The Boys - An Amazon Prime adaptation of the Ennis comic series

[A-Stump]

One of the things that bothers me about the series is just getting worse and worse. I hardly consume any contemporary media, but at first I liked this one. It did have one glaring problem that you see in fictional writing, but it was restrained to certain moments early on. It's when you look at a work of fiction, and you don't see the characters, the scenario, or the world that's being built. Instead, you see the writer, and that immersion is completely broken. The main point early on in the series was when the whole religious revival thing was being used a pinata. I didn't see a plot that made sense internally, I saw a 'fuck you, DAD' white boy who projects his rebellious teenage angst on to God waaaay past it's expiration date. You could see the author's pathologies and politics bleeding through the screen. The same thing happened with the Stormfront/4chan story, I didn't see a well-thought out plot, I saw someone who credulously reads dumb editorials and thought 'I'll work this into my story- those 4chan trolls are awful!' Then, in the most recent episodes, it's reached a fever pitch and has just become very tiresome. The gun nut guy, the BLM thing, the schizo GF behavior of Starlight that just makes zero sense - it's like any motive force to the story is being subsumed by a preachy, ham-fisted writer. Instead of fleshing out interesting stories, it seems like random shitlib political mores are being shoehorned into every single episode.

I do have to say I love Ashley as a character. Whoever writes her has a lot of experience with insufferable, AWFL HR cunts, because she fits that 'type' to a T.

It's still somehow less tryhard and edgy than Ennis's original story. I guess replace current day politics with 'What if a guy shoved a thumb up a guy's butt' and you'd have most of his stories neatly in a row.

 

[Prehistoric Jazz]

I loved Uber and was sad Uber Invasion ended at 17. Cant wait for next episode.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

The cartoon segments from the previous episode really take the cake:

Black Noir's the only one I feel sympathy for, especially given what he went through. So far, he's the only one I trust to take on Soldier Boy. Butcher and Hughie will just get whacked before they take their next Temp V dose, and Homelander is obviously going to suck up to his old man. I don't trust Starlight, MM, Kimiko, or Frenchie to do it. Black Noir knows what kind of person Soldier Boy is. Hopefully he gets the spotlight he deserves in the finale or the next season.

 

[TheHarbinger]

Also, with the reveal they gave in this episode. It makes it even weirder that Vought would switch sides. The Nazis has a functional supersoldier, and nobody else did. D-Day should never have even happened. Stormfront can break the sound barrier, and tear down buildings with her lightning bolts. She should have been able to zip across the channel, and send every ship with ammunition onboard, to the bottom of the sea. If she didn't do that, then she could have routed any of the landing zones by herself; and then flew to the others to do the same with no real issue.

They had a portable nuclear weapon with infinite ammo. Like a living cheat code. Stormfront alone could have assassinated every president, politician, general, intellectuals, famous celebrities, in any enemy country without a care in the world. She could have burned down entire fleets, munition factories, diesel fuel storage, and so on. And her character is played like some type of maniac Nazi believer yet she stood by and watched as her entire country is basically raped by the allies and then brain drained for Operation Paperclip. And then she moves to America to work for the people that turned her country into a communist dump for several decades. There was no consistency.

It would have been better if she was the daughter of Hitler or some famous Nazi and it was kept secret from her. And the deal with Vought coming to the allies was that some of the famous Nazis get their children to be the first wave of Compound V babies. And as an adult when she learns the truth of her Nazi origins she embraces it and becomes a Hitler fanatic and tries to destroy Vought from the inside. That Compound V was made after WWII by both the Americans and German scientists together would be a better timeline. Part of the writing on this show is that everything is meant to be as stupid and absurd as possible. "Eat....fucking....Timothy". But I hate having to continually suspend disbelief at every other scene.

Hell, she could have flown straight to Moscow, and turned the Soviet upper command into charred corpses without anyone really stopping her. She's faster than the fighters at the time, bulletproof, and can engage and disengage at will. Did he switch sides before dosing Stormfront? If not, it makes absolutely no sense that the war would go any other way than a complete Nazi victory. It's not like she's just a 'human but better'. She's a flying smart MOAB, with the staying power to demolish any armed forces that stick around to actually fight her.

Yes this stuff is just waved off like it is nothing. But the timeline and scale of The Boys is something that you have to suspend major disbelief for. Like the fact that not a single 'supe' was a villain until decades into the Compound V project. Basically no super mutants go rogue or become terrorists or serial killers. To the point where Vought had to literally manufacture super terrorists because they were running out of enemies to use their super heroes to battle. Or how few civilian and collateral casualties there are on these super fights. Or how Vought has these super secret facilities with dozens of ultra dangerous super mutants with almost no security whatsoever. Or how Vought constantly loses track of people that they are supposed to be tracking. Or how the Russian facility guarding Soldier Boy had like four or five armed guards. Or how Vought does not have their Compound V liquids guarded or cataloged.

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

I'm predicting that Soldier Boy isn't feeling as fatherly a connection as he lets on, making Homelander drop his guard before blasting him. A weakened Homelander gets his ass kicked by Soldier Boy, but gets saved by Black Noir before Soldier Boy can finish the job; proceeding to then bullshit out a 'Oh, I only ran away so I could take on Soldier Boy alone!' excuse to get back into Homelander's good graces.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

I'm predicting that Soldier Boy isn't feeling as fatherly a connection as he lets on, making Homelander drop his guard before blasting him. A weakened Homelander gets his ass kicked by Soldier Boy, but gets saved by Black Noir before Soldier Boy can finish the job; proceeding to then bullshit out a 'Oh, I only ran away so I could take on Soldier Boy alone!' excuse to get back into Homelander's good graces.

Nah, Solider Boy has been hinted at being starved for being a father the entire time he's been around. They had him watching the dad walking with his kid, they had him talk about how he wanted to have children with Crimson Countess. If they do have him turn on Homelander, it'll be because the writers want to get a cheap 'subverted expectations' moment in there.

 

[Mukhrani]

They had a portable nuclear weapon with infinite ammo. Like a living cheat code. Stormfront alone could have assassinated every president, politician, general, intellectuals, famous celebrities, in any enemy country without a care in the world. She could have burned down entire fleets, munition factories, diesel fuel storage, and so on. And her character is played like some type of maniac Nazi believer yet she stood by and watched as her entire country is basically raped by the allies and then brain drained for Operation Paperclip. And then she moves to America to work for the people that turned her country into a communist dump for several decades. There was no consistency.

It would have been better if she was the daughter of Hitler or some famous Nazi and it was kept secret from her. And the deal with Vought coming to the allies was that some of the famous Nazis get their children to be the first wave of Compound V babies. And as an adult when she learns the truth of her Nazi origins she embraces it and becomes a Hitler fanatic and tries to destroy Vought from the inside. That Compound V was made after WWII by both the Americans and German scientists together would be a better timeline. Part of the writing on this show is that everything is meant to be as stupid and absurd as possible. "Eat....fucking....Timothy". But I hate having to continually suspend disbelief at every other scene.

This is where you can see the political beliefs of the author bleeding through and just making a complete mess of the plot. They view WWII in a downright schizophrenic way, because they can't reconcile the fact that the racist, sexist, bigotted early 20th century America that they spend the rest of the show bashing were one of the major contributors to the destruction of Nazi Germany. In the mind of your garden-variety modern liberal, the real enemies of Nazism - a pretty much dead ideology - aren't the people who killed it. It's the modern suburban larpers who were born after it was a real threat, and who constantly tilt at windmills with swastikas slapped on them. They associate the people that they hate (rural and religious ones) with Nazism, and then shriek and holler impotently while smugly dismissing the soldiers who actually fought against it. Take this outlook and slap it onto the otherwise decent characters and story that they established in season one and you get a total clusterfuck. Someone like Stormfront has to be an ardent Nazi, an all-American Xenophobe, and a modern 4-chan troll because those things are all bad and scary. So you end up with the absurdity of a supposedly high-ranking Nazi having intense racial animus towards a Japanese man, siding with the country that destroyed the Third Reich, and running some kind of meme mill. Does this all make sense together? No. But the author is braindead, and he saw on CNN that Trump is a NAZI, America is RACIST, and memes spread BIGOTRY, so he just decided to mash all three themes together with zero consideration for the character's motivations or beliefs.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

This is where you can see the political beliefs of the author bleeding through and just making a complete mess of the plot. They view WWII in a downright schizophrenic way, because they can't reconcile the fact that the racist, sexist, bigotted early 20th century America that they spend the rest of the show bashing were one of the major contributors to the destruction of Nazi Germany.

That is the truth. Especially since the anti-feminist patriarchy that was propped up by white America was the major force that defeated the Axis Powers as a whole. They were the ones on the front lines. And their allies? Large colonial empires like Britain and France. For a while, the Left wanted to focus on the Soviets' contribution towards the defeat of the Nazis, shamelessly forgetting the fact that the Soviets and the Nazis were allies prior to Operation Barbarossa, that was, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine made praising the Soviets look horribly dated.

In the mind of your garden-variety modern liberal, the real enemies of Nazism - a pretty much dead ideology - aren't the people who killed it. It's the modern suburban larpers who were born after it was a real threat, and who constantly tilt at windmills with swastikas slapped on them.

They really think they were the true enemies of Nazism. That is both cute and pathetic. These yahoos would run away at the first sign of bombs and guns going off. These are the same people who think bitching at video game girls with metal bikinis is empowering for women, while ignoring the fact that two-thirds of Eurasia treats women like shit. Meanwhile, the actual heroes who fought the Nazis, they can't help but tear down, because "HURR DURR WHITE SUPREMACIST PATRIARCHY". Heroes like Winston Churchill have to be degraded because he represented a white colonial power, and he didn't like hostile tribes too much and wanted to gas them.

That's why they characterize Soldier Boy-a hero whom Stan Edgar says tore Germans apart-as a false veteran who wasn't really there in the European front in WW2. They have to retcon their own lore just to shit on this guy; Stan pretty much set aside corporate propaganda when he told Homelander that Soldier Boy tore Germans apart by the dozen, but apparently, that's corporate propaganda now, too. Soldier Boy had an interesting dynamic in that he's an asshole, but he's also a wounded veteran who feels abandoned by his country, but after they revealed that he never stormed the beaches on D-Day (which makes no sense, as he's the perfect bullet sponge for that) he's just another freak making up stuff to look tough.

They associate the people that they hate (rural and religious ones) with Nazism, and then shriek and holler impotently while smugly dismissing the soldiers who actually fought against it. Take this outlook and slap it onto the otherwise decent characters and story that they established in season one and you get a total clusterfuck.

Basically, you get a story written by people who are historically illiterate. Rural and religious folk provided much of the fighting power for American armies for the longest time, and even the American war against slavery was won by religious radicals who wanted to abolish it instead of the original Union line of just keeping the country together with or without slavery. It's a clusterfuck because they remove everyone who fought the Nazis and they pretend like they're the ones who fought the Nazis, when in reality, it's the rural and religious folk they hate who put down the Sour Kraut and all his friends.

Someone like Stormfront has to be an ardent Nazi, an all-American Xenophobe, and a modern 4-chan troll because those things are all bad and scary.

Ardent Nazis would view Americans as a weak, degenerate culture because black culture and the culture of other nonwhites mixed in with American culture. They would view 4chan trolls as pathetic whiners, even those that use Nazi regalia and symbolism, because while 4channers hide behind the internet, early Nazis were attacking Communists in the streets and leading riots against those they disliked. But for some reason, they're all lumped in together, because the left is scared of them.

So you end up with the absurdity of a supposedly high-ranking Nazi having intense racial animus towards a Japanese man, siding with the country that destroyed the Third Reich, and running some kind of meme mill. Does this all make sense together?

If anything, a high-ranking Nazi would probably admire the Japs, because not only were they allies, but because of the Japanese people's warrior spirit during WW2. A more appropriate response would have been Stormfront saying how modern Japan shames their samurai ancestors who fought in WW2, kind of like how Hank Schrader in Breaking Bad mocks Hispanic culture by comparing the Hispanic gangbangers and barrio trash whom he meets with the glorious conquerors of Spain's past by saying "you guys used to be conquerors".

No. But the author is braindead, and he saw on CNN that Trump is a NAZI, America is RACIST, and memes spread BIGOTRY, so he just decided to mash all three themes together with zero consideration for the character's motivations or beliefs.

That's what it feels like. They just slammed all these things together because Trump made the Left wet their panties. Instead of the actual reality where the Left lost to a billionaire attention whore because of how radical the SJWs were during the latter years of the Obama administration. If the liberals weren't shoving SJW culture so hard into American faces, Clinton might have handily defeated Trump. Instead, he's this great demon who has to be vanquished because he scared them by winning, and they don't want to hear anything about how it was their own idiocy that gave Trump and his supporters the political ammo they needed.

 

[Sithis]

Spoiler: Welp, gonna get this out of the way now...

RIP Noir you was a real one

 

[TheHarbinger]

This is arguably the worst episode of the series so far. Another predictable season where the bad guy basically dances around the plot armored characters for eight episodes. I mean even Queen Maeve is fully plot armored? This is getting tedious. Can they stretch for another two, possibly three seasons of content? Soldier Boy accomplished almost nothing. He could have been written out this season and it would have made no difference. Just have Vought tell Homelander that his father was Soldier Boy, have Homelander kill Noir for lying, battle it out with the Boys and their allied supes, and you do not even need Soldier Boy. His de-powering power was used basically on Maeve and no one else.

Soldier Boy is back into the stasis pod so his plot is almost reset. The Boys are back but with a new super member so their plot was basically stagnant if not reductive. The Boys are technically supposed to be an anti-supe CIA unit but their latest two members are now supes. Only Noir died yet in the most anticlimactic way after building his character up. Now that Maeve is gone they can finally release the video of the hijacked plane being left to crash?

My guess is that they want another two season of the show. Next season will be stretching out the plot as thinly as they possibly can with some new characters that basically do not impact the main cast. Final season involves Butcher finally losing his mind, taking tons of V to prevent his early death and also supe him up, and then him and Homelander and Ryan fighting it out amongst a few other heroes including.

Other than the spectacle, and the scene at the end where Homelander vaporizes the libtard fag who chucked a (concrete?) milkshake, that was a lot of nothing.

 

[X-Shaped Weeaboo]

Christ almighty, that was a shit episode. They're really dangling Ryan in front of the audience again? Really? We just came off a season doing this shit and despite the kid clearly being an early teen/tween at this point, they write him like a fucking toddler. Ryan's sudden love of Homelander is so fucking fake it's unreal.

I did like Soldier Boy constantly telling himself he'd be better than his dad only for him to be just as much of a shit, but I can't really give the episode praise past that.

Well I do have one thing I enjoyed, but I'll let the episode sit for a bit before I talk about that.

Fuck man, I was really digging this season and they fumbled at the fucking 10 yard line. What a god-damn disgrace.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Well, I was right on both accounts. Soldier Boy just did it to lower Homelander's guard, then he winds up fighting the Boys as well. Way to go, show. Way to go.

Spoiler: Welp, gonna get this out of the way now...

RIP Noir you was a real one

At least he died a true Christian. May he finally find peace in the embrace of the Lord.

 

[TheHarbinger]

Fuck man, I was really digging this season and they fumbled at the fucking 10 yard line. What a god-damn disgrace.

You're looking at it wrong. They are stalling for time at this point. Because they do not have enough plot to fill more than a mini-series with the way that this entire show is written plot wise. Stretching the plot out to make as many episodes as possible is basically the 'style' for this show. As many seasons as possible. They did not fumble. They just took a knee for the first three downs to take as much time as possible before they did anything, and saved everything that they had for one last down. One big plot explosion. Which will likely be the season finale when finally people have their plot armor removed.

I like how Maeve is healing slowly without powers....yet they could just inject her with V and she would regain her powers again and heal normally. Like we know that Kimiko has already done that. And that Butcher will almost assuredly do it next season (likely stretched dead on until the last five minutes of the season four finale). And Huey will likely also take either Temp-V into regular V or just go straight to regular V.

Ryan might not like Homelander. He might just need someone reliable to train him to control his powers. After all the first real time he used his powers he murdered his own mother on accident. And he is a dopey little kid who never lived in the outside world for his entire life. He has no idea how messed up the world is. Hilariously now one of his first actions on the world is getting a concrete block thrown at his head and his father zapping the dude.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

What is it with this story constantly disappointing me? I hadn't been this disappointed by a TV show since Game of Thrones killed off Stannis Baratheon for bullshit reasons.

That scene at the end could have been much more powerful if Soldier Boy joined Homelander and Ryan. Imagine the final battle is just the Boys against this trio of dangerous Supes, with Queen Maeve distracting the enemy/sacrificing her life so that the Boys can get away. Then imagine the ending scene has Ryan flying down and Homelander introducing the boy to the cheering crowds as his son, but then Homelander also brings out Soldier Boy and identifies him as his grandfather. That would be a real "passing the torch" moment that would rally the world around Homelander. Soldier Boy, the hero of heroes, is his father, and now he has a son in Ryan, and the crowd cheers as the two darlings of America are now together at last. Then Homelander can top it off with some spiel about the American family and how they should stick together, while embracing his dad and his son in front of the cameras.

They could have a whole dynasty of supes to fight in Season 4. Vought would be this legitimate empire now officially ruled by a Super-family of heroes, using their money and their influence in government, politics, and popular support to hunt down the Boys. That would have truly been a great conflict, especially since Homelander can kill almost any Supe, and if he has any problems, he can bring in his father and de-power any Supe who's too much of a problem. Soldier Boy's return to Vought, and Homelander's increasing popularity, will finally allow them to get supes in the army at last, especially with Soldier Boy who was both a soldier and a supe; they can have him forming and leading a military unit to hunt down the Boys. That would force the good guys to come up with something really clever in order to defeat the enemy.

Instead, we just have Homelander and Homelander Jr. as our final fight. And now that we've seen Homelander bleed, that's not that much of a problem. Just get a couple dozen well-trained fighters to take Compound V and kick the shit out of him and his brat. Problem solved.

 

[I don't swear]

As others have already intimated, this season pretty much did jack poop. Just as Stormfront getting her stuff kicked in was the highlight and only thing I can remember of S2, so will this amazing fight be (outside of that penis thing). But that's the kicker- it takes 8 episodes of redundancy to get to the hyper-violent action that distracts you from how unrewarding it is with the wait. Amazon's way of releasing episodes is rather frustrating in a world with Netflix, ignoring Netflix's dogwater shows. And no shot Noir dies like that, especially in light of his role in the comics. No friggin' shot. While I like Homelander being open with his craziness, it's just another waste of a character and a dumb deviation from a show-only watcher's knowledge of the comics.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

Spoiler

noir had to be oofed in order to bring in a clone of homelander when he jan 6th's congress to take out mind blow chick in the 4th season or some shit idk

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

As others have already intimated, this season pretty much did jack poop. Just as Stormfront getting her stuff kicked in was the highlight and only thing I can remember of S2, so will this amazing fight be (outside of that penis thing). But that's the kicker- it takes 8 episodes of redundancy to get to the hyper-violent action that distracts you from how unrewarding it is with the wait. Amazon's way of releasing episodes is rather frustrating in a world with Netflix, ignoring Netflix's dogwater shows. And no shot Noir dies like that, especially in light of his role in the comics. No friggin' shot. While I like Homelander being open with his craziness, it's just another waste of a character and a dumb deviation from a show-only watcher's knowledge of the comics.

Black Noir should have become the leader of the Boys for Season 4. He should have left when it became apparent that Homelander wishes to make an alliance with Soldier Boy. Then once Soldier Boy and Homelander join forces and defeat the Boys, Black Noir can show up and offer his support, taking a wounded Queen Maeve into some secret medical facility so that she can heal, while he's the one coming up with a plan to take down Soldier Boy and Homelander, to finish what he started in Nicaragua.

 

[Liucage67]

How come queen Maeve didn’t die and how come queen Maeve was to toe to homelander?

They wanked the shit out of her

 

[I don't swear]

Black Noir should have become the leader of the Boys for Season 4. He should have left when it became apparent that Homelander wishes to make an alliance with Soldier Boy. Then once Soldier Boy and Homelander join forces and defeat the Boys, Black Noir can show up and offer his support, taking a wounded Queen Maeve into some secret medical facility so that she can heal, while he's the one coming up with a plan to take down Soldier Boy and Homelander, to finish what he started in Nicaragua.

But he has brain damage???

 

[TheHarbinger]

And no shot Noir dies like that, especially in light of his role in the comics. No friggin' shot. While I like Homelander being open with his craziness, it's just another waste of a character and a dumb deviation from a show-only watcher's knowledge of the comics.

Black Noir should have become the leader of the Boys for Season 4. He should have left when it became apparent that Homelander wishes to make an alliance with Soldier Boy. Then once Soldier Boy and Homelander join forces and defeat the Boys, Black Noir can show up and offer his support, taking a wounded Queen Maeve into some secret medical facility so that she can heal, while he's the one coming up with a plan to take down Soldier Boy and Homelander, to finish what he started in Nicaragua.

Black Noir pathetically dying is probably the best writing on the show. You are meant to feel like him. The show builds up this huge revenge plot where Noir is a childlike figure and Soldier Boy is this huge demented bully idiot. And finally after decades of waiting Noir is going to get to at least confront his tormentor one last time even if it costs him his life. It was the classic revenge fantasy. But on this show revenge is always shown to be fruitless and pointless.

So all of the building up of the Noir revenge plots ends in a literal gut punch. A fatal gut punch. That kills Noir and simultaneously takes the wind out of the viewers. It was meant to be brutal and make you feel like shit. Because revenge fantasies only end in misery and shit. Which is a major theme of the show. That chasing revenge gets you nowhere. Huey is chasing revenge for Robin. Butcher is chasing revenge for Homelander and Becca. Soldier Boy was chasing revenge against his entire team and Vought. None of them are doing anything heroic. None of them are heroes. They are just chasing down personal vendettas.

Noir's death was a preview of the series finale in all likelihood. They will all die chasing down their own glory.