The Boys is empty shock value

Some shows, like Game of Thrones, are only great as long as they stick to their source material. Others succeed by respecting the lore and canon of a popular novel or comic book, but telling an original story in that universe. HBO’s Guardian is the best example of this; the first season of The young is possibly the only show that was successful precisely because it did not resemble the original.

The young Comics Stocks Guardianby exploring an alternate reality where superheroes are real. But while Alan Moore considered this premise in depth and rejected the concept of superheroes on philosophical grounds – he disagreed with the worship of power and the theory of great men in history – this is not the case with Garth Ennis. The young is just his emotional, visceral revenge on the genre by showing superheroes doing the most horrible, immoral, depraved things just for the sake of it, the story doesn’t matter. Reading it, you’d swear that Ennis must have been duped by Stan Lee.

For the TV adaptation, showrunner Eric Kripke used the basic idea and elements of The young and built a real plot around it, keeping some of the extremes but using them in a more interesting, thoughtful way. The young became a satire of celebrity culture, cultish evangelicals, corporate “wokeness,” stupid right-wing political TV, and of course, superhero movies. The first season was about a group of misfits who band together to defeat the “superheroes” who have harmed them, and since those superheroes seem immortal, they have to get their hands dirty in the process. The season was funny, suspenseful, really well-written, and had an incredible cast of characters – from Jack Quaid’s everyman Hughie to Karl Urban’s gritty, hyper-masculine Butcher, Erin Moriarty’s innocent, optimistic Starlight to Antony Starr’s terrifying evil Superman Homelander. The show was still over the top, but only in the plot-motivated, shocking moments, so they hit hard. The death of Hughie’s girlfriend at the beginning is still as shocking as it was when I first watched the show.

In short, it was not only fantastic television, but also significantly better than the original. But that’s no longer true. At the end of season four, the finale of which aired Thursday morning, the show now has the same flaws as its inspirational text. With each season they’ve tried to push the bloodshed and debauchery to new levels, regardless of whether it serves any plot purpose, and now it’s just plain tiring.

A mid-season episode ended with one of the most horrific images of the entire series, but it’s the climax of a scene that exists solely so Homelander can be sadistic against random people who are just there to be ripped apart, and that otherwise serves no plot purpose. It’s empty, senseless bloodshed, and you feel dirty after watching it; the same way you feel watching a fetish-centered sexual harassment sequence. Why does the scene happen? To offend you, of course! To outrage! To shock! Make you feel triggered? Like edgelord humor or many of the jokes on the new Eminem album, The young finds it provocative, but in reality is just boring and stupid.

The great shame of the whole thing is that season 4 actually had potential. While the second and third seasons were exercises in narrative cluelessness, season 4 asks, “How do you prevent an assassination attempt on the president-elect when superheroes are trying to do it and the smartest person in the world planned it?” Not only that, but their chosen assassin is a shapeshifter who steals the memories of the person he’s impersonating, meaning the killer could look like anyone else. It’s a great premise – almost a role reversal, with the main characters trying to prevent the crime rather than commit it – but it’s executed terribly.

Most of the eight episodes are spent on various subplots to extend the running time, and when they finally get to the premise in the final two episodes, it’s done in the most simplistic, thoughtless, and generic way possible. It’s not dramatic, clever, or suspenseful, and the finale is spent with people standing in various dark concrete rooms, watching things on TV or talking, with the occasional splash of bloody CGI violence.

If you enjoyed the season’s meandering subplots, this might be fine, but they’re neither entertaining nor interesting. This season, Frenchie confesses to past crimes and goes to prison, Kimiko fights a gang entangled in her past, Butcher sees dead people, The Deep has relationship problems with his Tilda Swinton-voiced octopus girlfriend, and Hughie reconnects with his mother during a family health crisis — and all of that could have been left out. These plotlines are pure filler, added to fill time for a few episodes and then dropped without impacting the story or characters. Oh, and that shapeshifter? Used to emotionally screw Hughie and then punch people. Brilliant.

For some reason, the writers have taken Hughie from audience surrogate to comic punching bag, putting him through various circles of emotional and sexual hell because… they can? Because they want to shock and can’t get away with treating a female character like that? He is sexually assaulted multiple times this season, and the most graphic example is treated as humorous, while another is just another funny plot twist and his girlfriend is blamed for it him for the attack. Hughie doesn’t get stronger or stand up for himself better because of this trauma, and the horrors he goes through don’t break him. He’s still basically the same guy and the scenes are completely pointless.

A-Train gets a great arc this season, and Newman had a relatively good one until the finale, but otherwise all of the main characters are treated pretty poorly. Starlight just happens to be unable to use her powers because it doesn’t suit the plot; Homelander assigns menial tasks to lackeys who are obviously going to fail and otherwise acts like an unstable idiot; and new superhero Sage is the latest “smartest person in the world” whose intelligence is limited by a TV show’s writers. Instead of having any really clever plans, she instead does a bunch of vague things and then says, “Everything that happened was my big plan all along.” How convenient! Writing this lazily is an insult to the audience’s intelligence.

In light of the recent assassination attempt on President Trump, Amazon Studios considered how to handle the episode’s release. They eventually renamed the episode from “Assassination Run” to “Season 4 Finale” and released a statement explaining that they were against real-world political violence, that this wasn’t based on anything in reality, and that they hoped this would relieve some frustration. Even for a provocative show, reality got a little too close to fiction for their goodwill, but that really wasn’t necessary since the whole episode feels so hollow and inconsequential.

The young ends next season, but I have no reason to believe that the impending ending will make everything right. There will just be more stupid subplots, more storylines that aren’t dealt with, and more hollow blood, guts, and debauchery. You’ll think it’s shocking. In reality, it will be boring. But at least we get to rewatch the great first season.