THE BOYS Season 5

“Oi, f*ck off, you c*nts.” 🥲 Some disjointed thoughts on the end of THE BOYS (and I guess GEN V, sigh…) I’m gonna massively miss this show’s mix of biting satire and OTT action. At this point, because of the state of the world, reality is already stranger than this fiction. But this final season still brought a lot of gems whilst remaining a painfully familiar but no longer particularly exaggerated reflection of our lives.

For me, a lot of these characters met pretty satisfying ends, especially The Deep’s (I loved the Samuel L Jackson cameo) and Ashley’s descent into being a truly divided/conflicted person. And I found all the little digs at the manosphere, Space Karen, the alt right, and toxic religion really cathartic, even if they are now exactly like our reality.

I also loved how meta this season was (that whole scene with Kumail Nanjiani and co was just gold... see pic below!) This season also touched on how erosion of the arts is another indicator of the rise of fascism, most noticeable in Homelander’s shitty movie, from the mention of AI writing to “vfx remove cables” being sloppily left in and the painfully cheesy eagle.

I’m glad this ending was different from the books because ye gods, that would have undermined this show’s entire purpose. And ultimately, the final message was bleak: because of one character’s fate, capitalism won, and as mentioned in one the quotes above, the machine that is ultimately the cause of all this rumbles on. Homelander is also a victim of this machine (in a way that the man he is a parody of is not… that man is very much the machine itself.) That’s something I would like to have seen addressed more because I’m left feeling that the end for this set of characters was ok, but the future itself is bleak. Maybe that’s the point. Some fave quotes:

“You’re fighting an unbeatable foe. You know that, right? We’re just cogs in a great machine and we all have our part to play […] because corporations must still grow. Money must still be made. The machine must still be fed. That is the way of the world.”

“You were already the most powerful person on earth and you were a lonely, miserable fucking piece of shit, throwing tantrums when you didn’t get what you want. Why the fuck would more power make you any better? It’s just gonna make you an even more lonely, miserable piece of shit. And scaring people into calling you god doesn’t make you god. And deep down you know that.”

(I’m sad we won’t get more Gen V as I really loved those characters. Interested to see what direction the prequel goes in, especially given that era’s similarity to the current political landscape.)