The original post: /r/television by /u/ObviousAnything7 on 2024-07-18 16:17:26.
Watched the finale of season 4 of The Boys. I wanted to try and figure out why my feelings towards it are so mixed.I have a couple of things that I want to address
The first thing I want to talk about is the pacing and structure of the season. A lot happens during season 4. And at the same time, a lot of time is spent meandering over side characters and arcs that feel very irrelevant to the rest of the story. Examples being Frenchie’s guilt over his past sins and his strange relationship with Colin, Kimiko confronting the Shinging Light trafickers, Hughie’s mom coming back into his life only to disappear again once Hughie Sr dies, The Deep and his sea creature shenanigans, Noir 2.0, etc. So much time is spent on these characters and yet I feel like none of these characters and their respective stories contributed much to the overall themes and enjoyment of the season.
Also the structure of the show just feels really weird to me. I feel like the plot isn’t advancing naturally like you’d expect it to. The Boys are constantly flip flipping from location A to B to C and back to A with little to no downtime. It almost feels like they’re doing side-quests. The season feels like a poorly stitched together sequence of significant moments and scenes that don’t gel together organically. Things just happen and everyone moves on to the next big thing instantly because there’s just so much going on and so much that needs to happen before the finale.
The second thing that kinda bothered me was the lack of focus on how the public reacts to the events of the show. I know, we had a big riot between the hometeamers and starlighters at the beginning of the season. But ever since that very first episode I feel like we’ve barely seen what the world of The Boys looks like now and how it’s changed for the worse. This is especially apparent in the final episode where you have a literal election going, an assassination attempt, and then a successful assassination of a VP elect and it barely feels like any of this has any real impact on the people of the country. It feels like it has no weight. We only see what happens to The Boys, but it doesn’t feel the same, because The Boys are always in danger any way. All these world changing events are happening and we see no tangible change on the screen aside from news reports telling us “oh there are riots happening”. And this is a big problem, because The Boys season 4 is trying its best to compare the supes to modern day MAGA types, but it begins to fall flat, because the events that take place in The Boys don’t even feel real anymore and feel even less analogous to the real life MAGA movement.
And the last thing I want to talk about is Hughie’s sudden pacifist realisation in the final episode. I think this was a really hamfisted attempt at trying to preach to the audience. What part of the events that take place have made Hughie think, “we need to be nicer to eachother, violence isn’t the answer guys”???. The world is literally falling apart, and this guy suddenly feels like we need to start being nicer to eachother.
Fuck off.
The whole pacificist character arc would’ve worked SO MUCH better with Butcher instead, a guy who’s always been a “the ends justify the means” type of person, a guy who’s shown little to no care about the people around him, a person who’s always been vicious and spiteful towards himself and the world. It would’ve been so much more effective for Butcher to come to the pacificist realisation with Ryan, which is what I thought the show was going to do. It would’ve been really cool to see Butcher come to terms with his mortality, to choose to respect Ryan as a person and not treat him as means to kill Homelander, to not repeat the mistakes of the past and to make Ryan a genuinely good person. This would’ve been a really effective to way to actually show how compassion is more effective fighting evil than anything else.
But alas, the show doesn’t go down that route, Ryan kills Grace and Butcher goes back to being a murderous cunt. AGAIN.
I feel like there’s a lot more to say about this season of The Boys but I’ll leave it at this for now. I apologise if this post seems really disorganised. These are my immediate thoughts and I wanted to get them out there.