Major Spoilers

Can the world be saved?

Season 4 of The Boys promised a lot. After the near miss in dealing with Homelander in Season 3 I thought we might end up with a show that had lost its way and was going to keep the awful character, played superbly by Antony Starr, on screen without really resolving any of the issues at hand.

I thought it might end up in Marvel territory where no one can actually die.

Season 4 brushed those concerns aside. This is the season where consequences come home to roost, where there is aftermath and emotional processing. It’s the season where, finally, we see the cost of all this on everyone concerned.

Whether it’s Hughie’s ruined life, Starlight as the missing stair, Frenchie and Kimiko’s inevitable need to face who they are and who they’ve been and, most of all, Homelander’s entirely empty soul staring back at him in the mirror.

This show has never let anyone be good and in learning about the roads that brought our characters here we see all too brutally the trajectories each of them was set on way before they came to orbit around one another.

The Boys doesn’t wallow in the past nor does it present it as an excuse – instead it develops its characters using the past to show how their destinations are beyond their capacity to change because, really, they don’t and won’t and possibly can’t face the ingredients that make them who they are.

And in this the show is finally showing us its arc. There’s something coming in season 5 – which we’ve been told is the last season. It’s clear season 4 is taking us right to the end of act two, where everything appears as bad as it could be.

Furthermore, the analogue with MAGA has never been clearer, more pointed and the death cult that sits inside that ideology is taken here to its very logical and unspeakable conclusion.

Season 5 will, I think, be a show that feels more like a war movie than a superhero movie and so it should because, quite rightly, where we end season 4 is far along the bleakest path The Boys has ever trodden.

From a grotesque start which, at times, felt more interested in shocking its viewers than telling much of a story, that had a little too much male gaze for its own good, The Boys has matured into that rarest of things – compelling satire. And as the Romans would tell you, good satire is grotesque. It’s bleeding, violent, sexualised caricatures strutting around living the worst impulses of humanity before, ultimately, catharsis strikes. Lest we forget though, catharsis is not always just, righteous or good.

I suspect The Boys will be racing with the outcome of the US Presidential election in November to see whether reality outdoes the satire warning of its possible eventuality. As it stands, well, we can perhaps only say that from this vantage point, they’re cutting it fine.

Satire’s not supposed to change anyone’s mind I don’t think. It’s the impulse to ridicule the powerful and remind them they’re mortal. Good satire harms the wellbeing of the unjust and reminds those who would also punch up if they could, that such things are possible and that all people are fallible, that all of us will die in the end.

In this, The Boys season 4 is its best showing yet and leaves us hanging on for catharsis like shipwreck survivors hoping for rescue.

Rating? 10 human sized ovens out of 10

Stewart Hotston