You have to hand it to “The Boys.” Production on Season 4 of Amazon’s action satire wrapped over a year ago, with its release delayed by subsequent strikes in the entertainment industry. (Season 3 aired a full two years ago, in the summer of 2022.) The premiere still manages to be almost eerily timely, with characters breathlessly awaiting the trial verdict in Manhattan, hyped up, against a polarizing political figure. Certainly, the character in question is Homelander (Antony Starr), the psychopathic Captain America type who serves as the arch-villain of the series, and not a certain former – and perhaps future – president. But the subject of the trial is a clear allusion to the famous Trumpism. When Homelander lasered a protester who had thrown a plastic bottle at his son, he essentially shot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue. And in the ever-cynical world of “The Boys,” Homelander loses as much support as his real-life inspiration.
Developed by showrunner Eric Kripke from the eponymous comics by Garth Ennis, “The Boys” has always been a political allegory. (It also takes jabs at popular culture, the military-industrial complex, and capitalism as a whole, a ridiculously broad mandate to match the reach of the sprawling conglomerate Vought International.) Since the introduction of Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) , an explosive superhero. who presents herself as a progressive congresswoman trying to regulate Vought, this aspect of the series has only become more important. But Season 4 marks the most central that this parallel version of the US government has ever been to the main story, with all eight episodes taking place between the election of anti-‘supe’ presidential candidate Robert Singer (Jim Beaver). and certification of the vote on — get ready. yourself – January 6. Unsurprisingly, this makes the season the darkest installment of “The Boys,” which already includes enough gore to make “Game of Thrones” feel like “My Little Pony.”
This bleakness already makes Season 4 a tough watch, but “The Boys” needs to balance its tone with some significant challenges in its storytelling. One of them incorporates the events of the spinoff “Gen V,” an excellent coming-of-age drama that must now leave its college campus and merge into the mothership. The other is the worldbuilding required by a story driven by mass movements and shifts of power. “The Boys” has an iron grip on its views, a caustic cynicism directed generally rightward toward big business, fear-mongering fascists, entertainment as propaganda and truth-resistant bigotry. But as the stakes rise and the franchise’s expansion continues, “The Boys” has less and less control over these new aspects of its growing mission.
Singer’s victory, with Neuman as vice president-elect, intersects with other developments in the series’ main narrative. After administering the experimental drug Temp V, a short-term version of the proprietary chemical Compound V that Vought uses to create its heroes, exiled anti-supe team leader Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) no longer has only a few months to live. This prognosis gives Butcher a despair made possible only by the appearance of a mysterious new ally (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who is even more militant than he is for the cause. Homelander has taken custody of Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), his now-teenage son conceived following the rape of Butcher’s late wife, and hired two dangerous new lieutenants: Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a real-life QAnon guy with an InfoWars style . podcast and Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), whose superintelligence threatens to balance Homelander’s impulsive megalomania. Meanwhile, Starlight (Erin Moriarty) left the Avengers group, The Seven, and spoke out publicly against Vought, drawing the ire of Firecracker and his frenzied fans.
These varied threads, which don’t even include various members of the namesake team struggling with guilt over their traumatic past, already make the season less focused than its immediate predecessor, which centered on antagonist Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). Then, about halfway through, Butcher abruptly announces the existence of the anti-supe virus that drove the “Gen V” plot – a revolutionary, game-changing development relegated to a dumping ground of sudden exposure. The “Gen V” characters also cross over with little introduction, an infusion of lore disorienting in its own right and difficult to balance with cracks on the seemingly endless, interconnected phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With its own extra-textual context, “The Boys” is no longer in such a privileged position to strike.
The introduction of the virus ties into larger issues related to communicating the larger impact of major changes in the world of the series. Some of Compound V’s statuses have always seemed a bit vague: some supers can be killed by natural means, while others cannot; some supers pass their abilities on to their children, others don’t. By putting humor and momentum at the forefront, this trend barely showed itself. After all, “The Boys” comes from comics, a medium that rarely values continuity. But with politics at the forefront, this vagueness becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. Homelander’s acquittal contrasts with the election of a liberal, anti-removal president. Starlight’s condemnation of Vought is strangely light on specific accusations and appears to have little impact. Years after the public learned that superheroes were made via Compound V, superheroes are still discussed as if they are inherently different from ordinary people and not an injection away. (“Generation V” was stronger on this, but that particular theme didn’t survive the transplant.) It’s difficult not want more details about the political dynamics with Neuman a heartbeat – or rather a headshot – away from the Oval Office, but “The Boys” is generally too busy with subplots and spectacular action to fill us in on that.
Without such specificity about its own universe, “The Boys” on the contrary comes ever closer to ours. Characters like Elizabeth Warren and AOC exist canonically in “The Boys,” and instead of inventing outrageous positions for its fictional conservatives, the writers simply insert familiar positions like “Jewish space lasers” and “legitimate rape.” The tactic is quite effective, showing how seamlessly the Washington circus blends into a landscape where Aquaman’s analogue is having sex with an octopus. It also amplifies the existential fear of America descending into potential autocracy, only on Amazon Prime instead of CNN.
“The Boys” balances that gut-wrenching sensation with his usual flair for lewd, crude comedy and his ear for silly corporate messages. Amazon itself gets a boost when a bloody fight turns into a “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”-themed bat mitzvah; an initiative to promote diversity within the Seven is dubbed “Black At It”. But while the series began primarily as a parody of an oppressively dominated superhero franchise, it became an indictment of a series of overlapping systems and the harmful ideology that underlies them . Season 4 begins to show the strain of this effort, both on the viewer’s tolerance for despair and on the series itself.
The first three episodes of “The Boys” Season 4 will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday, June 13, with the remaining episodes airing weekly on Thursdays.