. Knowing that that was going to be Jensen’s last scene in the series, we wanted to put in one last reference. Honestly, Slem wrote and we shot that it was a Ford. It was, ‘Working on the old Ford.’ The danger of having (director) Phil Sgriccia and I, sitting next to each other in editing, which we would do, was that we were watching it and Phil was like, ‘Should it be 'Impala'?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it probably should be Impala.’ And so, Jensen looped in 'Impala' just to do one last nod.
Eric Kripke
Kripke calls it a "danger," but I think him working with Phil Sgriccia is far more of a feature than a bug. Not that the sequence would have been a failure had he only joked about working on a Ford instead of the Impala, but it definitely helped make it that much more memorable. Especially if it's the last time fans see him until Vought Rising gets here and brings "Ben" and Clara back together. And it is.
Without any further Soldier Boy scenes to look forward to, I guess we just have a bunch of still-unrevealed cameos to anticipate. Find out when the series finale hits streaming on Wednesday, May 20. (Or if you're so brave, the episode is screening in 4DX theaters on Tuesday night.)
