The Boys - An Amazon Prime adaptation of the Ennis comic series

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RightToBearBlarms said:
The "White House" created an office of supe affairs and they're putting a sitting congresswoman at the head of it? If you're going to do that why not just have her be like the undersecretary at some other executive department? Was her being an AOC parallel really that necessary?
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This is the same series that thinks a scruffy British guy can just walk into a CIA deputy director's office while she's on a Starbucks run. And that the CIA would be involved in domestic superhuman affairs. They're not going for a realistic depiction of the US government. Or they are, and that's kind of sad.

Mariposa Electrique said:
Can I ask ...why do people enjoy super hero stuff. I've never seen the allure.
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It's probably the oldest genre of written entertainment. It goes back to the Sumerian stories of Bilgamesh and Enkidu, and includes the Hebrew Samson, the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, the adventures and misadventures of the Norse aesir and giants, miracle stories of Christian saints, tall tales like John Bunyan and John Henry Irons, and eventually the guy in the blue strongman suit and red cape. It's fun to see people transcend human limitations.
 
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Owlman3 said:
Do people forget that Stormfront in both the comics and show is supposed to be a critique on why nazis are bad? Like if you don’t agree, that’s fine, but don’t complain when it’s literally the whole point of her character and her arc.
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Most of my enjoyment of the show from the first season came from subverting capeshit tropes, but here they played the "100 year old Nazi" thing basically straight. They made an attempt at social commentary by drawing some rather ham-fisted parallels between Trump and Stormfront / Homelander, but that gets about zero points for originality in today's climate. I'll give them a bit of credit though for having Edgar manipulate Stormfront and then blatantly throw her under the bus, bringing A-Train back in order to get anti-Nazi PR points. That 30 seconds was amusing, but really doesn't make up for episodes worth of shitty plot unfortunately.

The plot also got really wonky there. Even assuming people somehow believed that Stormfront was a 100 year old Nazi rather than the victim of a photoshop smear campaign, there was no reason to blame the head-popping on her and cancel the $5 million per dose Compound V sales.

Dante Alighieri said:
The "girls get it done" scene was pretty funny, just the imagery of three women kicking Stormfront repeatedly is hilarious to me.

The stuff with A-Train and The Deep is also funny but feels out of place.
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That scene was hilarious, but kinda killed the seriousness of what was supposed to be the season finale showdown. The Church stuff was funny at times, but really went nowhere other than being an excuse to make fun of Scientology. Too many simultaneous plot threads in my opinion, and the show suffered for it.
 
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Mariposa Electrique said:
Can I ask ...why do people enjoy super hero stuff. I've never seen the allure.
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I may not have the answer you want exactly. With super hero movies they strike me much like classic Westerns in terms of the stories they tell. It's very simple and has a clear message and you want the guys in white hats to win and the guys in black hats to lose. And you can't do that sort of movie anymore so they dressed it up with fancy graphics and sexy superstars.

But I can say that the reason I liked The Boys was because it was a great send-up of all the overused and predictable junk that most superhero movies have. It's like Blade came out, then we had years of movies trying to capitalize on Spider-Man's formula, Dredd showed up and was a breath of fresh air, then several more years of movies attempting to create the CINEMATIC UNIVERSE, and then The Boys showed up and shit all over that.

I've got to say though, I did like the first season of The Boys a fair amount more than the second season. The second season was still good! But it definitely went more in the direction of the studio realizing they had a popular show, so let's make sure we use our platform more effectively to get our own messages across.
 
Finally got around to watching the season finale. Suffice to say, I had a lot of general thoughts + ramblings to go off of:

"The Good":
1. Very glad to see Edgar having some more screentime for once, especially with him being in the same room as Butcher. I complained before about him not appearing or having as much to do in the show, so that one scene with him was pretty satisfying. I do agree with @Tor Lugosi about his "black men can't be maniacs" line being a bit dumb the way it was written, though I also understand where @Secret Asshole is coming from with how it was meant to be a snide jab back at Butcher for him bringing up Stormfront's hatred for minorities. Either way, I really do hope that they give him more to do in Season 3.

2. The reveal of the Congresswoman having the head-popping powers at the end does have me somewhat intrigued for what her whole deal is. For now, I'm just glad that there's now another antagonist that isn't (as far as we currently know) a part of Vought. Oh, and Claire who escaped the hospital is on the loose. Hopefully she gets to do some fun stuff in the next Season as well.

3. The fight between all 4 supe women at the end was amusing, not gonna lie. I do have some issues with it (which I'll go over in a bit), though I'm totally fine with them doing the heavy lifting while the boys watched from the sidelines.
The Bad:
1. The way the show handled Queen Maeve being the deus ex machina 3 SEPARATE TIMES had me banging my head against a wall. The first time she saved Starlight (when she was almost killed by Black Noire in the previous episode) was totally fine. The second time though? She literally appears out of nowhere to beat up Stormfront, despite not having the group's location nor a vehicle/power to get her there that fast. It would have made far more sense for A-Train to show up, given his clear disdain for Stormfront + his power to easily get to them. Hell, they even had a simple line earlier where he explained how he found Starlight and Hughie in the city so easily. So the second time, while annoying, still lead to a (somewhat) satisfying fight between the gals. That alone would've been enough for me to forgive the show. But the third time really takes the cake: Maeve once again appears out of nowhere with her cellphone in hand and the video opened just to blackmail Homelander into letting Butcher and the kid go. I honestly don't even hate Maeve's character, but rather the writers being incompetent buffoons that default to shoehorning her in whenever the heroes need saving.

2. I sort of disagree with you @Observerer. While I did like the action in the finale, the multiple cuts really took away from the fight sequences for me. I don't even think that that's exclusive to the finale, but that the show in general has a habit of cutting away during a lot of the action that goes on. It gave me flashbacks to that infamous scene from Taken 3 of Liam Neeson having to hop over a fence and there being like 40 cuts over the span of 7 seconds. Also was a bit annoying to have The Boys create specialized weapons to fight against Stormfront, only to have said weapons immediately blown up and never used.

3. Becca managing to escape the facility and somehow track down Butcher right away was just straight up insulting. I get that she was desperate as to find her son and was capable of anything, though it would've been nice to show just a short sequence of her outsmarting security and breaking out. That part alone wasn't necessarily bad, but more so ties back to my main issue: There's this inherent problem of the writers setting things up, only to then go completely against what they've already established. Like how Hughie and Butcher weren't arrested at the hospital a few episodes back, or even caught out in public in general, considering how The Boys are all highly wanted. Whatever happened to that first episode where Hughie was so on-edge about being caught when he had to meet up with Starlight? Well, doesn't matter anyway, considering how the CIA has cleared their records. It's totally not like they have super-powered enemies that want to get revenge against them when nobody's looking, right? Everything's gonna be just fine.
The Ugly:
1. I am a bit disappointed with how The Church had been set up as this potentially nefarious organization, only to have the head of it have his head blown up. I get that it was meant to give The Deep's character some more comedic moments + character development throughout the show, though I ended up feeling underwhelmed and uninterested in them by the end of the season.

2. I dread the thought of the writers keeping Stormfront alive just to bring her back later to get revenge on The Boys. Maybe it could lead to a fun faceoff, though I'm very wary of how it would be handled.

3. >Mallory: "I'm assembling a team of specialized individuals that will help monitor and fight against the Supes."
>Butcher: "What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?"

I think my biggest complaint for this entire season has been how utterly useless The Boys were in the grand scheme of things. What I really enjoyed about the first Season was how The Boys were all essentially underdogs that had to outwit Vought and the Supes, such as them managing to capture and kill Translucent, or Frenchie causing a public distraction to save Kimiko from A-Train, or even Hughie even getting captured to help break his friends out. What did they accomplish this season?
  • Starlight on her own exposes Vought for producing Compound V
  • A-Train literally hands them a file on Stormfront to have her exposed
  • Nobody but Becca and her kid manage to badly harm Stormfront
  • Butcher failed to save his wife (TWICE!)
  • They failed to keep the VIPs they're tasked to protect alive, including Kimiko's brother, Lamplighter, and the main Vought scientist
  • Queen Maeve shows up to save Butcher and the kid from Homelander
The only thing I can sort of give credit for is Hughie going to The Tower with Lamplighter to save Starlight, despite him not really doing all that much on his own. It was really Lamplighter and Maeve that helped her escape, and he helped to show them the exit to the building.

Ultimately, I'm pretty disappointed with the season as a whole. As much as there were a small handful of fun moments to enjoy, there was far too much setup and very little payoff to keep me satisfied. I'll still watch Season 3 once its out in around 2 years, though I'm sadly not going to be looking forward to it like I was for Season 2 over a year ago.
*sigh*
 
Given how unsubtle and on the nose the wokeness has been this season, I was pleasantly surprised they had AOC standin be secretly evil.
Still, much weaker than last season, didn't even realise at the time of watching that it was the season finale.
 
I haven't had the chance to watch the season finale but it seems like they just let the interns do all the writing and planning this time. Season 1 wasn't mind blowing but it also wasn't bafflingly awfully written like almost all of S2. I think of the caution the group had to take while they had Translucent locked up and Homelander doing flyovers of the city trying to find him, compared to the one or two lines of The Boys acknowledging how wanted they are then just being in the broad daylight the next scene with no pretense of them being wanted.

Edit: I'm dumb his name is Translucent, not Transparent
 
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I'm in it now for The Deep's redemption arc going horribly wrong because of course it will.

The Deep getting #metoo

Have fun in Sandusky, Ohio where you can't do much as a fish guy

Joins 'scientology' to get back into The 7.

Does damn near everything they ask to get back in, but gets upstaged by a new member to the church (who also did fuck all as far as requests by the church).

For real, A-train could have went to bat for The Deep, but instead accepted being back in The 7 and got the fuck out of there.

Now the leader of the church and his major in back into The 7 has no head.

He's never getting back in, is he?
 
Burning Fanatic said:
I think my biggest complaint for this entire season has been how utterly useless The Boys were in the grand scheme of things. What I really enjoyed about the first Season was how The Boys were all essentially underdogs that had to outwit Vought and the Supes, such as them managing to capture and kill Translucent, or Frenchie causing a public distraction to save Kimiko from A-Train, or even Hughie even getting captured to help break his friends out. What did they accomplish this season?
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Yeah for a show titled "The Boys" there's very little The Boys actually do on their own. They're just vehicles for the women to do their girl power shit.
 
Dante Alighieri said:
Yeah for a show titled "The Boys" there's very little The Boys actually do on their own. They're just vehicles for the women to do their girl power shit.
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No, not entirely true. Again, Season 1 had some clever moments involving The Boys using their wits to turn an unfavorable situation to their advantage. Like when A-Train kept Hughie’s dad hostage, Hughie acted as a distraction for Kimiko to show up and smash the guy’s leg. Even with her acting as the muscle, the two still worked together to defeat A-Train. I’m not even asking for The Boys themselves to be more involved in the action, but rather given more to do in general. With all of their failures that I’ve listed previously, it’s like the show’s forgotten what made the characters a worthy adversary for Vought.
captkrisma said:
I'm in it now for The Deep's redemption arc going horribly wrong because of course it will.

The Deep getting #metoo

Have fun in Sandusky, Ohio where you can't do much as a fish guy

Joins 'scientology' to get back into The 7.

Does damn near everything they ask to get back in, but gets upstaged by a new member to the church (who also did fuck all as far as requests by the church).

For real, A-train could have went to bat for The Deep, but instead accepted being back in The 7 and got the fuck out of there.

Now the leader of the church and his major in back into The 7 has no head.

He's never getting back in, is he?
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On one hand, it would be interesting to see the guy not only redeem himself from being a total loser/creep, but also become far more powerful than anyone had ever anticipated (which is very unlikely). On the other hand, I figure that they’re going to play things safe and keep him in a more comedic relief role, which I’m not entirely against either. Suffice to say, I think that he also shared some similar issues with The Boys, having practically fuck all to do this season. I agree with the part of this review about how the church might as well have been a waiting room or purgatory for his character, with the writers having no idea for what to really do with him this season:
 
Burning Fanatic said:
Also was a bit annoying to have The Boys create specialized weapons to fight against Stormfront, only to have said weapons immediately blown up and never used.
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This is actually something I really appreciated because in practice things seldom go to plan and things like that really do happen instead of having the anti-heroes depicted as being infallable geniuses.
 
My theory for why Season 2 is so mediocre, or at least one of the reasons, is that maybe the production budget either wasn't as big this season, or didn't go as far because of Covid 19. There's a lot more reusing of sets, a lot more unnecessary talky bits to pad things out. Maybe this feels like half a season because they couldn't afford more than half a season of special effects, set building etc. This is the reason why The Walking Dead is 99% walking around arguing back and forth and maybe 3 minutes of zombies every episode, or why each season of Game of Thrones is everybody playing politics for 11 episodes with the occasional duel, then one giant battle at the end.

Or maybe they were just told by studio chiefs to pad things out because every streaming service needs at least 1 headliner to compete with other streaming services at any given time, ever since Game of Thrones, and they didn't know when the next hit would be coming in if they ended The Boys too early.
 
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jorgoth said:
My theory for why Season 2 is so mediocre, or at least one of the reasons, is that maybe the production budget either wasn't as big this season, or didn't go as far because of Covid 19. There's a lot more reusing of sets, a lot more unnecessary talky bits to pad things out. Maybe this feels like half a season because they couldn't afford more than half a season of special effects, set building etc. This is the reason why The Walking Dead is 99% walking around arguing back and forth and maybe 3 minutes of zombies every episode, or why each season of Game of Thrones is everybody playing politics for 11 episodes with the occasional duel, then one giant battle at the end.

Or maybe they were just told by studio chiefs to pad things out because every streaming service needs at least 1 headliner to compete with other streaming services at any given time, ever since Game of Thrones, and they didn't know when the next hit would be coming in if they ended The Boys too early.
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You're right about TWD, and the early seasons of GoT but I don't think you are right about this. This season was filmed at least a year ago so covid wouldn't have effected the filming and Amazon is one of the richest companies in the world so I doubt the 1 original hit they have had a smaller budget than they had in the first season. Also, the special effects were better and there were more of them this season then there were in the 1st.


I'm pretty sure the reason the writing fell off is time. They had less time to work out all the kinks when working on the second season. I'm sure the creator of the show had been working on this for years before it actually happened. That's a lot of time to edit, rewrite, fix, and create a solid show via writing. You go from multiple years to work on season 1 to less than a year to work on season 2. A lot of shows suffer from this problem. True Detective season 2 comes to mind. The cracks were there in season 1 but the lack of time to work on it really pushed then to the forefront in season 2.
 
Hollywood really doesn't put enough emphasis on writing. If the production fails the culprit is the writing 99% of the time.

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I think the show might just be a victim of its own success. After how successful season one apparently was for Amazon they likely told the writers to hit the brakes and not progress the story too rapidly so that they can stretch it out as long as possible. After all, if the Boys bring down Vought then the spin-off focusing on some 'Vought University' wouldn't really work. They also can't kill off or change the main cast too much or they might risk alienating some of their audience who watch it just for one character or another.
 
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Dante Alighieri said:
Yeah for a show titled "The Boys" there's very little The Boys actually do on their own. They're just vehicles for the women to do their girl power shit.
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The Witcher season 1 had the same problem. You go in thinking its about a monster hunter, but nope. Wizard politics.
 
I want to see Stormfront back with metal limbs and eye patch, sort of like a Wolfenstein Ubersoldaten but more ladylike. The series has potential, I just hope it doesn't dissolve into an incomprehensible SJW lecture at the end, the way Man in the High Castle did.
 
Feline Supremacist said:
I want to see Stormfront back with metal limbs and eye patch, sort of like a Wolfenstein Ubersoldaten but more ladylike. The series has potential, I just hope it doesn't dissolve into an incomprehensible SJW lecture at the end, the way Man in the High Castle did.
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I hated how The Man In The High Castle ended because it didn't resolve anything, in fact I hated the whole inter-dimensional nazis thing, they really could have had something if they'd just stuck to something gritty and realistic.
 
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