“The Boys” relies on shock effects instead of the story – and that goes badly

Season 4 of The Boys is almost over and things are starting to get out of hand. Not in a fun, crazy way that we’ve come to expect from the show, but in a way that’s just… awkward and bad. A content warning follows.

In this week’s episode, Dirty Business, the group infiltrates an alt-right meeting where a coup against the government is being planned, led by Homelander and Victoria Neuman. And on this night, we get to see two of the worst aspects of the show this season: its heavy-handed political commentary (one Republican quotes Todd Akin’s infamous “legitimate rape” explanation almost verbatim) and also that The Boys is trying to outdo itself, not by having better storylines or character moments, but by just being… gross. But in a way that doesn’t work at all.

It feels like this episode was trying to emulate the infamous “Herogasm,” which involves a superhero orgy leading to a big showdown between the characters. That doesn’t happen here, and a large portion of the evening is devoted primarily to Hughie’s sexual torture at the hands of Tek-Knight and Ashley. Even though it’s mostly things like foot tickling and cake farting and then the Danger Tek-Knight doing something so bad to Hughie that I can’t even write it down here, it’s still sexual harassment, and the show at least pauses to catch his breath so Hughie can break down afterward. Still, it wasn’t funny or entertaining to watch or whatever it was supposed to be.

The more I watch the latest episode of The Boys, the more I realize how much better the first season of Gen V was in comparison. That show has a lot of blood and sex, but it is not The main focus as it also has a cohesive plot and characters you want to root for. If The Boys ever had that, it’s now turned them into a battered Hughie and a powerless Starlight. Now the show is trying to give some sort of redemption arc to A-Train, who, given the nature of the show, seems like he’s being set up to be violently killed off shortly after.

This has not been an entertaining season. Politics has just become stupid, far too parallel to real life, and in a way that is not smart, even though I actually agree with those policies. And that desire to get viewers talking about whatever new, sick thing the show did the next day overshadows all of the plot development, which, six episodes into this season, boils down to “Homelander thinks everyone is inferior and wants to take over the country.” I mean, of course he does, and the “smartest person in the world” working for him hasn’t cooked up anything remotely resembling an interesting plan to make that happen. Meanwhile, the show has no idea what to do with the rest of its central cast of Boys, giving them disjointed, undeveloped storylines and isolating Butcher with his brain tumor hallucinations.

After that, there’s only one more season of The Boys, at least with this cast, from the series movies to the spin-offs. But at this point, I’m much more excited about Gen V season 2 than what happens next here.

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