The Boys are given a mission…

This is a busy episode. With the first three entries into season 4 focusing on manoeuvring characters both with respect to the past but also in how they were going to move going forward, this episode starts the journey.

The Boys has a large cast and, in this case, almost all of them had meaty things to be doing. It largely succeeds in keeping the pace and not losing anyone along the way. It does this in having a long episode – over an hour (just like episode 3 as it happens).

I’m not sure the trend towards ever longer episodes works but, at least here, I didn’t mind too much although at a significant transition about forty minutes in I did check my watch and was surprised how time the show still had to run. This tells me the busyness of the episode doesn’t entirely work. A little like Stranger Things – the decision has been made to allow the sprawling ensemble their time and to try to draw them all together at some point.

At least I hope they draw everyone back together at some point.

Episode 4 is a transition episode. We see just about all vestiges of the past done away with and we’re well and truly motoring towards the climax of the show.

What that climax might be remains out of sight. If there’s one criticism it’s that Soldier Boy is still almost entirely absent. Normally it wouldn’t bother me but the publicity led me to expect him to feature much more heavily than he has so far.

What was most interesting to me was nothing to do with how the story’s being told, nor with the general plot shenanigans of which there’s a bucket load to be chewing over and speculating over.

No. I was most interested in what The Boys had to say about power and how it plays itself out among people. The show has always had this conversation going on but most of the time it’s buried beneath the satire about capitalism or the ultra-violence of people being cruel to one another.

This episode allowed several of the cast members in different contexts to tackle the same issue – namely, what does it mean to wield power? The show explores this in a variety of different ways at once. In one context it’s about sheer power, in another it’s about being trapped under other people’s power, by their will and our own obligations, imaginary or otherwise.

In still another it’s about the bare faced fact that sometimes what we do is end up owning others in all but signed contract. It’s about how the asymmetry of power allows us to abuse others whether in forcing them to gratify us, in forcing them to agree with us or, more basically, in forcing them to abandon who they are to survive.

For me it’s the first time the show has properly explored how, socially, individual agency is crushed or facilitated by the power of others. However, structurally, the female characters continue to have less agency than the men. This is an important point. Sure, female presenting characters make decisions but as they are typically more marginalised structurally their decisions are what could be called the mechanics of precarity – or the kinds of decisions people are forced into when all the room they might occupy is already colonised. In such situations we tend to be forced to make decisions not in our best interests in order to survive. Such decision-making is akin to psychic self-harm as we try to justify choices which harm us as if they were what we wanted to do in the full knowledge that they’re the best of the worst set of circumstances we might end up in. A mental gymnastics designed to calm the dissonance of choosing to hurt oneself. We do these things because sometimes choosing the lesser harm is the only option even if our brains hate the place we’ve landed. Lesser harm is still harm. There is no congratulations in choosing the option that destroys you the least.

The casual observer might mistake these kinds of choices for agency. I would suggest that is privilege failing to see how it is blind to the pressures of the oppressed.

In my view The Boys gets this both right and wrong.

Its fictional weltanschauung is deeply misogynistic (we’ve talked before about how naivety is portrayed as both feminine, childish and a moral failure in The Boys). However, it is also making narrative choices that grant the male presenting characters options and agency that others don’t get.

The casualness of it masks a failure to be braver with the story, or perhaps a failure to understand the options available.

I don’t think The Boys understands its portrayal of structural oppression, or at least it only understands it from the side of the outside observer and the oppressor. It does not understand it from the perspective of the marginalised. Hence the lack of agency across anyone without power. It is tempting to say that power is a precursor to agency but that’s to miss the subtlety. Power is just one leg on the stool. Power can be a facilitator for agency but space to make choices is just as important as is a framework in which to make them.

You might argue that we’re all forced to make constrained choices; that some sort of Platonic ideal is just that – an ideal. True enough, but the counter here is that there are characters on show who get to act in an unconstrained way and they’re all men. So much, so cynically plausible, but it didn’t have to be this way. Fiction can make room for all kinds of stories and the failure here (among the success of committing to the nastiness on display) is that The Boys couldn’t say anything more interesting about this subject.

The Boys does get the corrosion of the powerful right. In spades. It gets how observers, those who do not intercede, are also corroded by their ‘neutrality’. When power is corrupted the ‘neutral’ centrist is, at best, an enabler.

So, yes, there’s stuff going on with the hunt to find a McGuffin to stop Homelander but the real story here is about what it means to have power. In The Boys power corrupts entirely. It doesn’t even corrupt slowly or in only one way – it corrupts everything in every way from every angle.

Verdict: This is the most interesting thing The Boys has done and delivering such a strong message in the midst of such chaotic carnage is the most accomplished it’s been.

Rating? 8 temporary doses out of 10.

Stewart Hotston