Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
From a washed-out Spiderman rip-off to a wickedly mysterious mash of X-men’s Mystique and Rogue, Season 4 of Amazon Prime’s “The Boys” adds more wacky superhero knockoffs to its universe. The new season is a bumpy wild ride of dirty politics, blood-soaked action, biting (not always) satire, and our favorite dysfunctional team trying to bring down the greatest villain of all time – Homelander. As the season progresses, it becomes clear that Eric Kripke and his team are determined to push the boundaries of what viewers can expect, for better or worse.
The season kicks off with The Boys – Hughie (Jack Quaid), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), Annie AKA Starlight (Erin Moriarty), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) gathering intel at a packed event for Victoria Neuman’s (Claudia Doumit) Vice Presidency campaign. Butcher (Karl Urban), as always, is the troublemaker, diverting from their plan to focus on his own agenda: rescuing Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) from Homelander (Antony Starr). Butcher’s vigilante-gone-crazy act is now getting repetitive and frankly bordering on being boring. But since The Boys is a big ensemble cast show, there are plenty of distractions that manage to keep the story dynamic.
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The primary focus of the season remains on the Boys’ mission to find a way to kill Homelander and halt Neuman’s rise to power. Meanwhile, Homelander, in true megalomaniac fashion, plots his next moves with the help of new character Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), the world’s smartest person. Homelander’s end game – he wants to install his own puppet in the Oval Office and “Make America Super Again!”. On Sage’s advice, he inducts Firecracker (Valorie Curry) into The Seven, giving Firecracker her own show on Vought TV to run a malicious campaign against Starlight. Firecracker is a loud, outspoken, crazy alt-right conspiracy theorist who’d do anything to keep herself on the right side of Homelander. Valorie Curry is entertainingly despicable as the vapid Starlight-hater and a desperate Homelander fangirl. Susan Heyward’s Sage starts off as a rather mundane superhero character, whose only superpower is super-intelligence, although she possesses more physical durability than the average human. However, her intellect emerges as an amusing contrast to Homelander’s blonde brute force.
If you haven’t seen the Prime Series “Gen V,” you should consider watching that before streaming “The Boys” season 4 because it’s like a bridge chapter, and its primary plot twist also serves as a major revelation in “The Boys” storyline too. Not just that, some of its crucial characters make their way into this season, so their significance will be lost on viewers who haven’t seen “Gen V.” And if you don’t have the time or interest in watching another show, here’s all you need to know about “Gen V” – it focuses on a younger generation of superheroes still in college and how they discover a secret lab where horrifying experiments are being conducted on superheroes, including developing a virus that can harm them.
The first three episodes were trying too hard to hit viewers with unexpected twists and gore, and a few of them felt far too contrived. For instance, (minor spoiler) – Tomer Capone’s Frenchie has a new romantic interest in season 4 of “The Boys,” and not only was there a lack of chemistry between him and the new character, but their romance felt too forced, as if inserted into the story just to tick a few boxes. The fact that I have been cheering for Frenchie and Kimiko has nothing to do with it! Seriously, if the two end up just being “friends forever,” it would still be a great way to conclude their bond, and pop culture writers can add Tomer Capone and Karen Fukuhara to the “best onscreen friendships” list.
Antony Starr’s portrayal of Homelander is the absolute highlight of “The Boys” season 4, his menacing presence palpable in every scene. Almost every time Homelander enters a scene, I would get anxious over who’d die a brutal death, because at this point in the series, nobody even needs to provoke the man to get lasered to bloody bits. Episode 4 marks a great turning point for this season, where Homelander takes a trip back to his origins at an underground Vought lab and has a talk with some of the people who raised him like a lab rat. You know things are not going to end well, and the episode brilliantly showcases Antony Starr’s talent for making Homelander’s mere existence terrifying. Viewers are going to lose count of the number of people he kills or gets his minions to kill. There’s one scene where he orders A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell), and The Deep (Chace Crawford) to bludgeon a bunch of innocent civilians to their deaths for him, and the guys quietly follow his instructions. The Seven – which is supposed to consist of America’s top 7 superheroes – is essentially a joke at this point. Cameron Crovetti, who plays Homelander’s son Ryan, is the only one in Vought who still has the guts to defy the man, and Cameron is impressively layered in his performance as a conflicted, rebellious young superhero.
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One of the weaker subplots of the show came from a surprising quarter – Billy Butcher’s struggles with the deadly brain tumor due to the compound V he’d taken, which messes him up mentally. He is constantly hallucinating his wife and reconnects with an old friend called Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who is like a nastier version of Butcher. Jeffrey Dean’s cameo isn’t memorable, Kessler is a mild variant of his villainous Negan from “The Walking Dead”. Butcher’s character gets repetitive and no longer possesses the edgy, brutish charm that made him exceedingly entertaining in the earlier seasons. Although Butcher does get his act together in the climactic episode, delivering one of the biggest plot twists of the season. So do The Boys get close to finding a way to murder the villains? Well, they are not too far off.
From super-powered animals causing mayhem to giving us a kinky Batman/Iron Man rip-off in the form of Tek Knight (introduced in “Gen V”), a bisexual playboy billionaire with an underground sex cave, Season 4 of “The Boys” packs in darkly hilarious twists. Some of the jokes and sequences don’t land as well, especially because strangely, there are times when you feel like Eric Kripke and team hold back on going completely off the rails with some subplots, while they just don’t give two shits with others.
Overall, Season 4 of “The Boys” is a mixed bag of brilliant performances, contrived subplots, a few epic twists, and relentless gore. Antony Starr’s Homelander remains a standout, his villainy unmatched in the series. As the Boys inch closer to their goal of taking down Homelander, the stakes have never been higher, offering fans a wild, bloody ride that delivers on its promise of chaos and carnage.
Stream “The Boys” on Prime Video.
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