The new chapter is not what fans expected.
The first three episodes of the new season of The Boys premiered on Amazon Prime. In them, Butcher and his team do not give up their attempts to kill the most corrupt Supe on Earth: Homelander.
Showrunner Eric Kripke has already stated that the fifth season will be the last. This means the stakes for The Boys are higher than ever. The problem is that it doesn’t feel that way.
Season 4 drops to Season 1’s level of conflict
On the one hand, we once again encounter cunning intrigues that make the show more cynical. This reminds us of how the media manipulates the public and uses ordinary people as pawns to promote its own interests.
The Seven even have a local propagandist, Firecracker: in her broadcasts, she talks about how Starlight’s followers corrupt children in the basements.
However, after the third season, the conflict between the Supes and the Boys becomes simpler. Previously, we were shown the goodness on the faces of Butcher, Hughie and others from an unusual angle: people who fight for a just cause often turn out to be no better than those with whom they fight.
Now the protagonists have returned to square one: they are complex, but sincere in their commitment to building a better world through honest methods.
The fourth season suffers from a lack of new ideas
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Furthermore, the series continues to draw old dramatic lines. After taking Compound V, Butcher has a few months to live: he does everything he can to contact Ryan and win him over to the good side.
Kimiko remembers her childhood in the biolabs and wants to punish the guilty. And Frenchie falls in love with someone from her criminal past. In the third season, these characters already helped each other overcome her trauma. But in the absence of new conflicts, the creators artificially complicate the old ones.
Worst of all, the writers are trying to tie even some of the new characters into familiar ones. For example, it is not in vain that Firecracker attacks Starlight in her transmissions. It turns out that Starlight slandered her at a talent show when she was a child. Now the girl on Homelander’s squad wants revenge on the perpetrator, and that’s literally her only motivation.
The Boys season 4 seems to be losing its grip
Hughie’s mother, who left the family years ago, also appears in the plot. She offers an excruciatingly long dialogue about why she left the child with her father. It’s starting to feel like we’re watching a soap opera instead of a cynical, ironic satire: another Kripke project, Supernatural, suffered from the same problem.
It is not clear why the authors placed so much emphasis on drama. But in the end, from a story of adrenaline, The Boys becomes a show of sad people, where everyone competes with each other to see who has the worst time.
Viewers have always watched The Boys for the frenetic dynamics that made the show so popular. But it is already known that the fifth season will be the last. That’s why we’d like to believe that Eric Kripke’s other show won’t suffer Supernatural’s fate and the ending will be awesome.
