2024-07-12 05:30:03
Photo: Prime Video
If you’ve kept up with the online response to the fourth season of The Boys, you may have noticed a bit of a shift. It’s not just that the critical reviews have trended more mixed than in seasons past; it’s the audience response, too. Some viewers have criticized the season for leaning harder into its (already obvious) leftist political commentary, which I understand to a certain extent; this has always been a show lacking in subtlety, and I’m not sure we need the message to get blunter and blunter each year, especially combined with drawn-out torture scenes aiming for shock value more than anything else. But I’m less sympathetic to those who claim the show suddenly went “woke” — the type of viewers who have review-bombed the show, resulting in this amusing response video from the Vought International Twitter account.
“The Insider” doesn’t necessarily do anything that would sway that type of fan back to the show; the catchy fascist ditties from the Avenue V scenes, especially, lean into the same Fox News messaging the show has been satirizing the whole season. But it also just works really well as an episode of TV, especially leading into the finale. We’ve known where this is all heading for several episodes now: an insurrection led by Homelander and the Seven on January 6. But what exactly that looks like remains unsettlingly ambiguous, and there are many other factors at play, from the supe-killing virus to a shapeshifter assassin to Butcher and Neuman’s crises of morality.
Of course, I made a similar point last season about all the variables, and that finale turned out pretty anticlimactic. Still, it feels like this finale could be a different case. Not every character arc has worked this year — both Frenchie and Kimiko have been caught in holding patterns — but most of them are actually coming together really nicely at this point. If we’re due a Butcher heel turn moment next week, for example, the show has done a decent job avoiding contrivance to get him there. Here, we see him struggling with the knowledge that Kessler is just an imaginary friend representing his own bloodlust, but Kessler doesn’t succeed in taunting him into forgetting about Ryan. He’s more a sounding board to remind us why Butcher cares about protecting the kid — not just to keep a promise to Becca, but because he genuinely admires Ryan’s gumption in resisting orders from Vought on live TV.
The Homelander-ification of the Deep has also been a steady, solid ongoing character story this season, after at least a season or two where the character hasn’t had much time to shine. If you told me a couple of months ago that Deep’s new storyline would involve him cheating on his stigmatized octopus girlfriend with a supersmart supe he regularly lobotomizes as foreplay, I probably would’ve rolled my eyes; it sounds like just another half-baked comedic subplot. But “The Insider” smartly connects that love triangle more directly to Deep’s growing ego, showing all the ways Sage’s manipulative encouragement has pushed him to embrace his worst qualities.
It’s legitimately disturbing to watch him impulsively smash Ambrosius’s tank and let her slowly suffocate to death, especially with the unbearably long period of choking and pleading followed by her final words: “I love you.” As we see shortly after, he didn’t just kill his girlfriend; he killed the last remaining piece of himself that was capable of love or loyalty to anyone other than a monster. He even tells Homelander he’d kill “any fish in the ocean” for him — a chilling line delivery by Chace Crawford, who really reaches new heights here.
But these twisted stories of people becoming the worst versions of themselves wouldn’t work without the necessary counterbalance of A-Train and Ashley’s parallel journeys. The show isn’t arguing that either of them are fully “good guys” now — look what Ashley and Tek Knight were up to just last week — but it’s refreshing to see some characters actually turning on the Seven leadership. Ashley hasn’t been a remotely sympathetic character since her publicist days (if that), but I appreciate the way this episode lets her comment directly on how easy it is to become a monster. When A-Train tries to take her up on the offer to flee Vought, she finds that she can’t bear to leave this sick place, even if it kills her. At least she reminds him to cut out his tracking chip.
This season has also productively paired up A-Train and Mother’s Milk, and I love that the former gets to be the mentor for once in this episode. Yes, we’ve been to this well before, with MM struggling to choose between his family and the mission to take down Vought. Once again, Monique and their daughter are headed overseas, and once again, MM is reinstating Butcher as leader of the Boys. But this time we’re a little privier to MM’s internal journey. This man grew up witnessing the ways Vought killed his father and grandfather, both spiritually and literally. Now he can feel himself slipping away, too. What convinces him to stay is A-Train’s emotional monologue about how saving MM allowed him to momentarily stop hating himself — along with his point that Vought won’t stop at America. They’re coming for the whole world; nowhere is safe.
With the big insurrection day coming up, Homelander still doesn’t know whom he can actually trust. Sage is on his shit list right now because she never told him the truth about the leak: She always knew it was A-Train, but wanted to use him as a strategic “misinformation delivery system.” (I’m not totally sure that squares with everything we’ve seen, but it makes a lot more sense than Sage being stupid enough not to see through A-Train.) When Homelander fires her from the Seven, she’s upset, but she also basically saw this coming. Of course he’d grow to prefer the sycophantic Firecracker over an ally who really challenged him. Even that new partnership is quickly on the decline. He’s not even that interested in her pharmaceutically induced breast milk anymore.
When it comes to the actual Boys’ missions in this episode, there are two goals: identify the assassin hired by Sage to kill Dakota Bob Singer and further refine the supe-killing virus to create something capable of killing Homelander and Victoria Neuman. The latter subplot allows Frenchie to reenter the story after his brief jail stay, released by Grace Mallory to lend his expertise to Sameer. Sameer has his own plans, of course — he manages to escape after sticking Kimiko in the leg with their new cocktail, almost killing her if not for Frenchie’s disgustingly speedy amputation skills — but by the end of this episode, there’s a viable weapon to take down at least one of the Boys’ biggest threats.
We learn early in this episode that the Singer assassin, who’s already equipped with Secret Service assignments and blueprints for the upcoming rally, is also a shapeshifter. From the moment she(?) escapes her hideout, we (along with Hughie and Annie) know that she’s lost in the wind; from that point forward, anyone we see could be a shapeshifter in disguise. But the episode smartly puts that storyline on pause for most of the episode, spending time elsewhere and sprinkling in that great, cathartic fight scene with Annie, Butcher, Deep, and Black Noir. That makes the final reveal — that the Annie whom Hughie just fucked is actually the same shapeshifter who slashed his hand earlier that day — all the more shocking.
Look, I’m always a sucker for an evil doppelganger plot (give or take the final A reveal in Pretty Little Liars), so this is all very fun stuff, even if the character was only just introduced. And it provides yet another intriguing variable heading into the finale, with our heroes once again in the dark about the exact threat they’re about to face. The events of next week’s finale will likely matter in a way that the last one didn’t. With only one season left and a violent insurrection on the horizon, the stakes are higher than ever.
• It’s good to see Frenchie and Kimiko finally open up to each other about their guilt over the people they killed in the past. The biggest revelation here is that Kimiko originally lost her voice because Shining Light forced her to move in silence during fights to the death, murdering other young girls without making a peep.
• I really like the scene when Hughie informs Neuman about the internment camps and pleads with her to put an end to this. Again, this dynamic really got short shrift in season three, so I appreciate that we’ve gotten to see more of them interacting this year.
• Maybe I missed something, but how did Annie’s mom know that Hughie pulled the Starlight suit from the trash?
• Apparently Noir has had his own off-screen situationship with Sage, and she doesn’t even make him lobotomize her first, so that’s pretty funny.
• Very gnarly but creative effects for the shapeshifter shedding her skin to don a new identity, ripping flesh and tissue off her own body. I do feel like there’s been a little bit more ripping this season — the Splinter clones come to mind — whereas the earlier seasons featured more exploding.
• Speaking of which, RIP Webweaver, whom Homelander sloppily rips in half after several minutes of nonstop web-farting. Can’t say I’ll miss that.
• Unfortunately the “see something, say something” song from the Avenue V Christmas special will not leave my cranium.
