Life goes on for the Boys…

It’s been a year since the events at the end of Season 2. From the opening minutes it seems that most everyone has moved on from Stormfront. The Boys themselves are largely going about their lives – some of them still involved in dealing with supes while others have managed to get their lives back, or at least into a shape they’d never dreamed possible during events in Seasons 1 and 2.

If that sounds like a recipe for a lovely little domestic drama about people having a good time then within the first ten minutes of the first episode we are given to understand in no uncertain terms that the blood, gore, violence and edge of the park gross-out nature of The Boys is very much still alive.

Add to that an almost immediate return to people being absolutely horrendous to one another and it’s business as normal. Except I’d say the gore here is no longer shocking. Heads pop, bodies smush like water balloons and people die with alarming regularity but there’s nothing like the whale from season 2 and there’s nothing like when Homelander simply killed everyone at the hideout.

Sure, the show is determined to try its best to shock but I think if you’ve made it to Season 3 of The Boys you’ve already demonstrated a… resilience to this kind of imagery that means there’s nowhere really to go on the shock the viewer stakes.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Human bodies are fragile things and the kinds of activities contained in this show are going to make you splatter like a burst squib more often than not.

In some ways I think this has freed the storytelling a little. Sure, no one suffers psychologically from what they’re experiencing but that’s hardly the point of the hyper-real style adopted by the show. What we get in the first three episodes is a lot of character development. Not that this slows the story down at all, nor saves it from some pretty hokey moments, but all our main characters get their chances to make choices, discover things about themselves and to connect with others. It’s the best The Boys has been in this area and it really helps what happens later to mean something.

The early episodes also deal with the aftermath of Stormfront – not just in the context of the world of The Boys, but there’s a strong sense that the writers are answering critics like me who’s accused them of using Nazism as a plot device without centring just how evil and unforgivable the ideas in it are. This is a good thing and as the stories at the heart of Season 3 ramp up they do so in parallel with the consequences of what came before.

Those consequences act as motivating incidents in many cases and this too is good – it’s good writing, fun to watch and horrifying as we see characters cycling right back into what destroyed them before.

It’s been pretty well covered at this point how Soldier Boy, the very first Super, makes an appearance in the series. I’m not going to talk about him, his team or the McGuffin that leads to this except to say it ties the world together very nicely.

If I have one criticism of the show it’s that it feels like it wants to talk about stuff that matters – cynicism, corruption, barbarity in the name of civilisation and a host of other things – but its commitment to the grotesque and the unrelenting style of satire at its heart mean that no one can be good for long enough for these discussions to have any space on screen.

If Homelander is unremittingly narcissistic he’s only offset by everyone around him being very nearly the same but without his power. Some people are horrified by him, but you never get the feeling that they’re repulsed by his morality – more that he gets away with it when they can’t.

That’s probably a little unfair as Hughie and Starlight are both ‘good’ but their goodness is filtered through a crushing naivety which undermines their morality – as if to say that only the naïve are good.

This structure, while being necessary for the style of satire which is the DNA of The Boys, means there is never a way to tell two sides of an argument or even to reflect that there might be a different way of being.

Still, The Boys remains raucous, toxically funny and exceptionally violent while never letting go of the subjects it wants to skewer. If Homelander is more Donald Trump than ever there’s no less a cruise missile targeted at the Democrats for their compromises, ineffectiveness at tackling corruption and their own frequent duplicitousness.

And unfettered Capitalism remains right at the heart of what this show hates – which I can only applaud.

I can say that most sides will read this wrong – either as a narrative on how to (in the same way that so many people completely misunderstood the point of David Fincher’s film Fight Club) or they’ll miss how their own side is being punctured. Watching it from the other side of the Atlantic probably affords just about the necessary distance one needs to see how no one comes out of this well and that there are no targets missed nor given mercy.

Where The Boys goes in its conclusion is, as ever, for anyone to guess.

It’s not entirely beyond belief that major characters get exploded or shunted off screen, nor is it implausible that we’ll end the season exactly where we started it – with Butcher and Homelander having aggressively achieved no new ground while causing maximum collateral damage in the process.

For me the challenge for a show like this – which is deeply satirical – is it needs to have a heart and that means it needs to tell a story that ends somewhere. We’re in Season 3 now and I am hoping we head towards payoff for our characters.

Verdict: I’m enjoying The Boys, washing my mind out after each episode and then looking forward to the next. Yet at some point I’m going to run out of joy and that’s being hastened by a show which ultimately gives its central protagonists an unchanging sitcom persona when they could be travelling somewhere new.

Rating? 8 buckets of blood out of 10

Stewart Hotston