The Boys - Series Review

Flashback to 2019 -- a young Bean, sophomore in College. In the heat of the Marvel Era, waiting on Endgame to release that summer, riding the high of Infinity War -- I couldn't have been more into the Superhero genre at that point. So when I came back to the Fraternity house on day and saw my roommate watching a new superhero show on Amazon Prime, obviously I was intrigued. But I'd soon find out this was nothing like the MCU movies I'd come to love -- but was rather a spin on the whole genre. This was, The Boys.

The Boys -- created by Eric Kripke (known for Supernatural), adapted from the comic series of the same name running from 2006-2012 -- is a show that takes what you would expect from Superhero media, and flips it on it's head. We're used to seeing heroes that use their powers for the good of the world and protect people from evil forces -- but what happens when those "heroes" abuse their power? What happens when the super-powered people aren't perfect -- or better yet, when the super-powered people are sociopathic, ego-maniacal, selfish, power-hungry criminals?

This is a show that presents the good, the bad, and the ugly of what super-powered individuals would look like in the real world -- not the idealistic world that the DCU and MCU present. While there is definitely a huge focus on the "Supes" of this world -- it's equal parts about the normal people. That's where The Boys come in -- the human characters who have been wronged by the Supes, and will do whatever it takes to bring them down.

Now before getting into specifics on the newest season, which concluded with it's finale last week, plus the early seasons, the characters themselves, etc -- I want to issue a SPOILER WARNING if you have not finished The Boys. I'll be talking about the best characters and performances, best seasons, best storylines, and everything in between -- so if you haven't finished yet, go knock it out and come back here when you do!

Season 5 -- Concluding the Series

Let's begin with the end -- since it's the freshest on all of our minds. There's been plenty of discourse about the final season of this show -- the most financially successful, and one of the longest running Amazon Prime Original Shows. As it's garnered more and more fans throughout it's run, it's only natural there's plenty of mixed feelings on how it wrapped things up in it's final season.

The Good

Looking at the final season incrementally -- episode by episode -- I think there was a lot of good in the 5th season. I look back at how the 5th season began, and I think those first 2-3 episodes were excellent TV. The internment camp escape -- especially that A-Train scene of him going full Quicksilver mode from X-Men -- was exhilarating. Everything with Frenchie, MM, and Hughie I really enjoyed, the MM and Butcher dynamic all season was interesting to me, a lot of the Soldier Boy/Homelander stuff worked, I shockingly found some of the Firecracker and Sage storylines working.

I was a big fan of the episode with Stan Edgar when they're hiding out in his bunker -- some of the best dialogue scenes of the season came from that one (of a show that is famously VERY inconsistent in writing dialogue). I found myself intrigued by the Firecracker stuff -- her internal struggle with what she believes and what she has to do for Homelander (not a character I've liked much, so was shocking). I think the penultimate episode for Frenchie specifically was great -- he's been a Top-3 character for me in this show, and I thought his final scenes were incredible.

My last major positive has to do with the finale -- which is that for 5 seasons and the better part of 7 years, this show's been building to one thing: Homelander vs Butcher. Scorched Earth. Blood and Bone. I don't necessarily think they delivered on the last 2 -- but they did on the first. I loved the fight scene in the oval office, and it was beyond satisfying to see Homelander finally lose his powers and absolutely crumble. And in typical The Boys fashion, they made him look so pathetic (and meme-able -- "I'll suck your fucking dick, I'll eat your shit!") and finally let Butcher get 5 seasons of fury out of his system in that beat-down. And I think Butcher's demise was well done as well -- he's in many ways the most important character in this show, and his arc concluded well for me.

The Bad

While I can look at the season incrementally and pull out a lot of good -- I think it's fair to say that, as a whole, this final season was pretty under-whelming.

I've seen it draw comparisons to Game of Thrones' final season -- which I think is an unfair comparison. For one -- The Boys never hit the highs that GOT did in it's run. But GOT Season 8 was an example of failing to conclude character arcs, choosing the wrong plot for a final season, AND concluding that plot they chose in an abysmal fashion.

With The Boys, I think they were at least successful in closing the book on some of its' biggest characters, and successful in concluding the story they told in Season 5 -- I just don't think they picked the right story for its' final season.

At some point in it's run -- The Boys went from being comic-adaptation to a full-blown political satire. It always had satirical elements in the early seasons -- but somewhere around Season 3/4, it stopped being satirical in a clever way. They just started beating you over the head with it. Which for me got tiresome pretty fast -- and I think the motivation to make the show politically charged came at the detriment of the show's plot. Season 5 is the most glaring example of this -- and that's not to say some of those elements weren't well done or effective, but it became all the show cared about.

My bigger issue with Season 5 is that for it's entire run, the show has been building up to Homelander going full "scorched Earth." The marketing of the 5th season teased this, and they've inched closer and closer to him fully losing his mind with every passing season. But rather than leaning into what they've built this final season toward, they instead pivoted to Homelander wanting to become God. They had left breadcrumbs for this plot, but they hadn't built up that story enough in the prior 4 seasons -- so they had to spend the entire 5th season building it up instead. Which is why this finale season is so unsatisfying: because instead of feeling like the culmination of 5 seasons, it feels like the culmination of one season.

I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a fan of The Boys that didn't want to see Homelander go nuts in this final season -- whether that came in the fashion of destroying major cities, killing thousands of innocents, slaughtering a big chunk of main characters, etc. The biggest things Homelander does in this final season are:

1.) Kill A-Train (great scene all-around, but he had the rest of The Boys dead to rights and chased A-Train down)

2.) Kill Firecracker (a newer character that I personally didn't care enough about to think it was major)

3.) Kill Frenchie (but we don't even see him deliver the killing blow on-screen, insane choice)

4.) Kill the President (a character none of us saw enough of to care about).

That's it -- half his worst moves are killing characters we don't care about. The Frenchie kill was clearly supposed to be their big plot-mover -- but that didn't move the needle enough for me, especially in the manner they handled it. You could include beating the shit out of Ryan early on, you can count putting Hughie/MM/Frenchie in the prison camps at the start -- but as a whole, I needed 10x more insane Homelander. The driving point of the show is that Homelander needs to be stopped because he's so evil -- make the guy do some truly heinous shit on a large scale.

Another qualm I have with the 5th season is just the pacing of it all -- which kind of ties in to the points above, but should be focused. I mentioned earlier how all the episodes of this season are pretty good in a vacuum -- but in the whole of a series-concluding season, they don't move the plot. I don't agree that they are "filler episodes" like many have said -- because they give characters more depth -- but those things need to happen in seasons 1-4, not season 5. Any show with a great final season -- Succession, Breaking Bad, Mad Men -- they are constantly moving, feature the main characters constantly, and are building toward something important. The Boys was spending full episodes giving us Firecracker and Black Noir's backstories, introducing new Supes we've never heard of, and moving core characters to the sidelines. That's not good storytelling in a final season. (Full episode spent with Starlight at her dad's house -- WTF are we doing?).

Speaking of core characters, let's talk about what wasn't working there. Love and respect to Kimiko and Karen Fukuhara -- can't be easy to be a mute character for 4 seasons. But the dialogue they give her when she finally can speak was a no from me dawg. Starlight was probably top-3 for me in the first couple seasons, but I think they fully tanked her character in the latter seasons. I love Soldier Boy as well -- Jensen Ackles was perfect in the role -- but his actions/decisions in this season contradict everything they've built him up to be. I'm always going to be positive on Hughie, Butcher, Homelander, Frenchie and The Deep -- I just think they're perfectly cast, consistent characters -- but just about everyone else I find all over the map, or simply uncompelling.

Conclusion

While recency-bias is putting this show in the Hot Seat -- I think we all need a reminder of just how good those early seasons of The Boys were. One of the best Pilot episodes in recent memory -- a tone-setting powerhouse of an ep that lets you know what you're in for. In the first few episodes you get A-Train running through Robin, Hughie killing Transluscent, The Deep sexually assaulting Starlight -- they don't hold back. The plane sequence with Homelander and Maeve might be the best scene of the show's run. Season 2 had plenty of great moments, but that Season 2 finale is easily my favorite season finale of the series. Even Season 3 had tons of standout moments -- the "Herogasm" episode comes to mind, where we saw arguably the best action/fight sequence of the show's run between Soldier Boy, Homelander, Butcher and Hughie.

I do think Season's 4 and 5 were a decline for the show -- partially because I think the story was being stretched too thin. In Season 4, they were scared to kill off too many core characters, and in Season 5, they didn't deliver enough big moments. But I also think a major factor in it's decline was the shift of who the true antagonist of the show is -- Vought, or Homelander. Those early seasons had so much tension because Vought was arguably more of a threat than Homelander himself -- and the threat they posed was much more intriguing and mysterious. Evil Superman is a very black and white threat -- but the corporation running the enterprise of Superheroes is much more gray. I wish they had continued building up Vought rather than honing in on Homelander (just to have the threat of Homelander underwhelm us all).

Although I don't think Game of Thrones is a fair comparison for The Boys in terms of how they concluded their shows -- I do think the way I view the two shows as a whole is similar: a bad ending down not ruin the whole of a show. Again, I don't believe The Boys was a bad ending -- but was definitely underwhelming/disappointing. Game of Thrones final season (last 2 seasons really, in my opinion) were straight up BAD. But that doesn't change the fact that the first 6 seasons of Game of Thrones are arguably the best TV ever made. So just because I was disappointed by the last 2 seasons of The Boys -- it doesn't change the fact that the first 2 seasons of The Boys are one of my favorite shows ever. Less sample size for The Boys -- which brings down the mean for the whole show -- but same school of thought.

If you finished The Boys and want to share some thoughts -- hit me up! Comment who your favorite character in The Boys was -- we'll close things on my power rankings of Performances in The Boys (becuase the Emmy's never honored the performers in this show -- I will here):

Main Characters:

1. Antony Starr -- Homelander (genuinely should have 2-3 Emmy's)

2. Karl Urban -- Butcher

3. Chace Crawford -- The Deep

4. Jack Quaid -- Hughie

5. Tomer Capone -- Frenchie

6. Jessie T Usher -- A-Train

7. Erin Moriarity -- Starlight (early seasons ELITE, tailed off toward the end)

8. Karen Fukuhara -- Kimiko (not an easy character to play, always great)

9. Laz Alonso -- Mother's Milk

10. Colby Minifie -- Ashley

Minor/Shorter-Run Characters:

1. Jensen Ackles -- Soldier Boy

2. Claudia Doumit -- Victoria Neumann

3. Aya Cash -- Stormfront

4. Dominique McElligott -- Queen Maeve

5. Giancarlo Esposito -- Stan Edgar

6. PJ Byrne -- Adam Bourke

7. Shantel VanSanten -- Becca Butcher

8. Shawn Ashmore -- Lamplighter

9. Derek Wilson -- Tek Knight

10. Elizabeth Shue -- Madeline Stillwell