New The Boys trailers explores the horrors of fascism, super-powered chickens
Plus, Homelander wants to treat us all to a creamy, delicious milkshake!
Aux News The Boys
We’re just a month out now from the release of the latest season of The Boys, Amazon’s joyfully profane, satirically brutal send-up of “superheroes” and the good, wholesome folks whose job it is to kill them. Anyone worried that the series might be pulling its punches as it ages into elder statesman status with its fourth season can quickly relieve those fears with a look at the show’s latest trailer, though—and specifically the bit where a man gets his chest exploded when a super-powered chicken flies through it.
No, we’re still in gleeful psychosis land here, as expertly expressed by Antony Starr, still chillingly perfect as Superman-but-he’s-a-thin-skinned-psychopath Homelander, who exhorts his fellow Supes to be “wrathful gods,” before dispensing “creamy, delicious milkshakes” to his friends. Sure, Jack Quaid’s Hughie is still on hand to weakly express the concept that violence is bad, but since that’s interspersed with shots of flying, murderous sheep, bubbles flying out of gaping head wounds, and a dude getting his stretchy hand shattered after being frozen with a fire extinguisher, we’re pretty sure we know which side the show is actually on.
All that, and we have Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher cooking up his latest wacky plan to take down all the “supes,” a virus that targets and kills people with super powers. All grimly hilarious par for the course, as The Boys prepares to return to the streaming airwaves on June 13.
16 Comments
Anyone else find this as tiresome as I do? I want to enjoy it but it just looks like more of the same.
I’m not tired, however… I did find reverting to a kind of “status quo” at the end of S3 (not really) empty. Homelander has had so many opportunities to kill the boys but hasn’t. I thought the turn against soldier boy was dumb, they HAD homelander… So this season needs to commit to actually moving that conflict forward in a meaningful way.
Honestly Gen V was so much better than I was expecting it to be that I’m not sure this series will live up to it. More to your point, though, it appears Ennis having planned an ‘end point’ for his story was a good idea. The penultimate arc was a pretty dang good ending, since all of the usual Ennis’ over the course of the 6+ years (and a couple of mini-series) that the comic ran actually built towards the end of the series. With all the changes the TV show has made to the characters, overall plot, etc., I’m not sure can putt that off, as it definitely has felt more ‘samey’ over the first three seasons than the comics did.
Yeah the Boys comic built up to the Seven, by having the early trades be the Boys Vs some incestuous X-Men parody or whatever. By making the Seven the co-leads of the show from ep 1, they’ve painted themselves into a corner. Homelander’s too popular to kill but having them dance around each other for season after season is getting tiring.I love the show, I think it’s miles better than the comic. However, Kripke is a man who loves a status quo (look at Supernatural) so I don’t think we’re changing things up anytime soon.
There were definitely some aspects of the comics that were Ennis at his over-the-top worst, but the general ideas for the stories were pretty solid (with roots, of course, in Watchmen and all the other ‘if superheroes were real they’d probably be awful’ stories). Even with an issue cap, series after series of The Boys vs The Seven wouldn’t have been interesting after a while. The show seems to have found a decent balance of just enough WTF moments to not be TOO much, but it hasn’t felt like the story has progressed much at all–stakes get just a little higher every season, but not high enough to not seem like a reset. They’ll either need to end it in another season or two, or try to come up with something worse than Homelander if they want to stretch it too thin…but hopefully they’ll take the first option.
I’m an Ennis fanboy but think the Boys is one of his worst. The show takes all the best parts of the comics but I agree, it feels like it’s resetting a lot. Between Kripke and the ratings, I don’t think the show will end any time soon. But they’re kinda stuck with Homelander because the fans (rightly) love him.So I think the options are1. Continue heightening the background stuff but keep the basic Homelander/Seven Vs the Boys, which is getting tired.2. Introduce more mini bosses, like Soldier Boy. But then you still have that no real progress feeling.3. Totally shake up the status quo, kill Homelander and/or have Butcher be the big bad (which is probably the final season endgame)I guess they could try a Homelander redemption arc if they wanted. I dunno. It’s hard because the shows engine is so built around the Homelander/Seven dynamic, it’s hard to break from it without breaking the show.
Compared to all other superhero *crap? No, not really. I seriously hope they don’t carry on too far with this stuff, it deserves an actual closure instead of sizzling to end.*Altough Peacemaker was magnificient.
Count me among the tired. Each successive season of this show just gets bleaker and bleaker. I get enough of the seemingly futile fight against encroaching Fascism in my normal everyday news intake. It just doesn’t feel like anyone is any closer to anything, other than Homelander truly embracing his inner “wrathful god” there’s really not much in the way of growth in anyone. After all these seasons, everyone’s more or less in the same place on the chessboard other than the most monstrous character, who pretty much just keeps racking up win after win. It’s depressing.I can see why, even though this show is obvious satire to a ridiculously unsubtle degree, there are still people who venerate Homelander. He’s the only character who gets to actually have an arc, and that arc is, he gets worse and worse and yet suffers no real consequences.
When I was a kid in the 80’s hearing about the terrors and pitfalls of drugs, one kid told me a story(obviously not real) about a cat who got into its dealer owner’s PCP supply, and in an Angel Dust fever jumped through said dealer’s chest.Chicken scene definitely reminded me of that story. Especially given it’s probably because the V Drug or whatever got into the chicken’s system to give it the ability to do what it did in the trailer.TLDR: Don’t give drugs to animals, children. It’ll give them the power to jump through your chest!
The super chickens and apparently super sheep were pretty funny. especially them shooting said super chicken and it just walking around like nothing is happening.
I would not accept a milkshake from that dude.
Props to whoever came up with the background music. Of all the songs I expected a moody, trailer-ready update of, this wasn’t one of them:
Frosty chocolate milkshakes!
Rampaging super animals? Why not. I do wonder if any Gen V characters will pop up in this, as that series was surprisingly good and different enough from THE BOYS.
Well Maddie Phillips does pop up for one shot in the trailer so there’s that.