“The Boys” satirizes not just its caped peers but also the society that consumes them, staying audaciously topical at a time when the superhero genre teeters on the verge of self-parody.

Now that superhero weariness seems to have set in permanently, the year has been pretty empty of comic book movies. Even while repetitive stories and decreasing returns continue to plague the genre, Prime Video’s fourth season of The Boys provides a sharp contrast to banal supe storytelling, continuing to disgust and disturb with unapologetic zeal.

After creating a super-saturated universe with its first three seasons and a spinoff at Godolkin University the previous year, Season 4 dives headfirst into the decaying depths of its protagonists’ psyches using a slower, more reflective pace. 

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The Boys (English)

Creator: Eric Kripke

Cast: Anthony Starr, Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Karen Fukuhara, Erin Moriarty

Episodes: 3 of 8

Runtime: 1 hour

Storyline: Billy Butcher has just a few months to live, so he must figure out how to collaborate with The Boys in order to save the world, and Homelander has Victoria Neuman closer to the Oval Office than ever.

Still portrayed with alarming abandon by Antony Starr, Homelander is experiencing an existential crisis as he examines a solitary golden pubic hair with dismay. Starr’s portrayal perfectly portrays the sense of a god struggling with his own mortality—his frenzied bouts interspersed with spooky quiet—imagine Squidward crippled by Tentacle Acres’ monotony.

Homelander appears to be both self-assured and extremely uneasy about the sycophancy surrounding him, having more unbridled power than ever before. This contradiction is exemplified by his compulsive drive to dominate everyone and everything in his immediate vicinity, including his own kid, in an effort to create a legacy that will outlive his own waning dominance. One of the scariest villains on television gains an intriguing new dimension with this obsession with his legacy and looming mortality, which heightens the menacingness of his spiral into lunacy.

Newcomers to the Seven, such as Valerie Curry’s Firecracker and Susan Heyward’s Sister Sage, bring a lethal spice to the already formidable combination. Known as the smartest person on the planet, Sister Sage turns into a cunning participant in Homelander’s schemes, while Firecracker, an alt-right conspiracy theorist, seems like a figure lifted from out of the pages of today’s newspapers and stretched to ludicrous proportions.

The boys are doing really well. A more complex subplot for Frenchie (Tomer Capone) involves navigating a complex relationship, while Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) concludes that killing her history is the only way to accept it. Jack Quaid plays Hughie, while Laz Alonso plays Mother’s Milk. Meanwhile, Butcher (Karl Urban), driven by a fatal diagnosis, exhibits unexpected depth as he strikes a balance between his reluctance to be a father and his deadly retribution. These segments offer a rough emotional backbone that keeps the season grounded among its most recent round of absurd antics, even though they feel more filler than normal.

The Boys, holding up a cracked mirror to the current political situation in America, continue to wield satire with gut-busting (quite literally) abandon, with an election year setting for an election year release. Homelander’s orange panties and populist rhetoric are a not-so-subtle allusion to a recently convicted tangerine tyrant, channeling the narcissism of authoritarian bullies in power. Corporate misbehavior is turned into a perverse art form by Vought International, the show’s vast, corrupt conglomerate that parodies the pernicious influence of big business in politics. The series delivers a stinging commentary on the precarious status of democracy and the pernicious nature of power in the twenty-first century with startling truth by amplifying these features to grotesque extremes.

Of all, The Boys wouldn’t be The Boys without their trademark depravity and hyperviolence. Thus far, we’ve enjoyed seeing a few routine Homelander laserings, a few faces being completely destroyed, and some auto-erotic Human Centipede behavior. Oh, and The Deep and the octopus are still at it.

The show maintains its sarcastic sense of optimism even in the face of its sharp remarks that poke fun at the limits of human nature and societal deterioration. The Boys appears to stand boldly erect, its blood-soaked cape flying in the breeze, all while making us laugh, grimace, and wince at the silliness of its own devilish existence, in contrast to the moral didacticisms of superhero series that are either imploding or stagnating.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi0YW9MoQ7w