After two years of waiting – thanks to the writers’ strike – one of Prime Video’s most successful and popular series is about to return: starting today with three episodes, then at the rate of one episode every Thursday until July 18th, the corrosive arrives on the platform The Boys by Eric Kripke, fourth (and penultimate) season. Born in 2019 as an adaptation of the comic of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, and developed as a style exercise on the theme “what would happen to the psyche of people with unlimited powers?” (spoiler: nothing good), The Boys has grown to become a global franchise, whose latest season beat even the Lord of the Rings series at Prime, in terms of number of minutes watched (106 billion in 2022). And so, to resume watching the new episodes, it is advisable not only to watch the third season finale, but also to learn about the Gen V spin-off, released a few months ago, and the animated anthology series Diabolico!.
PREVIOUS
Where do we start, and where we had arrived: the setting is a dystopian America in which superheroes exist, supervillains as well, and often the two definitions coincide. The arch-villain is a Patriot (Antony Starr), a sort of Captain America with psychotic tendencies, at the head of Vought, a multinational whose aim is to mask the vices of its super-affiliates to portray them as the champions of which the world he needs. But this season will also see space for the (super)progressive politician Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), who is campaigning as US vice president and capable of controlling and spreading a potentially lethal virus (as well as making people’s heads explode remotely).
The “good guys” are the Boys, former CIA agents led by Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), who, in the new episodes, will have to pay for the side effects of the serum drug taken during the previous season. Among the new entries in the series, two additions to the ranks of the Seven, that is, the superheroes: Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), the most intelligent person in the world, and Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a superhero with the power of fire, sympathies for the QAnon group and a conspiracy podcast inspired by the real InfoWars. That’s all? Certainly not: because what has always made The Boys different from any other story of superpowers (even in an “alternative” key, like The Umbrella Academy on Netflix or Misfits, broadcast on Fox and Rai) is its very strong charge of political satire, targeting wild capitalism, militarism, popular culture and – increasingly – the phenomenon of “Trumpism”. Just to give an example: all eight episodes of the season, with remarkable timing, take place during the US election campaign, with the voting date set for January 6th (a reference to the assault on Capitol Hill by Trump’s followers on January 6th January 2021).
THE AUTHOR
Violent, extreme, incorrect: as if Marvel met the Simpsons in a Civil War setting, the phenomenon film about the American civil war by Alex Garland. For Variety, the bible of cinema, the new season of The Boys is «so violent that in comparison Game of Thrones seems like My Little Pony». But what makes the difference – in an increasingly complicated plot, even too much so – is his cynicism, the criticism of entertainment used as propaganda, of conspiracy theorists, of alarmism that becomes a political strategy.
«Yet there are also those who believe that Patriot is a hero, and that ours is a woke series (extremist, bigoted, ed.)», explained the author, Kripke, to the American press. «If there are those who think like this, I raise my hands. I just know that since Trump re-nominated, I’ve felt the need to push in the direction of satire. What if I think that TV or cinema can change people’s minds? I do not think so”. Certainly, said Kripke, The Boys will have an end and it will be with the fifth season: «It has always been my project from the beginning», he assures. In the meantime, however, while the sequel to Gen V is being prepared, a new spin-off is in the works: The Boys: Mexico, directed by Mexican actors Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
