The Boys’ Less-Than-Diabolical Final Season

The last time that I talked about The Boys was a review for the first three episodes of Season Four, where I gave some reluctant praise for the show’s character work and dramatic tension. While I still believe that season had a strong start, I feel like things quickly deteriorated as it progressed. None of the characters seemed to have consistent motivations (Ryan seemed to change his mind about Homelander every five minutes), and the way the writers treated Hughie getting sexually assaulted felt particularly disgusting. Still, I tuned in to the final season with the same sort of morbid curiosity that I’d previously brought to the show as a whole. After all, the way that they were going to wrap things up after that cliffhanger had to at least be interesting, right?

I liked “Fifteen Inches of Pure Dynamite” and “Teenage Kix”, the first two episodes that dropped alongside each other. It was admittedly disappointing to see Butcher accepted back by the rest of the Boys after he ripped a woman in half with his cancer tentacles, but I thought the decision to kill A-Train and Soldier Boy in those initial episodes was a bold way to raise the stakes and– Oh, wait, what’s that? Soldier Boy was revealed to have survived the virus at the end of the second episode? 

Yeah, not only did Soldier Boy not die, but in the coming weeks it became more and more apparent that he was hijacking the final season to set up his spin-off show in the newly-christened “VCU” (sigh) which focuses on his romance with that Nazi from Season Two (sigh). The show quickly loses almost all interest in the titular Boys and becomes everything that it once lampooned to advertise the upcoming Vought Rising. Soldier Boy and Homelander’s relationship becomes the primary focus, even though the way that they feel about each other differs radically from one episode to the next. To add insult to injury, Soldier Boy goes back on ice right before the finale and all the narrative bullshit that was tied to him doesn’t end up mattering much. See, the majority of the season is about finding V1, a special type of Compound V that makes supes immune to the supe-killing virus that the Boys have. Oh, and it also prevents aging, which the show awkwardly tries to use to explain away the inconsistency of Soldier Boy not aging while his son had a whole subplot about his gray pubes last season. Anyways, Homelander ends up getting the V1, and it’s kind of astonishing how little consequence there is to this. Homelander doesn’t seem to be remarkably more threatening now that he’s immune to the virus because the Boys pretty easily pivot to a new plan that doesn’t involve the pathogen at all: irradiating Kimiko so that she can depower supes like Soldier Boy can.

It just raises the question… couldn’t they have started with that plan? Couldn’t the time that was wasted on the virus and the super serum from the prequel series (coming soon to Amazon Prime) have been used to flesh out the characters in more interesting ways? Like, Hughie and Annie’s relationship is really put on the backburner here, except whenever the show comes up with the type of bullshit disagreement that they honestly shouldn’t still be having at this point.

Come to think of it, none of the characters feel like themselves this season, and every attempt on the writers’ behalf to make that feel like a deliberate choice falls flat because the status quo for the Boys is the same way that it’s always been. MM behaves completely out of character just so that everyone around him can comment on how he’s behaving out of character. Kimiko talks now, and at first I thought that would be a fun change because Karen Fukuhara is really funny in interviews. Unfortunately, all she can really talk about is dicks, and it just feels infantilizing that she’s not able to express a wider range of emotions. Frenchie continues to be the most boring member of the group, and his case isn’t helped now that I know his actor is a war criminal.

And Butcher… Man, all that talk of going “scorched earth” really didn’t amount to anything, did it? The show is so afraid of committing to him being a monster that it’s bafflingly abrupt when the series finale pulls a fight to the death between him and Hughie out of its ass. It’s a scene that would make sense if Butcher followed the trajectory that the Season Four finale put him on, but he’s spent the last few episodes hanging with the Boys like nothing fucking happened. The show acts like Butcher dying is something it’s obliged to do because the comics did it, but it just doesn’t work for the version of this character who has been repeatedly dragged back into a more sympathetic light across five seasons.

But I guess if they focused on Butcher’s descent into psychopathy we wouldn’t have time for a whole episode about a plant guy that Soldier Boy used to know and Annie’s dad, who teaches us that not all cops are bad.

That last bit reminds me of how frustrating this show’s politics are. In doubling down on portraying Homelander as a sort of surface-level Donald Trump parody, the show becomes more and more incapable of saying anything coherent about fascism in America. Kripke lucked out with Homelander’s season-long plan to rebrand himself as God lining up with Trump’s recent AI Jesus bullshit, but there’s a smug oversimplification to everything that makes the show feel a lot less satisfying. The world feels smaller and shallower, and the corporate monolith of Vought has been replaced with one evil guy and his close followers that the Boys have to take out. The show plays with the idea of capitalism being the deeper evil beneath it all in Giancarlo Esposito’s scarce couple of scenes, but it hardly has any interest in exploring that. As a result, the satire has shifted away from things like the military-industrial complex and police brutality in favor of… Nicole Kidman’s AMC intro and Madame Web. To be fair they do make the Deep a manosphere influencer, but honestly his bullshit this season feels so disconnected from the rest of the show. It did give us a shark voiced by Samuel L. Jackson though, so I can’t pretend it’s all bad.

What is bad is the way the series handles Sage.  I have sympathy for anyone tasked with writing a character who’s supposed to be “the smartest person in the world”, and I get that all that stuff about her wanting to live in a bunker and not being able to predict that Soldier Boy would give Homelander the V1 was part of her working to a larger goal (at least, I hope so; it’s not clear that was on purpose). But the thing is… I feel like having the endgame for the only black woman in the main cast be “she becomes stupid” is a baffling choice. What the fuck were they thinking with that one? Also, having her team up with the Boys isn’t nearly as interesting as her previous dynamic with Homelander. That was such a fascinating look at how the pursuit of power and status leads people to ally themselves with those they’re ideologically opposed to, but I guess the writers just needed her to be a good guy this time around. Maybe they just kind of forgot about her encouraging Homelander to build internment camps when they chose to give her a happy ending.

I don’t think I ever expected Marie Moreau– the star of The Boys’ first spin-off series, Gen V – to be the one to kill Homelander on account of this not being her show, but I kind of expected that Kripke would have something planned for her. Instead, she gets told to go on a sidequest off-screen. What do you mean she’s not as powerful as you hyped her up to be? Couldn’t she at least help fight someone? Also, why should I care about the upcoming spin-off if its own showrunners clearly don’t give a shit about the last one they did?

The final season certainly wasn’t helped by all those advertisements featuring scenes of apocalyptic destruction that– even with Daddy Bezos’ money– they were never going to be able to afford. But even if you ignore the marketing team showing us a finale that doesn’t exist, this season still feels significantly cheaper than the others. There’s a bit where Homelander and Soldier Boy walk to a location and talk about how they didn’t fly there, and it just feels weird that they’d draw attention to how much less Homelander does anything that requires VFX like that. It gets you thinking about how he doesn’t end up massacring crowds like you expected him to do now that he’s lost the last of his humanity. They were able to show that sort of carnage in one of Homelander’s fantasies back in Season Two, but now that things are supposed to be more dangerous than ever? Nothing.

I’m disappointed that The Boys went out like this, but I’m not surprised by it. Season Four is really where it became clear that they were running out of ways to keep things fresh, and to create the illusion of change they just had characters be really inconsistent from one episode to the next. But the problem with that approach becomes clearer than ever as most of the characters refuse to take their final form before the big conclusion. It feels like we have less of an idea who these people are than we did when we first met them, and without its characters, what does this show have? Unfunny dick and balls jokes?

I don’t know, maybe it’s my fault for searching for more in a show where discount Aquaman kills a guy by sending an eel up his ass while he’s on the toilet. Still, I can’t help but think that maybe this show used to be about something.