Ah ha! I was gone for a week, and I bet you thought “well, we got quite the run there for a little while…”. Well, I’m back baby! Last weekend I simply had nothing worthy to say. Unless you wanted a 1200-1500 word screed on the entirety of Billions. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? 

Once I’d completed watching the run of that rather well-done drama, it was time to dig into some shows who had their next season drop whilst I was occupied elsewhere. Top on that list? Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Wildstorm/Dynamite’s “The Boys”. With the penultimate season’s whopping eight whole episodes available, I let the blood and foul language bring me back to the fold. 

If I’m allowed to be a bit cranky? With two years in between seasons, all the nuance of the previous seasons has long been forgotten, and it forces me each time I start up a show again, having to ask myself: do I want to go back to remember all the details, or can I allow the show to just bring me back to speed? Well, call me impatient, as this time around I just hit play. As I recall, season three is the (spoiler alerts now, duh) “Soldier Boy comes back, everyone tries to kill Homelander, it doesn’t work, Billy Butcher is fake-mean to Ryan” season. Any and all other plots have long been forgotten. Save only that Victoria “head popper” Neuman was secretly evil-or-maybe-not, and that everyone was kinda in the dumps.

And that brings us right back in! Season 4 of The Boys can be summed up pretty easily: sad. Everyone is sad. Starlight / Annie is sad because she now leads an Antifa-esque group called the Starlighters and feels shame for her past. Hughie is sad because his father (played by the always awesome Simon Pegg) is hospitalized after a massive stroke. MM is sad because he’s leading the team and clearly doesn’t want to. Frenchie is sad because he’s always sad — but this time he’s sad because he’s allowed himself now to feel remorse for previously being a drug-addled murderer. Kimiko is sad because Frenchie is sad, and she’s still dealing with her personal trauma as a childhood super soldier, kidnapper, and murderer. Butcher is sad because he took too much temporary Compound V and is now terminally ill with a CGI worm wriggling around his head. Homelander is sad because he’s still essentially an invulnerable god-like being now surrounded by only sycophants and betas. Oh and he has Ryan, but Ryan and Homelander are both pretty sad they have each other. I’m sure I’m missing some other folks, but trust me: they’re sad too.

Eight episodes see the titular team of mopey muggles attempting still to navigate ways to end Homelander — amidst a presidential election, and rising tension between the Starlighters and Homelanders. The ham-fisted metaphors here are palpable, as “Homelanders” are all red-white-and-blue conspiracy nutjobs, and the Starlighters all seem to emanate from cruelty-free coffee bars and used record stores. But they are both merely ciphers for the season… existing solely to drive a few plots into the ground, and get out of the way when it’s evident Amazon spent its budget on CGI, and not extras. 

In between super hero sad-sacks being sociopaths, and humdrum humans being heavy-hearted, the plot lurches forward. As per previous seasons, when things get too maudlin, the writers crank up the violence to distract and delay. Throughout the season, we’re treated to ice capades laden with blood, a conspiracy convention fracas, a farm of V-addled murder animals, and some disgusting pre-rape and bdsm in the Bat-cave (not really, but, c’mon). In nearly all these cases, one thought continuously ran through my mind: The Boys are the luckiest humans alive. They escape death and decapitation week to week, when it’s been shown several hundred times how overpowered every V-powered supe actually is. It becomes increasingly evident the writers are perpetually backed into corners when every superhero is automatically bulletproof, and effectively impossible to hurt unless the plot demands it. 

If there were bright spots — and yes there were — they come few and far between. Simon Pegg’s arc showcases the actor’s absolutely amazing chops, bringing his Hugh Sr.’s dad aura to center stage. Any hint of the actor’s comedic timing is absolutely nowhere to be found… leaving us someone whose love of The Davinci Code becomes a heartfelt note. Karl Urban eats the scenery in every scene he’s in. His arc this season comes part-in-parcel with a Fight Club-esque series of hallucinations that Urban plays pitch perfectly. Combined with a drop in by actor Jeffery Dean Morgan (playing Butcher’s former teammate Joe Kessler), and some surprise superpowered antics I’ll choose not to get into this time around, everything Butcher continues to matter in the series. 

The last bright spot of the season is the addition of Sister Sage. As played by Susan Heyward, the smartest person alive is recruited by Homelander to help chug the engine of the season forward. Tasked with helping the super-dolt wield the political power he now desires (because why not), she helps craft the season-long arc with the best deux-ex-machina power a writer’s room could ever offer. And while I personally frown on using her power to lazily craft the season… I can’t help but laugh at the character’s personal weakness. Versus every other supe on the show succumbing specifically to sexual debauchery, Sage routinely lobotomizes herself so she can enjoy snacks, trashy TV, and some mostly vanilla sex. Kudos. 

There’s an elephant in the room though. A pair of plot points so disgustingly handled that it nearly derails the entirety of the show for me. Throughout the series (both on the page and show) Hughie is meant to be our POV character. Someone who was forced into this world through a series of unfortunate choices, who finds his true self amidst the craziness of superheroes, Compound V, dating Starlighter and more. Hughie, more than others, always feels fairly grounded. As played earnestly by Jack Quaid, Hughie more often than not is a great bellwether of when too much is too much for a show that doesn’t skate the line so much as tear the line into pieces, throw them up into the air, and laughs giddily into the night. And after a season to acclimate to the world of supes (1), find his place in the world (2), dabble a bit in temporary V and live to walk away (3), it would seem this time around we’d have time for him to really take that last step into adulthood — dealing with his father’s illness, and confronting Victoria Neuman for her betrayal after building their relationship in the previous season to see a more balanced world together.

So, after dealing with both of those issues by the middle of the season, I’d figured we’d not really have much more to do with Hughie as things wrapped up. And then we have the mission at Tek Knight’s mansion. No need to worry about backstory or circumstances. Just know (in case you didn’t watch and don’t care about spoilers), Huey, in an attempt to play “spy” winds up chained to a table, and made to be sexually humiliated, peed on, and likely several other things not specifically mentioned but implied heavily. And after he’s saved? We don’t get any real time to see him deal with the situation before he’s dropped into another situation — this time now sleeping with a shapeshifter who takes the form of Annie (Starlighter). After the shapeshifter is made, and eliminated, Huey and Annie briefly catch up. Huey admits to 20-or-so sexual encounters with the not-Starlighter in what must be only several days at most. Suddenly someone who has otherwise been one of the most observant characters on the show, drops that trait entirely at the prospect of his girlfriend suddenly becoming disgustingly promiscuous without any explanation. It was cheap, lazy, and played more for a laugh than the deeply hurtful act it was. Boo.

All in all, the series continues to get bleaker and bleaker. The jokes no longer hit. The violence remains cartoonish, but now is just expected there for the sake of shock. The sexual situations are always played for laughs, but I stopped laughing a while back. And as I said: the writer’s treatment of “supe vs. schmoe” reduces all fights to “I wonder who they want to kill”. It’s plainly obvious at this point the final season to come will need to choose to reverse course as hard as possible to attempt to crawl back to the satire it was originally built to be, or double down on the depression. In either case, it’s clear: Homelander will die. Likely at Ryan’s hand (er, eyes?). Butcher will either be given a deus ex machina cure, or kicks it in enough time to inspire Ryan’s turn. Every other hero will choose a side, and still die. Kimiko and Frenchie will re-fall for one another (and maybe die). And Hughie and Annie will screw happily ever after. 

Too bad the show screwed itself one time too many.