Spoilers!

The final conflict – for now…

We’ve come to the end and what an ending. In some ways The Boys bottled it – the big fight that never was. In other ways I think the show did some tremendously interesting things in Season 3.

Ironically, and with full warning of spoilers, we don’t get a rematch between Homelander and Soldier Boy. What we get instead is a coming together of nearly all the various plotlines in the show.

We have moments for Ashley and The Deep, we have a nasty set of consequences for A Train and even worse for Noir.

None of them are good endings – containing as they do humiliation, manipulation, abuse and rejection.

Noir in particular gets short shrift. I didn’t like the story for him. Pretty much absent for the entire season and then gone. In some ways he only really existed in this season for the benefit of Homelander and to allow his plot to move on.

Throughout the season we’ve had the theme of fathers, of becoming our parents, explored by all the main male-presenting characters. Each of them find an ending here – whether it’s the tortuous set of rejections experienced by Butcher and Homelander or the choices made by Hughie and Homelander’s son.

What I really want to talk about though is how The Boys has taken us to the edge of what can be explored in this kind of show.

Make no mistake – The Boys hates the kinds of people it features and especially hates the idea of the power fantasy that so many seem to relish in today’s culture (there’s a PhD or two in the exploration of how populism as a political movement feeds on and supplies content for superhero narratives).

In that central objection is The Boys’ main moral thread because everything else is portrayed as flawed and equally capable of corruption – the message is that good intentions mixed with power always leads to moral decay. The Boys doesn’t explore how to avoid this, only that it’s true. The Boys doesn’t suggest there’s any guard against such corruption either, only that it is inevitable.

I’m not sure satire’s in the business of instructing us on how to be kinder or build better societies. More often than not satire is too busy trying to punch up and employing more or less acidic means of doing so.

Satire has always been a dangerous endeavour – people have been killed for it just about everywhere there’s a powerful person who doesn’t like being mocked. Moreover, the killings are often done by mobs with no need for show trials and state sanctioned executions.

The Boys is hyper aware of this both in its structure but also in the world it has built. It wields the scalpel of satire surgically but also wilfully cuts its own hand. Perhaps, in the end, satire’s limit is that it must devour itself.

I have good friends who can’t watch the show and their reasons are perfectly justifiable. The show portrays many difficult subjects as grotesquery, as if we’re watching a medieval harlequin mock us all with the darkest jokes about the things that we fear and reject as unacceptable.

I am not interested in persuading them otherwise – it’s both their right to not watch without harassment but also their right to observe what is being portrayed and reject it as unacceptable to them.

For me and my own sensibility The Boys has skirted near to this line more than once. However. There’s something about what it’s doing that keeps drawing me back. The show has put on screen fascism, racism, sexism and just about every form of political and capitalist corruption.

It’s done this with lashings of gore and violence and physical abuse.

Alongside this it has burned everyone along the way.

The nature of satire in this incarnation has been to find the edge of acceptability and push on it. Hard. I understand how that’s difficult because it pricks at our sacred cows. There’s often a good reason they’re sacred.

The Boys has, in particular, been interested in showing how power, when unchecked, is abusive and corrosive in absolutely every sphere it touches – personal, political, social and sexual.

Other people will talk about whether you could do it without putting all this on screen but to discuss The Boys we have to set that aside. There is no point discussing what the show isn’t.

There’s also no point in discussing the show I would have made.

What I’m interested in is the exploration of how we draw the line at what’s acceptable.

The Boys explores this both in its fundamental nature but also in its stories. Bubbling away through the season has been an increasingly colourful and transparent criticism of the extreme right wing of politics in the United States. Homelander as Trump, sculpted blond hair and all. Not simply right wing extremisms ever more unhinged racism and sexism but also its unwillingness to compromise, its bizarre relationship to the truth and its religious overtones. Add to these layers of conspiracy, incessant lying and the complete willingness to portray those not like us as less than human and The Boys has been deeply uncomfortable viewing.

The season ends by taking this subplot and foregrounding it – with a horrendous portrayal of Trump’s claim that he could shoot someone in Fifth Avenue and still become president.

There’s a question here: when does the portrayal of what we hate, of what we know hates us, cross a line? The answer is deeply subjective and there is no right conclusion. Searching for one will only lead us to make silly statements pretending to be objective when there is no objective answer. The truth is the line rests in different places for all of us. For those Trumpists and right-wing extremists who, apparently, only just realised Homelander is the ’bad guy’, their line is clearly in a very different place to mine.

Nevertheless. Satire asks us questions other than whether we support the corrupt or laugh at them as a way of denuding them of power.

Satire asks whether we have the stomach to even look at these things which, in other contexts, are designed purely to harm us. Corruption is harm. It is the changing of something to be less than what it is – whether that’s through abuse of power, coercion, seduction or whatever. When we’re corrupted we walk away less than what we were. Our integrity and hence our resilience are both impaired.

Satire dances on the edge of corrupting those who participate in its mockery by inviting them to transgress boundaries. This is difficult to articulate because it’s categorically not the same as the corruption power creates in those it touches. The corruption of satire is one of desensitisation, of catharsis through laughter. Both of those might be useful in the moment, but when I’ve become desensitised how do I hold onto my rage and determination to make a change the next time someone abuses the rules?

I’ve complained repeatedly about the treatment in the show of female presenting characters. They have lacked meaningful agency, representation and determination. They have, by turns, been naïve, corrupt and ineffective.

Part of the show’s satire is to talk about unfettered toxic masculinity of the kind encouraged by fundamentalist Christianity as kultur-religion. It can be persuasively argued that what we’re shown is what happens to women when men are given unchecked power and unending justification for their actions. It is #MeToo on screen with no sugar and no fetishization to make it palatable – it is thus deeply uncomfortable.

It can also be argued that there’s no need for this kind of portrayal. You could, arguably, defang these attitudes entirely without presenting them on screen.

The Boys clearly opts to show corruption in all its ugliness (and I’ve nary heard a word from people complaining about the hyper stylised violence by the way, so our sensitivities are absolutely… selective). In its relentless satirical bent it’s not focused on portraying a moral universe where the scales inevitably balance.

We might wish for that. We might dearly wish for that to be the way our stories are constructed. I suspect that if The Boys were to spoon feed us it would be with a broken, jagged knife tip.

The Boys’ refusal to preach, to come down explicitly on one side within the context of its characters’ stories, should and will remain a struggle for me. I think that is the heart of what makes satire – it should never be comfortable. It should always make us angry.

That anger should be aroused from two places – the first is the mockery of the powerful, but the second should be in our being forced to participate as spectators to the abuse the powerful mete out to their victims.

This means that satire will always walk the line of being unacceptably exploitative and focused just a little too much on the moral ugliness which it is seeking to murder.

I think The Boys is good satire, by which I mean that sometimes it crosses that line.

Rating? 10 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston