The Boys Season 5 Is Quietly Obsessed With Supernatural — and One Star Didn't Even Show Up
The Boys Season 5 features a full Supernatural reunion in Episode 5, but the show's real callback comes two episodes later when Jensen Ackles references the iconic '67 Impala — a vehicle that never appears on screen. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays John Winchester in Supernatural, is already embedded in the season as a different character entirely, but doesn't join the reunion.
Eric Kripke can't help himself. The man who spent 15 seasons building the Winchester mythology — Sam, Dean, and that '67 Chevrolet Impala that mattered more than most supporting characters — has been threading Supernatural DNA into The Boys since at least Season 2. Season 5, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, makes that habit impossible to miss anymore.
The callbacks aren't subtle. They're deliberate. They're crafted.
Episode 5's Poker Game Is the Obvious Reunion; Episode 7 Is Where It Gets Weird
Episode 5, "One-Shots," does the showy thing: it brings back Jared Padalecki and Misha Collins alongside Jensen Ackles for a poker game scene in Hollywood. All three actors played major roles in Supernatural (Padalecki as Sam Winchester, Collins as Castiel, Ackles as Dean). They're surrounded by other cameos — the scene is designed to be a spectacle, a "did you see who showed up?" moment that gets clipped and posted immediately.
Episode 7 is quieter. More unsettling.
Soldier Boy (Ackles' character) sits down with Homelander (Antony Starr) and tells him: "This was never gonna be a playing catch in the front lawn, fixing up the old Impala bulls**t. You're too weird."
That line does three things at once. It rejects fatherhood. It dismisses American mythology. And it references the single most iconic object from Ackles' entire previous career — a car that never appears in The Boys, not once, but gets name-checked anyway because the Impala is what Dean Winchester's relationship to his father meant.
Why the Impala Reference Matters More Than the Cameo
I keep thinking about the Season 11 Supernatural episode titled "Baby" — told entirely from the Impala's perspective — and how much weight that car carried for Ackles personally across 15 seasons. That wasn't accidental casting. That was mythology built brick by brick.
So when Soldier Boy rejects "fixing up the old Impala" in Episode 7, he's not just a character refusing fatherhood. He's Ackles, working with showrunner Kripke and director Phil Sgriccia (who produced Supernatural), using a specific reference to say: I know what that symbol means to you, and my character is choosing not to be that guy.
It's a small moment. But it lands differently than the poker game because it's personal. The reunion scene is fan service. The Impala line is craft. Most coverage has treated the Episode 5 poker game as the headline; the more interesting story is that Kripke buried his most emotionally loaded Supernatural reference two episodes deeper, in a scene most casual viewers won't even clock as a callback — which tells you he's writing for the long-haul fans first and the clip-farmers second.
Kripke's Been Doing This Since Season 2
The first Supernatural callback in The Boys appeared in Season 2's finale — an animated video of a '67 Chevrolet Impala running over Stormfront (Aya Cash) after her Nazi past gets exposed. Kripke and Sgriccia found that cartoon online and used it, which tells you something about how casually they've woven the old show into the new one.
Here's the layering: In Supernatural Season 12, Dean Winchester kills Adolf Hitler. Captain America — Soldier Boy's entire concept — is famous for punching Hitler. An Impala running over a Nazi connects all three threads. Kripke didn't put that together by accident.
The Boys has been running on Amazon Prime Video since 2019, and according to Movie OTT's where-to-watch database, the full back catalog is available globally. Supernatural ran for 15 seasons on The CW before ending in 2020 — 327 episodes total, making it the longest-running American live-action fantasy series in television history. Kripke created both shows. He's been remixing his own mythology in real time, and Season 5, which is the final season, is where he's stopped pretending it's coincidental.
The Jeffrey Dean Morgan Problem Nobody's Talking About
Here's what doesn't add up: Jeffrey Dean Morgan is already in The Boys Season 5. He plays Joe Kessler, a character with his own significant storyline. He's a Supernatural veteran — he was John Winchester, the father of Sam and Dean. And yet the Episode 5 reunion doesn't include him.
He's not in the poker game. He's not part of the "look who came back" moment. He's just... absent from the reunion his own show is getting.
Hard to say why. Scheduling conflict. Creative choice to keep Kessler's arc separate from the meta-commentary. Or — and this is my read — Kripke's saving something for the final episodes. The Impala reference feels like it's building toward something rather than wrapping it up. Morgan could still get his own moment before the finale.
Where to Actually Watch This (and When New Episodes Drop)
The Boys Season 5 streams exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, with new episodes releasing weekly. The season launched in 2026. It's the final season, so there's an endpoint — everything carries more weight knowing it's the last lap.
For viewers in India: Prime Video India has the full Season 5 with English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu subtitle options, plus Hindi-dubbed audio tracks if you prefer that. Movie OTT tracks availability across all major Indian platforms — Prime, Netflix, Hotstar, JioCinema, SonyLIV, Zee5 — so you can check where older seasons live if you need to catch up before jumping into Season 5.
The Boys has a solid Indian audience partly because Prime has had the show since Season 1 in 2019, and partly because the satire of American corporate power translates well across markets. The Supernatural reunion is more niche if you didn't grow up watching The CW, but the Episode 5 spectacle and the Ackles-Starr confrontation in Episode 7 work as pure drama regardless of whether you catch the Easter eggs.
What Kripke and Ackles Have Actually Said About This
Kripke's been open about the references. "I can't help myself," he told Den of Geek when discussing the Season 5 reunion, acknowledging that the Easter eggs are partly for his own amusement and partly a thank-you to the Supernatural fanbase that followed him to Prime Video.
Ackles has described Soldier Boy as a chance to play against type — genuinely unlikable, a war criminal wearing a hero's face. It's harder than it sounds. The Impala line works because it gives him a moment of complexity: Soldier Boy almost sounds human before he exits, and the specific reference makes it feel personal in a way a generic "fatherhood is hard" speech wouldn't.
What to Actually Watch For in the Final Episodes
Season 5 is the show's last lap, which means every callback carries real weight. The Impala reference feels like one piece of a larger farewell — Kripke closing a circle that started with two brothers on a Kansas highway in 2005.
The part I am most curious about is whether Morgan gets his own Supernatural-adjacent moment. Watch for whether the Homelander-Soldier Boy fallout gets a resolution that pays off the father-son mythology the show's been building since Season 3. And if you're a Supernatural fan who hasn't caught up with The Boys yet, the five seasons are worth the investment just to watch Kripke remix his own mythology in real time.
New episodes of The Boys Season 5 drop weekly on Amazon Prime Video. Check Movie OTT for current streaming availability in your region.
