The Boys season 5 episode 6 brings Jensen Ackles back as Soldier Boy in an episode that also reunites him with former Supernatural co-stars Jared Padalecki and Misha Collins. In this week’s installment, titled One-Shots, Soldier Boy and Homelander visit Marathon Man to get some V1, the substance Homelander wants so he can become immortal.
Padalecki appears in the episode as Marathon Man, while Collins shows up as Malchemical. The reunion lands just as the series moves toward its May 20 finale, giving the episode a burst of nostalgia without slowing the plot down.
That plot is still the show’s dark engine. Billy Butcher is planning to wipe out all Supes with a deadly virus, while Soldier Boy and Homelander are chasing a different kind of power at Marathon Man’s mega-mansion poker game. The episode also includes Seth Rogen, Kumail Nanjiani, Will Forte and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as heightened versions of themselves, pushing the satire further even as the stakes turn more lethal.
Ackles said working with Padalecki and Collins again took only a “minor mental adjustment” because the three had already spent 15 years together on Supernatural between 2005 and 2020. He said it felt familiar to get on set with them, but different enough because they were in a new environment with different costumes, crew and cast. As he put it, they were “already pretty used to playing different versions of different characters with each other for a long time,” and when the cameras were off, it was “right back to the old banter.”
The larger twist is that the reunion is not a reset button. Padalecki and Collins are not playing their Supernatural characters, and Ackles said that was part of the appeal: the show stripped away the modern-day version of Soldier Boy and pushed deeper into who he was before “a lot of the shit had happened.” Ackles said viewers will still see the modern-day Soldier Boy, but they will also get a clearer sense of why some parts of his personality hardened over time.
That matters because Ackles is not done with the character after The Boys. He will reprise Soldier Boy in the upcoming prequel Vought Rising, which is due on Prime Video in 2027. For now, though, One-Shots gives the franchise a reunion that feels both playful and consequential: three actors who spent 15 years trading lines together are back in the same orbit, but this time the family resemblance is masked by new names, new costumes and a far uglier mission.