The Boys’s Satire Is Running on Fumes

Spoilers follow for the fifth season of The Boys through the fifth episode, “One-Shots.” 

This week, The Boys revives one of its oldest visual gags: the superfast superhero running through people and bursting them apart. The series started with that violence; A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) accidentally killing Hughie’s (Jack Quaid) girlfriend as she was standing in the street set Hughie on his quest for revenge against the supes in the first place. But like so much else of what The Boys has been doing in its fifth and final season, the repetition of this series trope feels less like a callback than a fallback. When Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) manipulates celebrity cameos Craig Robinson, Kumail Nanjiani, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse into the path of Mister Marathon (Jared Padalecki) so that Mister Marathon can run into and accidentally explode them, every arc of blood spray is as enervating for The Boys’s efficacy as a satire as it is for these characters. By the time series executive producer Seth Rogen is cut in half by Mister Marathon and Soldier Boy’s assuring him that his legacy will live on in the straight-to-streaming movie An American Pickle, the show is winking so hard it’s lost sight of its satirical focus.

With three episodes left, The Boys hasn’t made much progress toward answering its series-long question: Can Homelander (Antony Starr) be killed, and can Butcher (Karl Urban), Hughie, Annie (Erin Moriarty), and their gang of resistance fighters pull it off? This final season has gone back and forth, introducing a virus that could kill all the supes and then destroying the Boys’ cache of it, then introducing a Vought formula that makes supes immortal and giving it to Homelander. He’s gotten increasingly powerful (and insane) as the season has gone on, while Hughie and Butcher are still arguing about whether it’s moral to want to kill him. This is the same dynamic as always (Hughie and Butcher attack Homelander; Homelander defeats them but for some reason doesn’t kill them; the Boys are divided between Hughie and Butcher’s conflicting ideologies) stretched out to pad a delayed-gratification season, and “One-Shots” is the most padded-out episode yet.

Narratively, “One-Shots” is a Rashomon-style detour in which little chunks of the episode are devoted to characters whose perspectives aren’t normally centered, like the Method actor now playing Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) and Butcher’s dog Terror. Actually, it’s an excuse for The Boys creator and showrunner Eric Kripke to nod to his prior series by staging a Supernatural reunion with Ackles, Padalecki, and Misha Collins and make a few flimsy jokes about how certain celebrities process fascism as a way to add lines to their filmographies. When our national reality is Pete Hegseth giving Kid Rock joyrides in military helicopters, Will Forte talking about Bill Hader’s execution being great for his career, or Mintz-Plasse wanting Michael Cera to get “vanished” because “I really need this part,” it just doesn’t pack much of a punch, nor does it feel like The Boys is meeting the moment. Is the joke that celebrities are self-involved? What’s new? Actors with liberal politics playing exaggerated versions of themselves who bury their heads in the sand as the world ends has already been done (by several of these same actors), and The Boys doesn’t add anything new to the conversation in “One-Shots.”

For all that Kripke insists that The Boys, which premiered more than two years into Donald Trump’s first presidency, has always been about Trump’s unlikely rise and reign, the parallel between him and Homelander was not initially the series’ prevailing satirical mode. At first, The Boys was a send-up of the Marvel- and DC-dominated entertainment industry and how our pop culture was defined by a childish superhero worship that filtered into myriad veins of commerce. Movies and television shows, tie-ins with clothing brands, grocery-store chains, and energy drinks — the Seven would shill anything affiliated with Vought, no matter how ludicrous. In a time when blockbuster movies regularly roll out with attached marketing stunts and celebrities feel focus-group tested and media trained into monotony, The Boys displayed a keen understanding of corporate greed, how CEOs can justify anything, even aligning with Nazis, if it ensures additional profits.

Yet as The Boys moved more vigorously into aligning Homelander with Trump, its satirical scope narrowed. The series became so focused on either ascribing Trump’s statements to Homelander (Trump boasts about being able to kill a man in public and not lose voters; Homelander does just that) or charting where Trump’s rhetoric could lead (Trump talks about building incarceration camps for Americans; Homelander does just that) that it lost track of the industry it once mocked so well. In this fifth season, the gags about Hollywood feel more superficial than ever — celebrities love doing cocaine and having sex; influencers are soulless opportunists; canceled A-listers will always find a way to reinvent themselves. “Suddenly, we were telling a story about the intersection of celebrity and authoritarianism and how social media and entertainment are used to sell fascism. We’re right in the eye of the storm,” Kripke has said about how he and fellow executive producers Rogen and Evan Goldberg imagined the show working as a critique. But by pivoting its final season toward church service as authoritarian entertainment, The Boys feels like it’s going through the motions of someone else’s critique. Presenting how the religious right has abandoned its alleged values with so much singing, dancing, and costuming in shades of royal purple and creamy white feels like a pastiche of The Righteous Gemstones rather than a distinct take. Meanwhile, what The Boys could be saying more broadly about how superhero entertainment has been used to prop up the military-industrial complex — what the series used to say in its earlier seasons — is absent. Homelander’s freedom camps show Dawn of the Seven every night, and there’s a mention of a blockbuster named G-Men: Days Past From the Future, and apparently the Lamplighter: Light of Justice finale got a D- on the The A.V. Club. What do any of these throwaway lines actually illustrate about Homelander’s project of using the entertainment industry to sell his traditionalist vision of America? Nothing. They’re catering to an audience who remembers X-Men: Days of Future Past was a movie and probably agrees that The A.V. Club’s recaps are graded too harshly.

The underlying question here is, how effectively can a show that mocks the entertainment industry do so when it is itself part of that industry? When The Boys began generating spinoff shows (and integrating those characters into its main narrative, with the expectation that every viewer would be aware of that interconnected plotting), announced brand partnerships of its own, and was dubbed by Prime Video as the center of the streamer’s Vought Cinematic Universe, it felt like the series lost its right to claim outsider status. “One-Shots” cements that. “The gang” of Seth & Co. are presented as pathetic but individually so: Rogen’s pottery is the butt of a joke, Forte is derisively called MacGruber. (Lena Dunham and Mischa Barton also catch strays, the former for possibly writing for The Atlantic and the latter for wanting to give Homelander a blowjob.) All of this chatter feels vaporous, though, because The Boys has spent so little time this season depicting anything similar to the events the comedians discuss in the scene preceding their demise — “Aziz, Macaulay, Joaquin, Kiefer, Meryl, Benedict” (both Wong and Cumberbatch) being rounded up or congressional hearings on suspected Starlighters, like Post Malone. If one of the comedians in this scene had shown up in the camp with the Boys, or filmed a Vought-approved PSA, or appeared on Deep’s ultramasculine podcast, that would have gone further to demonstrate how much America has changed under Homelander. Their banter is empty because outside the season’s premiere, The Boys hasn’t actually shown us this awful America, and how everyone within it, including celebrities, are at risk. This is gossip as exposition, and it doesn’t resonate.

Most noticeable of all is what The Boys doesn’t address in this scene, which is the commonality between a chunk of these actors that actually pertains to the show’s ideas about the thin line between supes and celebrities: Three of them have done the superhero thing. In its earlier days, The Boys might have done something with how Nanjiani’s Eternals and Rogen’s The Green Hornet both underperformed, and the Kick-Ass movies in which Mintz-Plasse played a villain left little cultural footprint. The world-building of The Boys is such that the MCU and DCU are replaced by Vought, but “One-Shots” could have framed these actors as stars in second-rate VCU knockoffs like Mister Marathon. What if each of these actors had tried to connect with Soldier Boy or Homelander over their filmographies and their fame? What if they talked about how they really understand the supe mind-set and should be spared as a result? There are opportunities here for satire that is structural in the way that The Boys used to be, rather than individualistic like it is now. Instead, these cameos ultimately just lead to a weak gag about how Homelander wants to punish people who make fun of him — again, a Trump analogue — and a one-note gorefest as Mister Marathon inadvertently eviscerates them all. Both elements of this, The Boys has done before and ad nauseam. We get it. Homelander might need to learn how to take a joke, but The Boys has run out of them.