I Watch TV: The Boys Season 3

 

The Boys

The Boys isn’t pulling any punches. At the end of last season there was an uneasy truce, with Hughie joining the Bureau Of Superhuman Affairs and Butcher and team going back to work for the CIA. In the opening scenes it becomes clear that Billy Butcher and The Boys (now just Frenchie and Kimiko) are acting as the Bureau’s enforcement arm, in a bloody and stupid takedown of a supe the results of which that are then neutered in political horsetrading.

Homelander remains controversial, making an apology tour for dating a Nazi. In an effort to make him more popular the Vought corporation decides to make Starlight co-captain of the Seven, the leading superteam. Between Homelander’s popularity with conservatives and Starlight’s with liberals they hope to make everyone happy.

At this point Hughie discovers that Victoria Neuman, in charge of the Bureau, is the Head-popper, a particularly nasty supe whose head-popping caused the Bureau to be created, and more, that she was brought up by Stan Edgar, head of the Vought corporation. They’ve achieved regulatory capture!

Combined with this, and preparing to go rogue, Maeve gives Butcher a lead. Something killed Soldier Boy, the original superhero, Homelander’s indestructible precursor, in the 80s. They follow the leads and we get The Boys: The Winter Soldier as a plotline.

Characters are always being offered chances at… well not at redemption. Because the major point is that no one can be trusted with superpowers, because morally no one is super. Possibly Starlight! But they’re being offered help, to do better. Even Homelander. Even Soldier Boy. They don’t have to be their worst selves. And what makes The Boys (the team) The Boys is that they will make bad choices, and worse choices, and at the very end they will take the consequences on themselves and give their teammates a chance.

Or not, the finale gets a bit confused, having to have a big multi-side fight kind of obscures any point. Which is also a theme, how when you have to fight powerful bad guys your ethics will be murky.

There’s some threads on fatherhood and legacy, and some very pointed satire of right wing American views, with a few swipes at other parts of politics. A-Train, no longer able to race due to a bad heart, tries to re-invent himself as an African-American icon, in the most crass way possible. When he confronts a violent racist superhero it goes wrong, ending with him destroying everything he wants. But, he does get his speed back, in the most on the nose metaphorically pointed way possible.

In the last episode they don’t offer Homelander any redemption. He’s still a monster. But he does make us pity him, for being used and abused, and if he had had a different chance, a different start – he would still have been abused and a monster. His apology tour has him use the phrase “I’m only human,” and that’s still true, under all his power and his need to be loved and his need to control. And sometimes he can see that himself, and that’s his tragedy.

Let’s get to the classic end of the tragedy and see his funeral.

Watch This: Profane superhero critique and pointed political satire wrapped up in some genuinely sharp edged character stories
Don’t Watch This: People get exploded a lot, also it’s often stupid