6 hours ago
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The Boys is back in town, for its fifth and final season. There’s too much to recap in full for those who have not yet had the pleasure of the satirical superhero show created by Eric Kripke from the comic books written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or who have not yet been horrified by the gory splatterfest (courtesy of all kinds of body fluids) of the preceding 32 episodes, which have seen orifices and appendages put to extraordinary use, and some of which have rightly entered what we will very carefully spell as the annals of TV history.
So, let’s just say that the new season finds us set for a showdown between an increasingly power-mad (“Have you seen the memes about me? Posting them should be a crime”) – or, as the voices of angels start speaking to him, possibly just mad – Homelander (Antony Starr) and the Butcher crew. The former is now overlord of the US, with the president and, apparently, Sage (Susan Heyward) at his beck and call. But the gang has just succeeded in screening – in front of a Maga … I mean, Homelander-loving … rally – the long-buried footage of him leaving the passengers on Flight 37 (as he did all the way back in season one when he was just a little baby villain) to die.
Fortunately, all it needs is a few loud claims from Fox Ne … I mean, Firecracker … on her show Infowars … I mean, The Truthbomb … and assorted other friendly media outlets (which is to say at this point, all of them) to claim it’s AI-generated propaganda by the Democrat party … I’m sorry, I mean the Starlighters … and that little problem goes away.
The bigger problem of how to bring him down and restore order to the US remains. That means getting the non-incarcerated half of Butcher’s crew (Billy himself, Starlight, Kimiko and ideally A-Train – played by Karl Urban, Erin Moriarty, Karen Fukuhara and Jessie T Usher respectively) back together to bust the incarcerated half of Butcher’s crew – Hughie, Frenchie, Mother’s Milk (Jack Quaid, Tomer Capone, Laz Alonso) – out of one of the regime’s Freedom Camps (“The Freedom to be Free!”). That done, the season-long endeavour to produce enough of the supe-killing virus to take out Homelander – plus however many noble-sacrificial supes are around him at the time – and get it into his well-protected system begins.
To the devoted fan, the first couple of episodes, even allowing for the need for more exposition than usual to make sure we’re all up to speed, feel a little – just a little – tired. A bit rote, a bit going-through-the-motions-y. Plenty of gore, plenty of fights, a few nice moments. (Kimiko has her voice back! But she and Frenchie slip in and out of talking and signing still and it is sweet and lovely. This can only mean bad things for them in The Boys, but not all episodes were available for review so I can live in hope, and maybe offer up a prayer to the “divinely rebranded” Democratic Church of America that they are allowed to survive.) There are also some not-nice moments, some good lines, much bum- and dick-based humour – all is present and correct. But there are none of the flashes of invention or inspiration that make and have made The Boys great.
However, the action comes at you so thick and fast thereafter that it’s easier to overlook the deficiency. Just about everybody returns to the fray, from Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles, whose solid magnetism is a perfect complement to the mercurial charisma of Starr, with whom he shares most of his scenes) to Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), to human members of some of the supes’ long-lost or estranged families. And The Deep (Chace Crawford, still blowing the minds of anyone who ever saw him in Gossip Girl and wondered about the entertainment industry’s recruitment policies) is back on fine form, dabbling in “incel culture”, reading with a confused frown about vaccinations, and proselytising for perineal sunbathing.
And it manages its usual fine balance between satire and story. The parallels with modern America are plentiful and terrifying, as the self-loving, self-pitying, self-deluding Homelander (“Was I too nurturing?”) gives increasing powers to his guys, encourages the rounding-up of the rest and becomes ever more convinced of his own righteousness, unhinged in his actions and beliefs, aided at every turn by cowards and by those more intelligent than him who are pursuing their own agendas.
Will it end in the return to truth, justice and the old American way? I don’t know. There are some truly brutal scenes along the way. But this is fiction, so we can hold out hope.
