Even an assassination-themed finale offers toothless commentary for our fanged-up times.
Something predictable happens in “Assassination Run,” the fourth-season finale of The Boys: The megalomaniacal superhero Homelander takes over the U.S. government. The details of how he does this — through a coup on January 6, with “patriots” supporting him and a televised speech in which he promises that under his leadership, “America will be safe again” — are representative of the kind of dull-blade political satire to which this series has increasingly turned. Over time, its progressive partisanship curled into smugness, and its ripped-from-the-real-world mimicry doomed the series to anti-climax. Wherever The Boys ends up in its upcoming fifth and final season, Homelander’s new role as a god-emperor version of our 45th president is certain to play a significant part. That’s a guarantee, and it’s a narratively unfulfilling one.
Because there’s an earlier moment in “Assassination Run,” another atrocity for which Homelander is responsible, that reminds us of how piercing The Boys used to be when it didn’t lean on resistance-Twitter talking points and instead leveled its laser eyes on late-stage-capitalism targets not named Donald J. Trump. Inside Vought Tower, as Homelander prepares for his coup, he assembles a list of Vought International employees who know too much about the blunders and murders committed by Homelander’s superhero team, the Seven. Writers, assistants, marketeers — anyone could be a potential whistleblower, and they all need to be removed “permanently, by the end of the day,” Homelander says to his loyalists. Chace Crawford’s line delivery of “Sorry, bro, you’re on the list,” and the Deep’s punching through a former colleague’s face, then crossing his name off a slip of paper, is all done with a degree of casual callousness that plays out like a psychopath’s version of escorting someone out of the building on their last day. This is The Boys’s rendition of mass layoffs, and it’s the exact morbid spin on corporate culture that this series can still deliver when it tries.
The top-down selfishness of the executive class, the disposability of employees, the facetiousness of “we’re a family” posturing — those by-products of Fortune 500 greed exist outside political boundaries, and The Boys is often at its most creative and most uncompromising when it’s eviscerating the moral emptiness of America’s one percent. This is what the series started as, after all. When Eric Kripke’s adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s same-named graphic novels premiered in 2019, it changed its source material to amp up Vought International’s hold on the entertainment industry, drawing parallels to Marvel’s and DC’s vast cinematic universes. The key to mockery was making The Boys world seem real by blurring its lines with our own: Executive producer Seth Rogen (who starred in 2011’s odd-duck superhero comedy The Green Hornet) played himself in a couple cameos; there was a reference to former Marvel Cinematic Universe mastermind Joss Whedon working for Vought Studios. Vought was a monoculture force that controlled everything — cable news, blockbuster movies, evangelical Christianity, birthday-party decorations — and that aspired to also make a move into the military, to transition superheroes from public figures policing locally for Vought to internationally known superstars fighting crime and terrorism around the world.
The Boys’s scorn for the highest echelons of American capitalism takes an Ask a Manager email and puts it through a nightmare filter.
By the time season one dropped on Prime Video in July 2019, fans were already grumbling over Marvel’s relationship with the U.S. military, especially in light of an Air Force Recruiting Service commercial that coincided with the release of Captain Marvel. The Boys’s explicit message that costumed supes — pop-culture diversions — aligning with America’s armed forces for shared propaganda purposes was a bad idea felt like a meta rebuke. (To Ennis and Robertson’s credit, their comics are dripping with contempt for weapons manufacturers like Lockheed-Martin and Haliburton and their role in benefiting from the forever wars waged by the U.S. after September 11, 2001.) And the show’s positioning of Vought as ethically hollow for treating diversity and representation as worthwhile so long as they provided financial gain had a smirking energy that felt less cynical than resentful. When scaled up, the transactional thinking that puts business gains and never-ending growth first leads to all kinds of social evils, The Boys argued, and it did so by mocking Vought’s increasingly bald attempts to gobble up market share, its condescension toward its own fans, and how corruptible its higher-ups were.
The Boys was the first of Prime Video’s burgeoning mini-genre of corporate-satire series, and its initial thematic questions were ones I’m a Virgo, Fallout, and Utopia have also grasped at with variable degrees of success: In a world where we can be sterilized against our will, as in Utopia, and persecuted and racially profiled, as in I’m a Virgo, and murdered en masse, as in Fallout, all in the quest for a soaring stock price — how do we become more than a wallet to be opened? (That this corporate-satire series is solidifying itself on Amazon is surely not lost on anyone.) In Kripke’s series, these queries came through in shareholder meetings and fan conventions, in Vought decision-making dens where executives like Madelyn Stillwell, Stan Edgar, and Ashley Barrett crassly scheme to expand the company’s ubiquity while keeping up a facade of benevolence. Unlike the series’s approach to mocking conservative politics — which in this fourth season leaned hard on copying contemporaneous scenarios, like a right-wing elected official blathering on about “legitimate rape” à la Todd Akin or a conspiracy theorist storming a building because he was convinced children were being sex-trafficked there — The Boys’s scorn for the highest echelons of American capitalism doesn’t simply indulge its audience in what they might already believe. It takes an Ask a Manager email and puts it through a nightmare filter.
Like in “Assassination Run,” when Homelander agrees with the Deep that they should kill underling Ashley for all the information she has on their illegal activities, but neither of them knows her last name, so they end up killing her assistant (also named Ashley) instead. Or the season-long gag Training A-Train, a Vought-funded biopic of Seven member A-Train that rewrites his childhood, turning his Black brother and coach into a drug dealer who is replaced by a white savior played by Will Ferrell. The movie’s “Blind Side vibe” is a cringeworthy spin on Oscar bait when we visit the set in third episode “We’ll Keep the Red Flag Flying Here,” and then transforms into an infuriating observation of our tax-break-obsessed media landscape in “Assassination Run,” when it’s revealed that Vought canceled the movie because they “realized we’d make more from the write-off.”
That sounds familiar, but the series justifies its conspicuousness by linking the plot point to an earlier one – the V752 Expo in “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son.” In that episode, Vought personalities introduce “custom digital product placement” that uses cultural, ethnic, and racial stereotypes to serve specialized commercials to viewers watching Vought TV and movie content in “phases seven through 19” of the VCU. This is another opportunity for the company to turn “diversity” into dollars after adding a second Black supe to the Seven. BIPOC Vought fans in the audience hesitate at first, but then ultimately clap for the very algorithms that will depersonalize them and, episodes later, will decide Training A-Train, a wannabe prestige picture starring a Black man, is worth more to the company deleted than it is released.
What effective satire accomplishes through a mixture of humor and discomfort is to force our faces against a mirror and persuade us to reconsider what we see, which The Boys’s attacks on corporate culture have always managed to do. But as Homelander’s character transformed from a public figure in the time of Trump to Trump himself, the corporate satire became side plot, diminished to background texture for a primary storyline that exhaustively (and exhaustingly) prioritized culture-war commentary. What’s so frustrating about this fourth season of The Boys is how often it was satisfied with just pointing and laughing at politics — and ignoring the more entertaining question of why any of us acquiesce to corporate executives calling the shots. Think of the Federalist sex party, and how bankrupt its “evil right-wingers have deviant kinks” framing was; is there anything more overdone in The Boys at this point than indecorous orgies attended by hypocrites?
So much, too much, of The Boys’s tone has now become assumptive — of course we’ll see, through Homelander, how dangerous Trump is for America; of course we’ll understand, through good ol’ boys like Tek Knight, how America’s criminal-justice system is broken — that it’s adopted the tone of screed, repeating what we’ve lived through without analyzing our place or involvement within it. When The Boys switches focus to a target like Vought, though, it reckons with what we see in ourselves: our obsession with spectacle, our alliance with brands, and our pervasive, misguided belief we’ll be billionaires. Those aspects of our American identity are worth analyzing, worth mocking, and worth changing. This country’s evils aren’t exclusive to Homelander, and The Boys was better when it remembered that.
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