Pretty much the only reason why I followed Amazon's series The Boys after Season 3 was completism. I had mostly stopped caring after Season 3. Season 5 marks the finale for the main storyline of the Vought universe (Vought is the corporation that created superheroes). I think I'd heard that the college spinoff Gen V, which I'd followed for two seasons, has been canceled, but two spinoffs—1950s retro series Vought Rising and the modern-era The Boys: Mexico, are currently in development. But let's focus on this concluding season of the main series that started it all. I started off liking The Boys a lot because of its darkly, perversely comic sendup of "normal" superheroes from comics houses like DC and Marvel. Sometime around Season 2 or 3, I even wrote a defense of the series when most rightie reviewers were slagging the show for having become overly anti-conservative. At least through the first two seasons, The Boys was, I thought, fairly balanced in its satire, and its humor worked on several levels. But the show's final two or three seasons did indeed slide over into a wild-eyed, leftist nightmare of Trump's America, and the humor devolved into something simpler and broader, laced with plenty of fucks and cunts and dick jokes and brains being splattered all over Hughie (Jack Quaid). This season, the feral Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) starts talking; Starlight (Erin Moriarty) looks shockingly different after the actress's plastic surgery; Butcher (Karl Urban) finally finds peace, in a manner of speaking; and Homelander (Anthony Starr) gets his long-awaited comeuppance after trying to pass himself off as God. Overall, it was hard for me to care about the fates of the various characters. The show on the whole, and Season 5 in particular, spends so much time being darkly cynical that, when a bit of uncynical earnestness appears in the final episode, it's hard not to snicker in derision. So if you're okay with picking and choosing, and you have a strong desire to watch The Boys, I can't recommend the series beyond Season 3. It started strong, but as with so many series, it ended with a whimper.
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