I also inexplicably subjected myself to the remainder of The Boys, I think I was just hoping for something as horrible and galling as Homelander’s 747 fuckup way back in season 1. Basically the only things this show had to offer for most of the run were Karl Urban chewing scenes and doing a face, the bizarrely hyper-realistic gore, and Antony Starr getting the occasional decent character moment. There was this brief little two-season span in the beginning where the actual horror element was this megacorp spinning every horrible massacre to pass legislation or pay a favor to a politician, and it all was “realistic” enough to be galling without feeling forced.
Then, yeah, the show became very popular, so they stretched this into a five-season trudge with truly nothing to do or say, so stories would just circle around aimlessly, nothing going anywhere, people acting out of character to just move shit in a random direction. Really reminded me of Star Trek Discovery and the like, where they had one story idea and then replaced it with nothing when that exhausted.
Thoughts on The Boys
It’s pretty clear this thing had one and a half seasons worth of story. The comic book is such unsalvagable dogshit that they had to jettison most of the ideas from that early on, so, now it was this Amazon-written thing that briefly refocused on the corp.
It was then simply slop, where no episode was about anything, and the seasons did not have like “arcs” or anything, shit just happened. The bad guys became cartoonishly and implausibly evil, when there was zero reason to not just make them act like regular amoral corpos or billionaires. They would name-drop the manosphere or brain-cooking talking point cycles but never show it. Why was there so much made of the V formula and serums? Why was so much time spent on the anti-supe virus? Why was Homelander’s son a thing? Why did Butcher’s tentacles have a mind of their own but only for season 4? Why was Stan Edgar in the show? Why did Black Noir die and get replaced by that strangely superpowered actor?
What was the point to the Supernatural guy’s character, Soldier Boy, being here at all? He clearly was hired on because of the frothing fandom around Jensen Ackles and they had to keep inventing random reasons to keep him on the show. Anything that might’ve been a source of some good drama - like he and Homelander both being involved with the same actual-from-WW2-Nazi woman - were thrown out the window because it would’ve been too hard to keep the audience from thinking him irredeemable (note: the character literally murdered MM’s father, which his his reason for joining The Boys, and he forgets about this). How can one of the most profitable headliner shows by one of the richest companies on the planet not be able to hire some writers for this?
At that point, the draw of the show is the violence and the comedy. The comedy is insultingly Scary Movie shitty, and the gore just happens randomly without any reason, so neither of those are a draw any more. I think I could’ve stuck with it if we were treated to some horrible disaster every few eps but they were so arbitrary with the deaths that it was impossible to care. They would often imply that Homelander was about to level a city or something similarly nightmarish but they never had the courage to do that. Instead it was like… I was stunned to see that they evoked “I can’t breathe” and “Say her name” as a fucking meme joke for The Deep in the final few eps, probably the most genuinely offensive thing the show ever did, and they snuck it in the final three eps of the show. That was where you guys took a chance? To try to trivialize BLM as a Jimmy Kimmel-ass way to score a point against Trump? Fuck off!
Deep down I think there’s just a desire to have something like an X-Men show, like Legion or Umbrella Academy, going on where we get to see a semi-realistic world with superpowered people and see how that world changes if, say, you could teleport or go through time. And there’s nuggets here and there! I think the whole Stormfront story was kinda good, because it had Homelander being manipulated through his ego by a Third Reich woman who had been graciously brought into the U.S. after WW2 for the promise of the formula, the government’s greed came home to roost in a pretty satisfying way. I also liked the brief bit where Homelander went back to the facility that had created him and put him through torturous stress testing and killed off the staff in horrible ways, because, well, everyone involved was awful and deserved it, so it was a pretty enjoyable nightmare. I can’t really think of anything else they did that was worth a fat slap at the end of the day though.
It will never stop being the height of absurdity that the titular Boys did not have anything to do in their show, The Boys. They kill the invisible guy member of the Seven in season 1, and then genuinely never actually kill another one until Butcher kills Homelander in the finale. The fucking premise of this show is that this group of onerous Normals are killing off a Justice League-like world-famous superhero team, and they literally do not ever do that for five seasons. It’s a little bit like Star Trek Discovery never actually going to a planet and doing Star Trek shit.
Shows that feel like they are made by AI.
