[COLUMN] In Its Fourth Season Premiere, The Boys Faces a Midlife Crisis | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the three-episode premiere of the fourth season of The Boys.

In the fourth season premiere of The Boys, super-smart superhero Sage (Susan Heyward) uses her superior intellect to deduce that Homelander (Antony Starr) is “going through some existential mid-life… whatever.” That is perhaps true of the show as a whole.

It is perhaps too much to suggest that the fourth season of The Boys is about “growing up”, the three-episode premiere is certainly about confronting the passage of time and the inevitability of mortality. Even more than the heavily-publicized plot elements like Homelander’s trial, these three episodes are about the understanding that time moves on and that people inevitably grow and change. It’s reflected in a variety of ways.

The season sees the return of Hugh Campbell, Sr. (Simon Pegg), the father of protagonist Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid). While Hugh appeared briefly in the third season premiere, he hasn’t been a significant part of the show since the first season. In the fourth season premiere, Hugh suffers a stroke that has left him braindead, forcing Hughie to confront his father’s mortality. It’s especially charged, given that Pegg was a major influence on the original comic book character of Hughie and that Boys showrunner Eric Kripke recently lost his own father, Larry.

However, Hugh isn’t Hughie’s only father figure who finds himself facing mortality. Following his abuse of the drug “Compound V” during the third season, William “Billy” Butcher (Karl Urban) has also been given a terminal diagnosis. He has less than a year to live. He has to put his own affairs in order, including repairing his damaged relationship with Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), the son of Butcher’s deceased wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten), conceived through Homelander’s rape of her.

Even characters who aren’t confronting their mortality find themselves trying to move forward with their lives. Kimiko Miyashiro (Karen Fukuhara) goes to therapy and struggles with the need to confront her past. Annie January (Erin Moriarty) reinvents herself as a philanthropist, trying to distance herself from her time as the superhero Starlight. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) begins a love affair with Colin (Elliot Knight), whose family he murdered years ago. The latest addition to the Seven is the new Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell), replacing the last version (also Mitchell), but frustrated at the limitations of the role imitating a dead man.

Even Homelander himself struggles with ageing. More than the criminal trial over his murder of a protestor (Ryan Manning) at the end of the third season, Homelander seems perturbed by the fact that his hair is going gray. Standing at a urinal, he plucks a grey public hair. Returning to his lavish apartment in Vought Tower, he stores it in a jar of other gray hairs. Even superheroes cannot escape the ravages of time, despite their best efforts. 

There is, of course, an irony in all of this. Comic book superheroes exist frozen in time, trapped in a perpetual “now.” Superheroes like Superman and Batman look pretty spry for characters over eighty years old. Peter Parker will forever be a teenager or young adult, decades after his first appearance. However, the real world - and even live action television - cannot work like this. Time marches by. Characters change. Actors want to move on.

However, Homelander faces a more abstract sort of midlife crisis than the mortality concerns facing Hughie or Butcher. Homelander has it all. He has seized control of Vought Industries. He escapes conviction early in the season. He has sole custody of his son. His enemies are in disarray. Even the election of Democratic President Robert Singer (Jim Beaver) doesn’t bother him as “even with a soft-on-crime fucking libtard for President, it’s going to be business as usual at Vought.”

It feels like The Boys is being self-reflective here. The show was always among one of Amazon’s more popular shows, to the point that it represents a challenge to Netflix’s dominance of the streaming space. However, it has evolved into its own franchise. Shortly before the release of the show’s third season, it premiered a selection of animated shorts known as Diabolical. Between its third and fourth seasons, it launched the spin-off Gen V. The Boys has conquered the world.

However, The Boys is also reaching what feels like a terminal point for a streaming series. Most modern streaming shows tend to run three seasons, and The Boys has just crossed that line. Showrunner Eric Kripke stated during the second season that he imagined The Boys would run “five seasons total”, although he would later acknowledge that he had “stopped predicting how many seasons these shows go.” The implication was that The Boys could run forever.

Of course, shortly before the fourth season premiere, Kripke acknowledged that The Boys would wrap up after its fifth season. He explained that he “just had to be cagey till [he] got the final OK from Vought”, which would seem to imply that he always intended for the show to wrap up at that point, but needed approval from Amazon. This might explain the ambivalence that runs through the fourth season of The Boys, the sense of a show that wants to enter a terminal phase, but isn’t sure whether it can.

So the fourth season seems to find The Boys at a crossroads, between several logical endpoints and immortality. Like so many of its characters at the start of this fourth season, The Boys seems to find itself in limbo. It is caught between life and death, paradoxically at the peak of its popularity but also at a point where a popular show like this needs to begin considering wrapping things up before transforming into a lifeless husk, a shell of its former self. How many great shows run forever?

The fourth season of The Boys seems to acknowledge this. Butcher contemplates his mortality, advising Hughie, “Quick lights out. Better than the alternative, sitting there stewing in your mistakes, as you wait out the inevitable.” Butcher is haunted by Becca’s ghost, who remarks on the cyclic and repetitive nature of the show’s plots as it gets stuck in perpetual motion. “I think you’re about to fuck over Hughie, again,” she observes. “And I think it’s going to blow up in your face, again.” Does Butcher have any new tricks? Does The Boys?

Although his circumstances are very different, Homelander finds himself stuck in a similar cycle. He is incapable of failing, and so there is no risk. “I’m surrounded by sycophants and fucking imbeciles,” he complains as the characters around him trip over themselves to praise his ideas. “It’s just that you make a lot of really great points, sir,” the Deep (Chace Crawford) assures him. Talking to Sage, Homelander laments, “I save people, they cheer. I kill people, they cheer. It’s fucking meaningless.”

How long can The Boys run without repeating itself and falling into familiar and comfortable patterns? After all, The Boys is a show that runs on transgression. It likes to push the envelope: “Love Sausage”, the Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and Thanos (Josh Brolin) meme, even “Herogasm.” However, allowing for exceptions like South Park, it’s hard to maintain that sort of momentum over years and years. At a certain point, it’s hard to be anti-establishment while being the establishment.

While the first three episodes of the fourth season build to a gleefully bloody confrontation at the “Vought on Ice” superhero-themed nativity musical “A Very Super Christmas”, it’s telling that Homelander’s first impulse when reacting to his boredom is to instruct the Deep to perform oral sex on A-Train (Jesse T. Usher), essentially repeating the abuse that Annie suffered at the end of the very first episode. The Deep finds himself having an affair with an octopus named Ambrosia (Tilda Swinton), another familiar beat. The show can only go so far without repeating itself.

In this sense, there is perhaps a wry meta joke in casting Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Joe Kessler, Butcher’s old mentor. Morgan is perhaps the patron saint of shows that run too long. He appeared on two other long-running shows, The Walking Dead and Grey’s Anatomy. On The Walking Dead, he played Negan, a villain who perhaps hung around a little too long and was a key part of what is widely believed to be the show’s “jump the shark” moment.

On Grey’s Anatomy, now in its 20th season, Morgan played Denny Duquette, Jr., a patient who died during the show’s second season and who went on to literally haunt the series. Denny appeared as a ghost to both Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl) and Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo). Morgan is the sort of cast member who tends to join these sorts of shows right  as they are on the cusp of becoming behemoths that run forever but don’t ever actually seem to go anywhere.

At the other extreme, there is the new character of Sage, “the smartest person on Earth.” Cursed with knowledge, understanding human nature and the larger systems around her, Sage seems largely motivated by a desire to burn it all down. Her awareness has metastasized into a sort of bleak nihilism. A Black woman well aware of Homelander’s past, she agrees to work with white supremacists to destroy the status quo.

Of course, this is all overt political commentary. Sage’s philosophy is quite close to “accelerationism”, the belief that collapse is inevitable and that the best thing to do is to rush it along. “All democracies fail,” Sage tells Homelander. “Because people are fucking stupid.” Indeed, Sage argues that Homelander doesn’t need to topple democracy because “the people will tear it apart themselves.” It seems likely Sage is playing a similar game with Homelander.

However, it also reflects the anxieties bubbling through this fourth season. The Boys is both Butcher and Homelander. It is caught between the desire to go out on its own terms and the impulse to keep running in place for as long as it can be successful. Although Kripke has confirmed that the show has embraced the former option, that psychodrama animates so much of the character and thematic concerns of the season. Inevitably, these contradictory impulses yield contradictory results. These wrestling ideas are equal parts fascinating and frustrating. It feels like the show is marking time, even as it works through its issues.