This story contains spoilers for the fourth-season finale of The Boys.
It hasn’t even been a full week yet since a presidential candidate survived an apparent assassination attempt, and yet today on Prime Video, you can watch a superpowered Donald Trump stand-in try to kill the president-elect…on January 6th, because of course. Since at least season 2, The Boys has worn its Trump/MAGA allegory on its sleeve, but in the now-concluded season 4, to still call this aspect of the show “subtext” would be generous. Government coups, the weaponized spread of misinformation, political figures serving as mere mouthpieces for shadowy figures wielding the real power… it’s all plot fodder for the series, which is practically ripping inspiration right from the headlines.
After the initial shock and confusion of last Saturday’s events began to wear off, references to The Boys ran rampant on the timeline, including plenty of jokes about how eerily prescient the satirical superhero drama had become. On the one hand, it’s a little jejune to start thinking about TV when real shit is happening in the world, but really, can you blame anyone’s mind for wandering there? Season 4’s story had arrived at a juncture that had Homelander—the show’s narcissistic superman, angling for total domination—and vice-president elect Victoria Neumann plotting the president-elect Robert Singer’s assassination, and easing key cabinet figures into the idea so their seizure of power would go unchallenged.
Thankfully, in this week’s finale, The Boys remembered that it’s first and foremost a show about aquamen and people with laser eyes and glowy hands. We were spared an uncomfortably-familiar scenario where, say, a shooter took aim at Singer at his inauguration rally—instead, a shapeshifter infiltrated his bunker and (lightly anticlimactic) superpowered hijinks ensued. Singer was saved, but through a series of twists I won’t bother breaking down here, Homelander’s plan still came to fruition. The season ends with a straw man in the Oval Office—not Neumann, who waffled and died for it, but an even more willing puppet who, on behalf of Homelander, enacts a sort of superhero martial law in the country. Our heroes, the titular Boys, are captured and sent to black-site prisons, and in a casually bleak bit of business, everyone in the superhero-marketing corporation Vought that might pose a threat to Homelander’s regime is slaughtered in the office.
And with that, the fifth and final season promises to be even bleaker. As of now The Boys remains watchable—we’re far past the series’ second-season peak, but penultimate seasons are always tricky on shows like this, tasked with treading water until a big climactic showdown. But as we lurch toward what promises to be, at best, the most bizarre election of all time and one that could have calamitous implications depending on the result, it’s getting harder to find the show “cathartic,” as showrunner Eric Kripke has described it. In that same interview, Kripke wisecracked that he sometimes thinks of his team as “Satan’s writers room,” for the way the show’s fictitious narratives tend to align with or even anticipate real, terrible events. (Sometimes through inadvertent coincidence—this season, which wrapped filming over a year ago, began with Homelander on trial.)
As Homelander grows inevitably more unhinged and power-hungry—with the real-world right-wingers he stands in for seemingly on a similar trajectory—the show is inadvertently becoming a little less enjoyable. Thank God season 4 didn’t air closer to the fall. (Kripke, or someone at Amazon at least, seemed to realize how closely the art was beginning to imitate reality: the season finale’s original title, “Assassination Run,” was scrubbed, and a disclaimer airs in front of the episode.)
Still, while there’s no way this series doesn’t sign off with a conclusion that lands somewhere closer to a grey middle ground than simply good defeating evil, it’s not pitch-black enough to end without Homelander being defeated in some regard at least, right? Whichever way the election goes, who knows—maybe season 5 may end up flipping the script and being comfort food instead. Let’s just hope the remainder of 2024 doesn’t give Kripke and his Satanists much more in the way of material than it already has.
