It’s a grim state of affairs when the most optimistic element of your season finale is that our side’s strongest player gets her powers back—just in time to flee while every single other member of the good guys gets rounded up by supes serving fascist stormtroopers aligned under a psychopath Superman, who is now President in all ways save for official capacity. Forget all those previous times things seemed bad—that was just prelude to things being awful.

“Assassination Run” caps off a fascinating but uneven season of The Boys, one that (admirably) tried to do too much, but as a result ended up dropping a lot of narrative threads or rushing through character arcs in a mad dash to push it all forward. I’ve said it before: I much prefer this strategy to the “padded-out movie” vibes of far too many streaming shows. Still, just because your way is more fun doesn’t make it correct. The Boys has always been more-more-more, but this season didn’t know when to stop and take a breath, and thus lost some of the adrenaline-spiked momentum through sheer refusal to pause and let its audience take it all in.

Still, if you’re going to go dark, have a good time doing it. And this season closer gave us a lot of enjoyable moments en route to such a seemingly hopeless end. Some of it was gallows humor, but much more was effective character beats, borne of steadily enriching the inner lives of our protagonists and antagonists alike, so we can laugh at them inevitably being who they are. Whether it’s Kimiko brightly giving a big “Hi!” to a bedraggled Annie, freshly escaped from shapeshifter prison, or Hughie and M.M. clumsily attempting to pretend they don’t know faux-Annie is the killer with a labored “Heyyyyyyyyy!,” there were so many nice little moments of humor borne from the sheer delight of seeing our heroes in awkward situations.

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What drives these people? This show is premised upon going over the top, and some episodes may get more ridiculous than others, but ultimately The Boys will always come back to its twinned core themes: How can we maintain our humanity in a world that seems hell-bent on beating it out of us (and what compromises do we have to accept just to get through the day), and how do you keep fighting the good fight when the odds appear insurmountable? These intertwined questions of morality drive the arc of nearly every character. They’re the same questions that powered Kripke’s last series, too. Supernatural was about brothers fighting monsters of the week, but it was fundamentally about what ideals people will sacrifice to win, and how even holding on to your better angels can sometimes seem pointless when the bad guys practically control our lives.

The Boys can get a bit too cute with its topical references and allusions to America’s current political situation (and be fairl…

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Hi-fives all around to those who watched all of the scenes with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Joe Kessler this season and thought to themselves, “Yeah, that guy isn’t actually there.” I watched this week’s episode with someone who had not remotely considered the possibility that Kessler was a figment of Butcher’s imagination, and they uttered an audible gasp when Kessler interrupted Butcher’s vision of his wife with a vituperative, “Shut your fucking cake-hole, bitch.” (Honestly, I’m a little jealous. That reveal apparently played like gangbusters.)

Yes, The Boys has been Fight Club-ing us all season with Butcher’s old war buddy, who was left to die by our protagonist way back in the day, and we even get the full montage of sequences in reality—sans Kessler—to drive home the point that Butcher has been talking to himself from the start. What makes it work—beyond the stunt of it all—is how the show sells the idea that Kessler is somehow more a part of Butcher than…

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This is exactly what I was afraid of.

Ever since the early reference to plot points from Gen V that appeared in episode one, I’ve been warily awaiting some element that felt out of place. Maybe a MacGuffin introduced awkwardly, or a casual mention of a character or event in which it seemed as though the show were expecting you to know what it was talking about—something to signal that the two shows are connected to the point where unfamiliarity with the newer series could harm your enjoyment of the original. But all through this season, I’ve felt comfortable with the storytelling (with regard to this issue, anyway). It’s never come across like there was something missing, some gap in my knowledge that was clearly traceable back to the spinoff. I hadn’t seen Gen V? No problem, The Boys seemed to be saying; this is a TV show. It can, and should, stand on its own two feet.1

But wow, did this episode shred any lingering hope of The Boys continuing down that …

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After episode three, I guessed that we were heading into some very dark territory. I just want the show to know it didn’t have to prove me right quite so fast, and in such a bleak manner. If “We’ll Keep The Red Flag Flying Here” was The Boys in fun mode, “Wisdom Of The Ages” is pretty much the exact opposite of that. There’s plenty of great material here, but it doesn’t matter how loudly they crank that awful Deep/Firecracker cover version of “Up Where We Belong” over the end credits—this is a downer of an episode.

The most obvious reason for that is also the one that throws our protagonists right back into the defensive position, with any public support or governmental aid they previously had quickly slipping through their fingers. It once again makes them serious underdogs in the fight against Neuman and Homelander (and now Sage, as well), but not in a plucky, all-for-one-and-one-for-all way. No, this was a very unpleasant public dismantling of Starli…

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If there’s one thing The Boys loves doing, it’s delivering deadly serious life and death stakes in the midst of the silliest settings you could ever plausibly imagine being real. I’ve often wondered why more comedies haven’t made hay out of how ludicrous most IP-themed ice skating shows are. Speaking as someone who always enjoys them, they are deeply, almost powerfully stupid affairs. Even Disney On Ice, inarguably the high-water mark for such productions, is objectively bananas. So taking one of these shows and adding the frankly not-that-far-removed-from-many-contemporary-Christian-fundamentalist-performances element of Vought’s right-wing politics, all so the show can unleash a bloodbath? That’s just damn good entertainment.

Sure, there’s some potent psychodrama and character studies happening, but this dip into espionage thriller territory actually counts as one of the more light-hearted episodes of the series in recent memory. (That’s admittedly gr…

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I can’t find it at the moment,1 but there was an article a number of years back in which Republican and Democratic strategists and commentators were interviewed. The Republicans all talked about how they (and their candidates) would receive the daily messaging and soundbite-approved talking points from the RNC, and promptly either parrot them publicly themselves or direct their candidates to do so. The Democratic strategists and commentators, almost to a one, talked about how they’d ignore those daily memos, because, as they said, “I have better ideas and better ways to say them.” (I am seriously paraphrasing, here.) Any time people ask why Dems are so bad at getting their message out, I’m reminded of it. Honestly, I think about it a lot.

You see where I’m going with this.

Thematically, this is one of the more cohesive and artfully assembled episodes the show has done. It wasn’t perfect, but in terms of connecting the many disparate storylines with an overarching concept, it blows a lot of other installments out of the water. (Or, to quote Sage, “It blows harder than Nancy Reagan on the MGM backlot.”) Vought, Sage, Firecracker—they understand the power of symbolism, of circular messaging, providing a clear and easily digestible narrative that speaks to their target audience. “I bring ‘em together, tell ‘em a story, give ‘em a purpose,” as Firecracker succinctly explains to Sage, when pushed about whether she’s dumb enough to actually believe the bullshit she’s peddling. “I mean, which would you rather believe: That you belong with a community of warriors battling a secret evil, or that you’re a lonely inconsequential nobody that no one will ever remember?” (For an even more succinct take, there’s always Bruce Springsteen: “At the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe.”)

She doesn’t have the resources or the intelligence to take it beyond the low-level pandering that puts her in front of drooling men at events like TruthCon, but Firecracker is sharp enough to execute the same rough fundamentals of propaganda and cult-of-personality tactics that Sage is just beginning to practice on a nationwide/global level. It’s not even that smart: It’s one of those things that more or less everybody understands at this point (hell, 10-year-olds can explain why Bruce Wayne became a bat when he decided to fight crime). It’s a staple of not just superhero narratives, but narratives, period. Plato’s cave gets at this, among many other intellectually fecund examples. Symbols are more powerful than words.

So why are the good guys always so bad at it? The generous answer is that they want to be better—to avoid the reductive propaganda and simplistic, dumbed-down messaging that seems to be so facile and appealing. The fact that life is complicated is analytically important. Unfortunately, complications don’t create soldiers. They create confusion. Madelyn Stillwell got this. Stormfront really got this. Sage and Firecracker get it. And when your goal is power, when you don’t care about making things better, or indulging in humanism (or Butcher’s preferred target of scorn, compassion) or all the things that make us kinder and more forgiving, well, that’s why you’re better at it.

Annie January knows this. She gets the importance of symbols, of hope, of someone to place your faith in, even before Hughie reminds her of it. And yet she doesn’t want to participate, for all the reasons outlined above and more. Being a supe was the most miserable time of her life. It left her traumatized, disillusioned, and cold. It’s all too easy to understand why she wants nothing to do with “Starlight.” But ultimately, seeing the way their opponents have weaponized it forces her to reconsider. She doesn’t give Hughie’s “I’m just so sick of losing” speech from last season, but it’s certainly percolating under the surface. She wants to reassure, to inspire—and that means putting on a light show and standing above her cheering admirers, in order to give them hope and motivate to continue fighting for the side of good. Or, as she tells Hughie, “I’m gonna let a shitbag like A-Train step up, but I won’t?”

The hunt for more symbols, more power, leads Sage to TruthCon. Which by extension leads our heroes, who know Sage was behind the frame job against the two black men accused of killing Todd and the other Homelander fanatics, to the event as well. The episode nails the tone and tenor of these kinds of events, as anyone who has seen or attended them can attest. The testosterone and wannabe militaristic roleplaying, the barely veiled racism, the percolating anger funneled toward false but easy targets like “global pedophile rings” or immigrants—it’s all there, with the little flourishes of humor the show always utilizes to leaven the dispiriting reality that stuff like TruthCon really exists. (“Deep’s Blue Sea Room” is a phrase I’d wager someone in the writer’s room has been sitting on for awhile.)

It also becomes the setting of the climactic fight, after the con ends and the space is repurposed for the family-friendly—and excellently themed—bat mitvah, “The Marvelous Ms. Rachel.”2 It’s an action sequence delightfully enlivened by the presence of “Splinter,” a dimwitted Multiple Man-esque supe last seen engaging in a daisy chain of self-salad tossing that left all his doubles with pinkeye. Sage, unsurprisingly, was on to our team from the start, setting up a sting operation to trap them. And sure, they survive (even if Splinter doesn’t), but Sage’s larger purpose is still achieved—more ammunition for public mobilization against the good guys.

It also sets up an opportunity for a Butcher redemption arc, which the show then undercuts at the very end. After being fired immediately following his confession of his health status (we’re at about six months to live for him, now), Butcher shows up to try and seize control of the situation, only for M.M. to throw him out. So when Butcher reappears just when he’s needed and rescues everybody, it’s understandable to think he’ll be back with the team—especially after the genuinely heartfelt plea to M.M. that he makes back at the office, all but begging for help rescuing Ryan, in order to do one good deed before he dies. Instead, the show blows up the seeming reconciliation: “Too fucking little, Butcher…too fucking late,” M.M. spits, and we cut to credits. There was no Kessler this episode, but after being so definitively rejected by his team, it’s almost certain Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s offer to Butcher is about to be accepted.

Some other supporting storylines are being put into action here, as well. Frenchie’s inebriated call to Cherie reveals the real reason he’s being weird around Colin: back in his former life, Frenchie killed Colin’s family, something that will presumably go over about as well as pinkeye in the chocolate fountain at a bat mitzvah, when Colin finds out. And Kimiko, who has thus far this season been doing little more than supporting Frenchie’s affection for the other man (admittedly in a very funny way, after she drinks four six eight of A-Train’s boozy energy drink), suddenly confronts her past. A sign of fake pedo-ring nonsense uses the picture of a woman from her dark past, and after briefly pondering actually doing the work with her therapist, the news alert on the Shining Light—the group that killed her parents and kidnapped her and her brother into their ring—instead sends her out the door. We haven’t really explored this part of her character since season two; it feels overdue for a Kimiko side quest.

And meanwhile, Homelander’s efforts to have his son follow in his footsteps keep blowing up in his face. Especially this time, he has no one to blame but himself, sabotaging Ryan’s meticulously choreographed rescue scenario and so throwing the kid off his game that Ryan gets startled into flinging his fight-maestro buddy Koy to his death, rather than the genteel toss they had planned. These scenes with the two of them tend to follow a standard template: Homelander is initially understanding and encouraging, but quickly loses patience’s with his son’s insistence on caring about people. What makes it effective is the groundwork already laid. We’ve seen Homelander arguing with himself in the mirror, a part of him still craving that human connection and approval. He gets so upset with Ryan because his kid is the part of himself he’s working to bury. That’s gonna be tough when there’s a sentient reminder of it calling him out on a daily basis.

Symbols of hope keep circling the edges of the frame. A-Train wants to be one, but beneath the stories he tries to feed his nephews, he hates the things he’s done. Hughie just wants to believe in one, his support for Annie a way to distract himself from the pain and betrayal he feels from his mother. Butcher wants to tear them all down, refusing to accept that a world with symbols of hope is a world without, well, hope. But everyone knows how powerful they are. It’s just a question of what to do with that knowledge. Too bad Sage isn’t sharing.

Stray observations

• I was mostly convinced we were about to watch an A-Train flashback at the beginning, until Will Ferrell stepped out of the car, and the appalling Blind Side-esque (name-checked, even!) tales got nicely, if a little broadly, skewered. Bonus points for “Ferrell Streep.”3

• The filming also helped reveal that the new Black Noir is mostly treating his latest gig as an acting challenge.

• Always happy to see Rosemarie Dewitt pop up, and she’s doing a fine job underplaying what could’ve easily been a bit too hammy role as Hughie’s mom.

• The reveal of the “Homeboy” poster made me laugh.

• Honestly, a lot of choice one-liners this episode, though my favorite might’ve been Ashley’s exasperated response to Deep: “Stupid people who think they’re smart make me wanna eat my own shit.”

• Also, Sage is a little too smart for her own good, not noticing that Homelander is already doing exactly what she was worried he’d do: resenting her authority. She might want to listen to Ashley’s advice.

• Homelander’s vanity gets checked again this episode, overhearing the media team gossiping about how many millions it cost to airbrush out his signs of aging in Dawn Of The Seven.

• Valerie Curry is clearly having a ball playing the love-to-hate-her Firecracker.

• Similarly, I owe Jessie T. Usher an apology. I really thought he was over-the-top in season one, but A-Train’s self-hatred has really given him a way to lock into the character and deliver a strong performance. Most Improved Performance award, there.

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of season four of The Boys, Prime Video’s grisly look at a world of superheroes. As always, this review is free for all, with subsequent reviews—episodes two and three will follow in the coming days—exclusively for paid subscribers. For more information on our schedule for June and what your subscription gets you, check out our About Page in the meantime for more information.

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You know what they say about Chekhov’s Glass Jar Of Superhuman Pubic Hair: If you put it on a tray in episode one, you must use it for some extremely gross but relevant reason by episode eight.

The Boys has never been one to shy away from tossing another narrative ball in the air, confident it can juggle them all effectively. And historically, it’s mostly done exactly that, give or take a Black Noir. What began as an entertaining but sometimes fairly straightforward subversion of superhero tropes in service of a gonzo (albeit obvious) meditation on “power corrupts” quickly grew more rich and involving with each passing year. Season three was its darkest but most compelling outing yet, leveling up from the Nazism-under-every-right-wing-rock tale of Stormfront in season two. After plunging headfirst into topics like manipulation of digital media and how cults of personality are formed and maintained, it set its despairing (but never as nihilistic as it’s often accused of being) satirical sights on the shifting ground of allegiances: political, emotional, and moral. In Eric Kripke’s clever adaptation of Garth Ennis’ far uglier source material, almost no one sets out to betray or hurt another person they care about. It just happens—and often in the pursuit of seemingly noble ends.

But let’s not sideline the fun, which is half the reason we’re here. This is still a show where people get fists punched straight through their heads and viscera explodes on everyone in the immediate vicinity, usually accompanied by a puerile gag or cartoonishly repugnant set piece. For every surprisingly earnest redemption arc like Maeve’s, there’s a Herogasm. And that tonal whiplash, more often than not, is the fun.

Last season ended with Butcher sacrificing his vendetta against Homelander in order to save Ryan, only to have the caped psychopath stroll off with the kid, his team remove him as leader, and all of that just to find out his use of Temp V is going to kill him within a year or so. The first episode back smartly and efficiently carries on those dynamics, in ways that pay off existing relationships while also using them to convincingly launch new subplots. As I mentioned above, there’s a lot of narrative balls in the air here, so let’s take them one at a time.

Our main storyline has swung smack into the presidential race, where Robert Singer and head-popping vice presidential candidate Victoria Neuman are busy winning their bid for the White House. I was relieved the show immediately revealed Singer to be in on The Boys’ attempt to kill her, both because it’s exhausting watching characters be in the dark about things that were long ago revealed to the viewer (not to mention everyone around them), but also because—after two seasons of the odds being comically stacked against our protagonists—having the resources of the CIA at their disposal finally gives some legitimate juice to the two-pronged fight against Homelander and Neuman. It opens up the worlds in which the team can travel, paying dividends for both plot and character.

It also sets up Butcher’s new temptation. (Hi, Jeffrey Dean Morgan!) Running out of time, sidelined by his own team (with very fucking good reason, it should be noted, as he single-handedly fucks up their six-months-in-the-offing plan to kill Neuman) and hallucinating visions of his dead wife, in comes old friend Kessler to offer him a spot with a team who seems to actually value him. I hope Morgan’s character is genuine; the least interesting angle here would be yet another asshole in friend’s clothing introduced just so he could betray his longtime buddy. Plus, it would give Butcher something to do besides toy once again with the idea of betraying Hughie, a move that officially hit diminishing returns after he knocked Hughie out last season. (Credit for quickly squashing that notion, with a selfie of his butthole to Neuman, no less.) A Butcher that is hugging Hughie and mourning his failed vengeance quest is a more interesting iteration of the character.

Homelander’s story, by contrast, has gone from occasionally reflecting Trumpism and contemporary politics to full-on aping them in ways that are often funny, but even more often uncomfortable in their familiarity. This runs the gamut from his trial for murder, stemming from lasering apart the head of a leftist protester in season three’s finale (shades of our ex-President’s “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”) to the QAnon mimicry of his supporters. Whether it’s the vlogger parroting baseless talking points about the pedophile tendencies of anyone who dares oppose the head of The Seven or the literal sacrificial victims to the cause of Homelander (R.I.P. Todd), the show is leaning into its parody of our current political landscape in ways that would seem thuddingly obvious if real-life wasn’t becoming a worryingly close copy of a copy.

Yet the show refuses to let Homelander fall into one-note villainy. Rather than just hammering home the “it’s lonely at the top” theme repeatedly, Homelander spurns his circle of ever-more-pathetic yes men to seek out Sage (or “Sister” Sage; as she acidly notes, Vought “can’t have one of us without a racial qualifier”). Her intelligence and horrifying realpolitik gives him meaning and purpose, Sage becoming the Steve Bannon to his super-powered Trump. In some ways, she’s a Stormfront 2.0, someone who can’t wait to use his abilities to carry out her machinations, only this time without the personal affection or ideological blinders. Sure, he’ll still order Deep to perform oral sex on A-Train to prove their pitiful sycophancy, but with her help, those commands are soon applied to worryingly propagandistic ends—literal ends, in the form of Todd and his fellow bludgeoned dimwits.

Meanwhile, the rest of our heroes are grappling with the fallout of their various choices, almost all of which harmed someone they love. Hughie beats himself up for not being a better son prior to his dad’s stroke; M.M. tries to locate Todd to help his troubled daughter, who is acting out following the divorce; Starlight watches her pleas for tolerance fall on deaf ears as her friend and her organization’s best asset is beaten senseless by Homelander supporters. Some of these play better than others; Simon Pegg has been there since episode one, making Hugh Campbell’s coma at least pluck a heartstring. The introduction of a new love interest for Frenchie, by contrast, feels too abrupt by half, the character’s introduction rushed and the development haphazard. And Butcher’s offhand mention of an anti-supe virus Neuman is overseeing development of is even more offhand, when it seems like something our heroes should immediately be dropping everything to investigate.

In other words, the show is struggling to keep all these balls going up and down in sync. (Insert appropriately puerile joke here.) This isn’t a new problem—season three’s premiere felt similarly overstuffed—but it’s straining mightily to keep these many parts moving. When you get all the way through a recap of the events from this episode and realize you haven’t even mentioned the bloodthirsty adolescent who can shred Kimiko’s arm clean off with her mouth tentacles, there may be a slight surfeit of developments. Nonetheless, we’ve got a whole season to expand on the events of this hour, and The Boys has earned my trust. Let’s see where it goes.

Stray Observations

• Welcome, everyone, to the reviews of season four! One of the things I’m most looking forward to this season is hearing from the commenters, because this show is nothing if not a near-endless fount of provocations on which to debate. Whether it sticks the landing or not, that part should be fun.

• Ashley couldn’t hide her enthusiasm for Homelander’s command of sexual assault to Deep and A-Train. Colby Minifie is so, so good at playing fucked-up.

• M.M., meanwhile, is still at his best when exasperated: “Fucking Gruyère puffs?!” He also gets one of the best non-gruesome, non-political jokes: “I just logged in five minutes ago!”

• I get why it was such a short scene, but Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s introduction needed more time to breathe. That scene was all about Butcher, meaning we still know basically nothing about this new, presumably important, character.

• Kimiko’s post-splat face is a rare instance of the show actually not reveling in gratuitous gross-out.

• The real-life alignment of Trump’s trial/s is almost too much kismet. Production wrapped over a year ago, yet the in-universe ads fundraising for Homelander’s Legal Defense Fund feel like they could have been filmed yesterday.

• They’re certainly playing Ryan’s ambivalence close to the vest, but I did laugh at his and Homelander’s simultaneous, “…toys for our amusement!”

• Yes, that was Tilda Swinton as the voice of Ambrosius, the lovestruck octopus.

• “I do NOT want to miss Smash Mouth.”

• Who wants to take bets on what’s happening inside Butcher’s head? Give me your best guess.