The Boys ended last week and I still don’t know what to say about it. Disappointed doesn’t cover it. What I feel is closer to betrayal.
When the show first arrived it was everything the safe, PG-13 superhero movies weren’t. Sharp, brutal, genuinely unafraid to offend anyone. The premise alone was a good joke at the expense of an entire genre: what if the people with god-like powers were exactly as vain and damaged as the rest of us, and what if a company managed them like a product line. For two seasons it held that together, and it felt like watching something that actually had a point of view rather than a release schedule.
Then it slowly started losing its way, and the final season is where that became impossible to ignore. It should have been Homelander unleashed. The most powerful and unstable man on the planet, four seasons of build-up behind him, going scorched earth against Butcher. What we got instead was a supposedly godlike superhero on his knees, sobbing and begging for mercy, disconnected from everything the show had spent years constructing. Whatever the writers were reaching for, it wasn’t the ending that character had earned. I think even sticking closer to the comics would have served it better.
The performances deserve better than the writing they were given. Antony Starr has always been the show’s anchor, but Chace Crawford as the Deep was every bit as good, playing a man pathetic and dangerous in equal measure without ever winking at the audience. His death was as well handled as his performance, which is more than most of this season managed. And if there’s a silver lining to the whole disaster, it’s Valorie Curry as Firecracker. That’s an Emmy-worthy turn, or at least a nomination, and she was doing the best work on screen while the plot collapsed around her. A-Train quietly ended up with the most complete arc of anyone, which I don’t think was the plan when the show started.
What frustrates me is how much was set up and then abandoned. Soldier Boy arrived with an enormous build-up and was then sidelined every single time he mattered, which is about as lazy as writing gets. Why establish a threat like that and then keep finding reasons for him not to be in the room. Sister Sage had the same problem from the opposite direction. She’s supposed to possess superhuman intelligence, the smartest person in the world, and yet most of the decisions she makes are ones you could talk a reasonably clever teenager out of. You can’t write the smartest person alive by telling us she’s the smartest person alive.
Butcher at least got his revenge, the thing he’d wanted since the first episode, so the show honoured that much. But a series is more than one character getting what he came for.
And now there’s another spin-off coming, Vought Rising. I’d rather have one great show with a proper ending than an endless stream of them, which is a thing I’ve said before about a different show.
I still remember how bad the Game of Thrones ending felt in May 2019. The Boys turned up a couple of months later and restored my faith that television could still surprise me. After Thrones I’d promised myself I wouldn’t get that invested in a series again, and then The Boys happened and I broke it immediately. So here I am making the same promise, with roughly the same confidence I’ll keep it.
