The Boys creator and showrunner Eric Kripke has revealed the real-world inspiration behind Firecracker’s fate, as shown in Season 5, Episode 5.
Warning! Spoilers for The Boys Season 5, Episode 5 follow:
In the latest episode of The Boys, Firecracker, played by Valorie Curry, gives herself over entirely to supervillain Homelander despite his aspirations to “ascend” to godhood. Firecracker — a monstrous supe in her own right — had been a key member of The Seven and Homelander’s inner circle, enacting his will no matter how demented the request.
But as Homelander’s insanity grows he questions the loyalty of those around him. At the end of Episode 5, Firecracker pleads her innocence with Homelander, insisting she worships him, mind, body, and soul. But Homelander is unconvinced, and, seemingly on a whim, kills her by impaling her head on the sharp end of the right wing of an eagle statue.
It’s a shocking moment that brings Firecracker’s arc to an end in perhaps the only way it could: death at the hand of her new “Lord.” But, as Kripke told The Hollywood Reporter, the inspiration for her demise came from a real-world political figure: Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In November last year, President Donald Trump officially rescinded his endorsement of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and attacked her in personal terms, marking a major political breakup of the two former allies. Greene, who arrived in Congress in 2021, had been an ardent and outspoken Trump supporter.
“We always knew we would have an episode where she completely gives up everything she holds dear and that was going to be the episode where Homelander kills her,” Kripke revealed.
“Because for us, it’s like, everyone who’s in his orbit — or everybody who is in a certain public figure’s orbit — they give up every single conviction they’ve ever had, and then he destroys their careers. They end up just getting thrown out into the world.
“There’s this breed of people espousing Trump’s message who are more hardcore than him — the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world. [When we wrote the episode], her sort of banishment hadn’t happened yet. But we were like, ‘But it’s only a matter of time before it does.’ So we were like, ‘Let’s write that. Because, I mean, Firecracker had it coming.”
Kripke has maintained that Homelander was always intended to be a proxy for Donald Trump, and that it had become increasingly difficult to effectively provide satire. “When Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and I took it out to pitch, it was 2016,” he explained. “We just wanted to do a very realistic version of a superhero show, one where superheroes are celebrities behaving badly. Trump was the, ‘He’s not really getting the nomination, is he?’ guy. When he got elected, we had a metaphor that said more about the current world. Suddenly, we were telling a story about the intersection of celebrity and authoritarianism and how social media and entertainment are used to sell fascism. We’re right in the eye of the storm. And once we realized that, I just felt an obligation to run in that direction as far as we could.”
Earlier this month, Kripke told TV Guide that he was “bummed out” that Season 5 was written before the presidential election, which took place in November 2024.
“I’m totally bummed out to say we wrote it before the election. It sounds super naive now, but I swear the plan was, ‘Let’s write a 1984 version of what creeping authoritarianism looks like in America,’ and maybe everyone will be like, ‘Whew, we really dodged a bullet.’ But instead, we got hit with the bullet,” Kripke said.
Kripke added that the writers would come up with outlandish ideas that at the time seemed implausible, but have since become reality. “And a lot of things that were far-fetched for us, we’re like — ‘That’s crazy!’ — have come to pass in a way that’s really really f***ing troubling,” he explained.
Now Firecracker is dead, thoughts turn to the fate of other members of The Seven and Homelander’s inner circle. Will Homelander turn on the likes of Soldier Boy, The Deep, Black Noir, Sister Sage, and Ashley Barrett? Is everyone who’s sided with Homelander marked for death?
More parallels are coming, it seems. Kripke has revealed that in Episode 7 of Season 5, Homelander says a line that the writers felt was the “craziest” they could think of, but “it’s already happened.”
“There’s a line — I won’t give it away — but there’s a line in Episode 7 that Homelander says that was the craziest line we could think of, and it’s already happened,” Kripke said.
In May 2025, Starr spoke of his shock at the glorification of Homelander by some The Boys fans, calling it “surreal.”
“We had a bunch of guys that we all kind of knocked them down a little but on social media to say, ‘This guy is not the hero of any story.'” Starr said. “They were really glorifying him, they loved him. Which is surreal.”
Starr added that he was surprised to find some The Boys fans siding with Homelander, given the outrageously evil actions he takes in the show. “What I didn’t expect was that people would be so conflicted around it and, you know, finding themselves finding empathy for this monster.”
And in 2024, ahead of The Boys Season 4, Kripke responded to fans saying Homelander is a hero, saying: “Some people who watch it think Homelander is the hero. What do you say to that? The show’s many things. Subtle isn’t one of them. So if that’s the message you’re getting from it, I just throw up my hands.”
Image credit: Jasper Savage/Prime.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
