A still from ‘The Boys’ Season 4
| Photo Credit: Amazon Prime Video
In its penultimate season, The Boys seems to transcend its unflinching satirical sleight-of-hand to the likeness of creative nonfiction, I daresay, documentary even. As Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher and the titular team of anti-supe rebels barrel towards its final season, the show feels less like a parody and more like a distressingly accurate play-by-play of current events, accentuated only by lobotimised sex and pubic laserings.
This season’s climax, with the possibility of a supe ascending to the presidency, raises the stakes to vertiginous heights. Superheroes as political figures? Outlandish, yet disturbingly close to a reality where fist-pumping, super-charged charisma often trumps competence.
The Boys Season 4 (English)
Creator: Eric Kripke
Cast: Anthony Starr, Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Karen Fukuhara, Erin Moriarty
Episodes: 8
Runtime: 1 hour
Storyline: Victoria Neuman, under the control of Homelander, is closer than ever to the Oval Office and with only months to live, Billy Butcher must find a way to work with The Boys to save the world
The season finale opens with the fresh face of primetime fascism, Firecracker (Valorie Curry), greeting us with a wake-up call: “Good morning patriots, it’s January 6th”. Eric Kripke’s lampooning of populist demagoguery feels distressingly prescient. Rather than merely poking fun at the absurdity of MAGA politics, The Boys is now performing an incisive autopsy on it. And this season, they’ve really ramped up the absurdity, giving us everything from politically charged dismemberments to flesh-eating sheep.
Homelander in a still from ‘The Boys’ Season 4
| Photo Credit:
Amazon Prime Video
In this election year, the creators have uncorked a bottle of caustic nitroglycerin, focusing their narrative crosshairs on perhaps a little too much. Anthony Starr’s Homelander, the despotic poster boy of superhuman narcissism, complete with a fan base that’s more cult than constituency, is front and centre for this season’s political allegory. His rhetoric, bombastic and vacuous as it is, has reached its narrative peak. In a brief yet gripping tryst with his origins — involving a cute, whale-shaped cake, chargrilled scientists and a donut-hole through a crotch — the botched lab experiment with a god-complex finally seems to have shed the frailty of his humanity.
Meanwhile, the fictional megacorporation that makes Amazon look like a thrift shop (the ironies of The Boys being a Prime Video original are not beyond me) is having a field day, firing shots at its contemporaries. In its latest jab at pop culture giants, the series manages to skewer Marvel’s recent missteps, including a pointed jab at the beloved D23 Expo tradition and its plethora of cinematic phases in the franchise.
Superhero fatigue has been more real than ever before and, The Boys remains an invigorating breath of sulphur. The show’s relevance has only honed its edge, ripping a certain web-slinging icon a new one (quite literally), diving deep into the lurid, fetishized sex dungeon of a super-depraved billionaire, and Firecracker’s cunning lactic power play that reduces the world’s greatest supe to a suckling infant. Also worth mentioning is Sister Sage’s (Susan Heyward) debutante dance of manipulation which has been a delight to witness and has ultimately proven that even the star-spangled puppeteers are mere pieces in a darker, more cunning chess match.
Sister Sage and Firecracker in a still from ‘The Boys’ Season 4
| Photo Credit:
Amazon Prime Video
Save for some rushed mishaps and patch-ups between the trauma-bonded Frenchie and Kimiko, Butcher’s evolving relationship with Ryan provides the emotional anchor to this season’s chaos. While a fairly predictable late-season Jeffrey Dean Morgan reveal hinted at things to come, it seems like our cockney maverick might just be gearing up for an Eren Jaeger-esque metamorphosis in the series’ climactic next chapter.
In a serendipitous and disturbingly foresighted convergence of fact and fiction, the finale dropped amidst a week dominated by startling real-world occurrences, namely, botched political assassinations. While one may have emerged with a political tide-turning, fist raised defiantly high, the other ushered in a new dawn of American superhero mythology, setting the stage for its grand finale and the quest to “make America super again.”
All episodes of ‘The Boys’ Season 4 are currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video
