The Boys' Eric Kripke Weighs In On Maeve's Fate In Season 3's Finale

The following article contains spoilers for "The Boys" Season 3 finale.

It's another season finale of "The Boys," which means it's time to take stock of who lived and who died. No character is ever truly safe on the series, which is pretty much a given considering it deals heavily with a bunch of morally-scrupulous superpowered individuals who have no problem taking a life if it means saving their own skin. Plenty of people bit the dust over the course of the last eight episodes, but for the finale, there was a death that genuinely hit people hard. 

Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell), despite being a solid ally to Homelander (Antony Starr) for so long, met his end at the hands of his former friend. Homelander decided it was for the best to take out the mysterious vigilante after discovering that he knew all along that Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) was his true father. That meant he had to go, and by the end of the episode, it looked like another member of The Seven was also going to die, and now, showrunner Eric Kripke has explained why they decided to spare them.

Viewers had to say goodbye to Maeve (Dominique McElligott) in the Season 3 finale ... just not in the way they probably expected. We last see her in action taking Soldier Boy out of Vought Tower, where he explodes. The next we see of her, there's a news report about her death, but it doesn't take long until we see her alive and well. She managed to survive the blast, but she lost her powers in the process, so she's going off with Elena (Nicola Correia-Damude) to live the quiet life. 

It's a happy ending in a show that doesn't have very many of them. And according to Eric Kripke, they always planned on sending her off in such a manner. As he told TVLine, "We were intentionally building to a happy ending for her, always, for a lot of reasons. One, she deserved it. Believe it or not, 'The Boys' is a moral universe, and when you make the right choices, you get rewarded, and she deserved a happy ending with Elena." However, there was another reason why Kripke wanted to keep Maeve alive. 

There's a problematic trope in media called "Bury Your Gays," where LGBTQ+ characters typically die in TV shows and movies. This can be seen in such shows as "Arrow," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and "Killing Eve," to name a few. Kripke intentionally wanted to avoid falling into such a cliche with Maeve, a bisexual character, as he goes on to say, "I'm aware of it, [and] I agree with the criticism of it. I'm not going to do that as well." The titular Boys may still want to go after Homelander, but at least Maeve can rest easy for the time being, which she so richly deserves.