NO longer a litmus test for the audience on their media literacy, the recently concluded fourth season of The Boys sheds its previous seasons’ subtlety in tackling its political, media and corporate satire, resulting in the lines being blurred between fiction and non-fiction.
After the events in the last season and the spinoff series Gen V, as Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) closes in on becoming the US vice president, the Central Intelligence Agency initiates a plan to have her assassinated by using The Boys, now led by MM (Laz Alonso).
Within the same periphery, the increasingly unhinged Homelander (Antony Starr) begins manoeuvring to control Neuman in his grand plan to overthrow the US government and install himself and his superhero team The Seven to lead the country. In order to do so, he recruits Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), whose superpower makes her “the smartest person on the planet”.
Now slowly dying due to his abuse of the Temp V drug in the previous season, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) has become desperate in his personal mission to kill Homelander. With only months left to live, he attempts to find a way to use something he found from Gen V – a virus capable of killing superpowered individuals.
The other audacious pit-stops in the story merely serve to broaden these three core plotlines.
Good when it is not being bad
Pumping on all cylinders, the fourth season is strong and confident in how it presents its story, spoofing a lot of contemporary America throughout the eight episodes. The choice to write and release the season with the 2024 US election season in mind was a stroke of genius.
The addition of Firecracker (Valorie Curry) as an alt-right superhero who hosts an extreme conservative talk show full of propaganda and conspiracy theories was good as expected and this extends to Sage, who brings a dynamic of intelligence to the show’s bad guys that was not present since Homelander started losing his mind in the second season. Her presence keeps him in check and has the audience always trying to figure out her ultimate plan.
After the massive blunder in the third season’s finale involving Annie January (Erin Moriarty), the writers have given her a lot of great moments this season such as fighting The Deep (Chace Crawford) and Firecracker after she infringes on January’s female bodily autonomy to score points with her conservative fans.
Starr proves himself to be an imposing presence on The Boys and television, in general, as Homelander’s descent into vacuous psychopathy has allowed him to excavate deeper into his talent to deliver a delirious Emmy Awards-worthy performance.
Butcher’s story is equally great, especially as it introduces Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a brand new role as Joe Kessler. Urban continues to shine on equal, show-stealing footing as Starr and the scenes he shares with Morgan are fantastic.
Though the final 30 minutes of the season finale somewhat saves the entire fourth season, there are grave misfires in between the good parts, particularly questionable choices made by the writers involving sexual abuse.
Callous handling of delicate subject
In the sixth episode Dirty Business, The Boys infiltrate Tek Knight’s (Derek Wilson) mansion in order to uncover Homelander’s coup d’etat plan. A parody of Bruce Wayne (Batman), Knight is a billionaire racist and pervert and in this episode, he sexually assaults a male member of The Boys in his sex dungeon parody of the Batcave.
The character is traumatised but in the very next episode, he show no signs of distress, seemingly cured overnight. At the end of this same episode, this character engages in “carnal relationship” with another member of The Boys, who in a plot twist a few minutes later is revealed to be a shape-shifting superhero in disguise. That is essentially rape.
In the span of two episodes, a main character is sexually assaulted and then raped, with the writers using both as a joke with no long-term ramifications, especially the entire sequence with Knight, which is played off for laughs at the expense of the character’s anguish.
Other than the callous handling of a delicate subject, The Boys has always had adult humour but Dirty Business demonstrates a bigger problem with the show: the writers and showrunner Eric Kripke are spending too much time on unnecessary elements that detract from the core story.
Case in point, this season introduces a random new love interest for Frenchie (Tomer Capone) to separate him from Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara). Several episodes are dedicated to this relationship before it ultimately goes nowhere and in the final episode, Frenchie and Kimiko end up together again. The writers have seemingly wasted time that would be better spent tightening the story or developing existing characters.
The end of this season will lead into the second season of Gen V, which will in turn lead to The Boys’ fifth and final season. The two to three year gap in production should be spent fixing the problems this season had as The Boys has all the talent and promise to end its five-season run as one of the greatest TV shows of all time.
The fourth season of The Boys is available to stream on Prime Video.
