Martin Carr reviews the season 1 finale of The Boys…
This is why Amazon greenlit a second season before one minute had been broadcast. Between the breakdowns, heart attacks and callous disregard for each other this moral vacuum of a finale demands your attention. From the blackmailing of high ranging government officials to revelations with ramifications on a global scale, this bloodied, broken and beleaguered group has twisted in the knife and snapped it off. Once the truths of episode seven were revealed there had to be a certain level of cliché but thankfully it’s minimal.
Warmongering to increase profits, burying secrets for personal gain and playing to a crowd for popularity are all common place these days. In television such things are rarely so callously explored without sweetening the pill. Thankfully You Found Me directed by showrunner Eric Kripke allows for no such leniency. Super heroes are felled by their own vanity, need for attention or fear of their own obsolescence. What makes The Boys work on a fundamental level is that shared commonality between them and us.
By understanding that they are nothing more than corporate experiments created to appease a niche market fascinated by super humans, it taps into our preoccupation with getting older and remaining relevant. An essential reason why this house of cards is beginning to crumble ties into this premise, as characters like A-Train and The Deep feel their predominance start slipping away. Others like Queen Maeve express themselves through bitterness and self-loathing as age brings experience, realisation and resignation.
Elsewhere even Butcher has some home truths rearing their ugly heads. Moments when obsession, devotion and the mission become blurred. These things are the reason why people like Karl Urban, Elisabeth Shue and others signed on. Conflicted characters with clashing priorities provide the most dramatic depth. Those shades of grey which supersede comic relief, violent retribution or self-interest engage and fascinate. That super villains are manufactured to maintain profit margins might sound like a leap, but it is the real world behaviour under scrutiny not the possibility of enhanced humans.
At present political corruption is alive and kicking whilst others busy themselves trying to burn its wings off under a magnifying glass. Cambridge Analytics caused similar issues over privacy for Facebook some time ago, whilst arming terrorist splinter cells for global leverage has been documented, satirised and broadcast with no fear of censorship for years. The Boys is just taking that idea a step further using the small screen as a means to promote debate and disseminate information; in certain circles they call it evolution.
Martin Carr
