Superiority Complex

Eric Kripke’s interview in The Hollywood Reporter about season four of The Boys touches on a lot of topics.

But there’s a good chance you’ve only seen the bit where he’s dismissive of anyone who calls The Boys “woke” and throws his hands up at the idea that anyone could think that Homelander, the evil Superman / Captain America mash-up Supe of the setting, is a hero. In one sense, it’s hard to blame the showrunner for this response. Simply answering the question at all made it the only question in the interview anyone reported on. It took a social-media announcement explicitly saying The Boys would only last for five seasons to kill that talking point.

Ideally, the premiere of the fourth season of The Boys itself might have done that much, but it doesn’t take long for the show to jump right back into the same ambiguous metaphors that complicate any simplistic attempt to interpret Homelander as just being a Donald Trump stand-in. The opening episodes remind us that the evil Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of this setting, Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), succeeds outrageously compared to her real world counterpart, managing to politick her way into the vice presidency. An attempt by the titular Boys to assassinate her inevitably fails. Then we learn that despite Homelander experiencing a moment of triumph in last season’s cliffhanger by murdering a man in broad daylight to wild cheers, he still has to sit through boring trials to establish that technically he committed self-defense. He’s depressed; everyone’s scared of him and even his allies can’t provide useful feedback.

Enter Sage (Susan Heyward), the standout character who tops these ambiguous metaphors. Sage’s superpower is being smart. Think less Tony Stark, building random science out of nothing and more Sherlock Holmes, making fast, elaborate deductions and complex long-term schemes. But more than her abilities, what makes Sage so intriguing is her split motivation. As a Black woman, Sage resents that Vought International tried to name her Sister Sage and dress her up in spandex to fit the image for a ridiculous business model revolving around woke branding.

Sage seems to be a sympathetic character. She’s Black, smart, and discriminated against for both reasons. On the more surface level, though, Sage seems to agree entirely with Homelander’s vision of a world dominated by Supes, the next level of human evolution. She’s condescending enough to everyone she meets for this interpretation to be plausible. But what exactly is she trying to do? Sage describes herself as a master manipulator trying to work behind the scenes. But would the smartest person in the world really watch trashy reality TV and eat junk food while rehashing discourse from fifteen year old movies, all as part of a ludicrously complex seduction when the more plausible explanation is just that she’s lonely?

If there’s any consistent thread in The Boys, it’s that whatever explanation of what’s going on — whether it be the obvious one, the absurd one, or something else entirely — hinges on the world these characters live in being irredeemably stupid. The speedy superhero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) opens up one episode starring in a terrible inspirational story, and his day only gets worse when he’s forced to admit that superheroes in this world don’t actually save anyone. Even the rescues are stage managed.

Like any good metaphor, there are a lot of ways to interpret this. Could American hegemony also be a form of such stage management? Should we see American soldiers as innately heroic regardless of what they’re doing or why? Or what about how “woke” branding encourages us to see accts of consumerism as heroic?

The main flaw of The Boys is that its own hype, after a certain point, turned into consumerist fetishism, a subject Eric Kripke tried to discuss in the Hollywood Reporter interview to relatively little interest. He openly acknowledged that The Boys is mainly about catharsis, with no pretensions of provoking real world change, which is almost certainly why the criticism The Boys offers about the hollowness of such messaging is so sharp. We live in a society surrounded by obvious, absurd agitprop where we’re expected to pretend that statements of obvious self interest should be presumed to be true if we find them agreeable, while similar statements from those politically opposed to our own views are seen as deriving from pure evil.

The fourth season has an especially interesting approach to this kind of binary thinking when it visits a conspiracy theorist convention. So many absurd conspiracies have already turned out to be true in this setting that the skepticism in these scenes never feels wrong so much as misaimed. The way The Boys handles child sex trafficking conspiracy theories, for example, takes on a different tone in the context of the backstory of Kimiko Miyashiro (Karen Fukuhara).

Although on that note, the personal, rather than the political or espionage elements of The Boys in this season as ever tend to go understated mainly because they’re just not that interesting in comparison. The stakes of the greater conflict of Supes versus the world are high less because the world of The Boys is itself all that interesting so much as because of how stark the contrast is to our own reality. Kripke can say Homelander isn’t sympathetic as much as he wants, but his mid-life crisis, existential doubt, and blank stares of empty frustration are reminiscent of modern ennui. Kimiko’s fundamentally silly backstory — brainwashed by a religious cult — can’t really compare.

As the Supes in The Boys get more powerful, they paradoxically also get more pathetic, struggling to earn self worth in a world that only values their incredible powers as parlor tricks. All of which ties neatly back to Sage, who seems to dislike racists less because racism is bad and more because she’s smarter than the racists. It doesn’t help that she uses the word “racist” in a way that makes it difficult to tell at any given moment whether she’s talking about prejudice against black people or prejudice against Supes.

The real antagonist of The Boys is smug, overconfident superiority. Anyone can fall victim to that. It’s just a whole lot easier when you take certain facts for granted and refuse to entertain the idea that the world doesn’t have to work this way.