The Boys remains fun until the end but it was very apparent that ever since the third series the show has no idea for what to do other than have Homelander put everyone around him under more and more strain while the boys chase after a series of plot devices in the hopes of killing him until here, in the last two episodes, one of them finally works. Everything just kept lurching on in much the same way despite how increasingly little sense that made. The promise of massive escalation at the end of the fourth series was immediately rolled back but the boys are able to operate in pretty much the same way, going alone with Butcher every time despite everyone increasingly saying how fucked up and wrong he is, whether or not they are broke and slumming it up in one of Frenchie’s mob-connected safehouses, part of the CIA, or the most wanted fugitives in an increasingly fascist police state.

There are some changes! Kimiko is American now! And she talks in fluent English with an American accent. I do understand why getting her voice back would be a big thing and why they wouldn’t want the actress to put on a Japanese accent with broken English but it’s incredibly jarring, especially in Though the Heavens Fall where she gushes to an Asian-American woman about inspiration it was to see someone like her on TV when growing up despite the fact that Kimiko grew up in fucking Japan. She has only been in America for a few years. It’s not like the writers forgot that she’s not American; she says a few lines later that the show is how she first learned English. Did the writers think that Japan doesn’t have it’s own TV shows?

Kimiko also now speaks like a 2010s Redditor who has watched nothing but Kevin Smith movies trying to write Joss Whedon quips. It’s painful to watch and Karen Fukuhara gives a much less expressive performance now compared to when she was playing without her voice (though I can’t imagine it’s easy to give a strong performance while reading those lines). Everyone else’s dialogue is almost as dire now too. The show has been Flanderised into puerile vulgarity and clichéd inspirational speeches, completing its transformation from comic book satire into Marvel with knobs. We even get a slow motion sequence for A-Train that is pulled straight out of Quicksilver scenes from the X-Men films except that it looks like shit.

The satire, of course, has entirely shifted to political, but is all very surface level. It makes little jokes about and references to Trump’s regime and its media arms, and some of them did make me laugh, but it has very little to say outside of orange flag man bad. The series also fails to give much of a sense of what Homelander’s regime is like for people day to day outside of those at the top. People getting rounded up and arrested is mentioned a lot in passing and we see the camps but we get nothing like the subplot of seeing M.M.’s ex-wife’s boyfriend getting radicalised. There’s no place for that in the series any more when everyone has fully become comic book characters and are completely disconnected from normal life. Firecracker’s plot in One-Shots is the one part of the series that delivers something a bit better.

When the series finally, reluctantly, puts Hughie and Butcher in a moral conflict that was promised for so long it really doesn’t seem like it has anything to say. Butcher, after Homelander is dead and everything is over, threatening to still release the supervirus, says that he wants to kill the very idea of superheroes. I was expecting, in line other big speeches in the final few episodes, some refutation of the importance of superheroes and of stories. Some point being made about comics and superheroes in general, but the show doesn’t really have anything to say about that. Hughie is just forced to kill Butcher to stop him from committing mass murder and there isn’t really anything deeper. It’s fine. Don’t worry that none of the underlying structural problems with Vought and the superhero industry have been fixed at all.

Sage also ends up being an incredible waste. After so much contrivance being justified as part of her master plan her big plan is just… cause mass chaos so she can be Henry Bemis from Time Enough at Last in a bunker. Wow! A seventy year-old episode of the Twilight Zone! How original. But… why couldn’t she just do this anyway? She basically was already doing that before Homelander showed up. What, she can manipulate everyone in convoluted ways but couldn’t figure out a way to just get away from Homelander? To get rich on the stock market and build her bunker anyway? And then in the same episode where Kimiko forgets that she grew up in Japan, Sage is blindsided about Soldier Boy siding with Homelander despite the fact that back-Ashley told her in the same fucking episode that Soldier Boy was sympathetic to Homelander. Why are you surprised?

It’s not all bad. I still enjoy The Deep becoming ever-more pathetic and I quite enjoyed Ashley’s suffering in proportion to her increasingly higher rank as she fails upwards, having long gone past the point here she should have stepped away and saved herself. Her short redemption arc, undercut by her literally declaring in a press conference “I did nothing wrong,” only to be immediately impeached was a great ending for her and the show is still, for the most part, quite fun.

They probably should have stopped after they ran out of ideas, though.

They really had no plan for how they were going to do with that cliffhanger did they? Just forget it and quickly return them to the school. The show is of such inconsistent quality and it gets markedly worse whenever it get hijacked by the plot of The Boys. It fails to build any kind of real tension and just have characters repeatedly tell each other how dangerous and important everything is while everyone just wanders from scene to scene with no sense of urgency and we can explain any tiresome, extraneous back and forth with it just all being part of Sage’s big, grand, vague plan. Also explicit ranked power levels exist in this now too. Sure. Whatever.

On the political side this series has generally been fast and lose with allegories and I don’t expect the logic of supe supremacist to be particularly sound, but pulling in eugenicist ideas of culling the herd to select for better superpowers when superpowers are explicitly nonheritable (unless you’re Andre) really annoyed me. What was he actually trying to achieve with that?

I can understand why the writers would feel that dropping and and all subtlety, particularly in the political satire, is warranted right now, but the show has started to feel like a parody of itself as a result. I also think that if the show is going to make watching the spinoff crucial to following the plot (which I am told is even more true for the second series of Gen V) then it making fun of Marvel movie phases and crossovers starts to lose any and all bite. I did enjoy some of the sillier parts, such as the gang unloading into V’d-up chickens that are no-selling the entire thing, and there is still plenty else that I like, but I think that it is time for this show to wrap up. Hopefully the fifth series sticks the landing.

Starts of fairly insufferable with the attempts at social media satire, finds its feet after a while, and then suddenly just swerves in the last few episodes to being much more of a direct extension of The Boys and throws out a lot of characterisation in favour of feeding into the political division plot of its parent show.

Speaking of The Boys, Edgar’s comments on Vought being a pharmaceutical company, not a superhero company was a good moment but becomes increasingly nonsensical as the show goes on and Vought starts seeming like it makes up half of the American economy. They own the television ecosystem, they own the news, they own their own university and it’s all centred on superheroes. Several supes also having children with the same powers as them also seems weird in light of how big of a deal Ryan was made out to be.

• I am starting to think that there may be an element of political satire in this show.
• The forced corporate nonsense continues to be very well done in so far as it causes my physical pain to watch.
• The guy playing young Edgar has the unenviable task of trying to affect the mannerisms of Giancarlo Esposito but mostly just comes across like he’s playing a vulcan.
• I think the general direction of tempting Huey with power leading him down the path of becoming more like Butcher is a good one but I am as frustrated as Annie is with it being done by making him suddenly much more insecure about his masculinity than he was at the start of the show. I quite liked that element of the relationship between the two of them.
• Kimiko can do better than Frenchie.

The colour palette didn’t feel as overly washed out as in the first series (or maybe I am just getting used to it?). It does get a bit much with the nihilistic violence and misery but manages to pick up before the end. Stormfront was a good villain though in the end felt like a bit of an extended aside before focusing back Homelander again. I do enjoy the little asides back to The Deep every once in a while to see just how badly things are going for him today.

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.

Again the page is here and the lists are also on my Letterboxd, Serializd and Backloggd accounts as well as a second Letterboxd list covering the years 1970-1989.

Superheroes are inherently fascist 🫡