'The Boys' Season 5 Is a Real Drag

I don’t have a lot to say about The Boys this season, except that it’s not very fun anymore. It worked originally as a gleefully deranged satire of superhero tropes — “Look! Superheroes! But they’re violent, disgusting, and amoral people!” — and for a while, that was enough. But somewhere along the way, the series’ sole focus became the eradication of Homelander, and it also became clear that the show won’t end until Homelander dies (and potentially, all the supes). That’s when it stopped being a comedy and became a superhero drama. Worse, it’s a purely mission-driven series now, one where we must sit through various permutations of The Boys characters completing tasks in an effort to take out Homelander. Maybe some die along the way. Maybe some don’t. In other words, it’s entered its The Walking Dead era: There’s a lot of walking around, interrupted occasionally by rote, largely lifeless fight sequences that no longer carry the same sense of joie de vivre. The gore is still there. The transgression is still there. But transgression without surprise is just noise.

All the characters are miserable, most especially Butcher, and there’s reason enough for it: They’re living through miserable times. But there is no sense of hope — only a sense of inevitability. They’ll figure out how to get rid of Homelander. The series will end. Roll credits.

But mostly, The Boys feels too … timely. The show was apparently written two years ago, before the election, before any of this. And yet here we are: Homelander — the show’s wretched, narcissistic, forever miserable villain — decides to anoint himself as the actual Jesus, and it lands one week after our own wretched, narcissistic, forever miserable President essentially did the same, posting an AI-generated image of himself in a white robe healing the sick while verbally going to war with the Pope. The only thing missing from real life is Daveed Diggs stepping to a podium to announce that Trump has risen to lead the Democratic Church of America.

And it doesn’t stop there. The Freedom Camps, where Starlighters are locked in detention facilities, map cleanly onto ICE sweeps and corporate detention centers. The billionaires prop up their respective leaders in both universes, loyalty purchased with tax cuts and proximity to power. Even Soldier Boy — an enemy of Homelander — is getting pardoned in exchange for his loyalty, which is the kind of plot development that no longer reads as satire so much as a scheduling conflict with the news cycle.

Showrunner Eric Kripke has said publicly that he’s tired of reality beating him to the punch, that it’s “just really hard to out-satire this world.” I believe him. And I don’t blame him. But that doesn’t make the show any easier to sit with. The Boys used to feel like catharsis. Now it feels like the worst history lesson ever.

It’s a drag.