The Boys Season 3

In the latest season of Amazon's 'The Boys,' the gang discovers that Soldier Boy might hold the key to stopping Homelander for good.

The series hasn’t lost its bitterness or its bite, and the chilling final shots of the finale should wipe out any fears to that effect. And yes, it’s queasily ironic that this takedown of powerful institutions is coming to us from a series funded by one of the most powerful corporations at all. The other is Soldier Boy (a well cast but somewhat underused Jensen Ackles), an early Captain America-esque Supe whose mysterious demise in the 1980s might hold the key to stopping Homelander and his kind for good. Unfortunately for these characters but fortunately for us, the season two finale planted a ticking time bomb in the form of Victoria’s secret head-exploding superpower. The Boys is still the show that’ll serve up exploding bodies with a smirk and make time for a field trip to a superpower-fueled orgy. “With great power comes the absolute certainty you’ll turn into a right cunt.” That line, delivered with a weary sigh by Karl Urban’s Butcher in the new season, has been more or less The Boys‘ thesis statement from the beginning.

This review of The Boys season 3 contains no spoilers and is based on all eight episodes. Ever since satire was invented people have loved to claim that ...

In that respect, The Boys remains the rare streaming TV property that understands how to exploit both the advantages of streaming (accessibility, memeification) and traditional serialized storytelling (escalation, rhythm, and *ahem* consistent episode lengths). It’s in exploring that question that The Boys bumps into its first major character introduction of the year. Like we said, the show really does have a handle on the Western cultural landscape. Just as important as the shock the opening minutes of this season provides, however, is how economically it catches viewers up with each character in the show’s sprawling cast. Something has to give with Homelander in season 3 and wouldn’t you know it, it eventually does in breathtaking fashion. I’m just so tired of losing.” It’s a valid question, borne of frustration that is eerily reflected in much of our political discourse today. Characters like Annie January a.k.a. Starlight (Erin Moriarty), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) build upon the cheeky “Girls Get It Done” Vought campaign from last season to uh…really get shit done. When The Boys season 3 premieres its first three episodes this Friday, June 3 on Prime Video, even the most satire-agnostic among us will have to concede that the show is onto something. In speaking to Den of Geek at SXSW prior to season 3’s premiere, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke revealed that the first 15 minutes of season 3 was “by far” the craziest thing the show had ever done. No pop culture entity in living memory has better understood the human inclination towards hero worship better than The Boys and this third season puts that understanding to use in profoundly insightful and entertaining ways. The impulse is understandable as sometimes the world is so intensely bizarre that there doesn’t appear to be much point in comedically exaggerating it further. The rubber meets the road quickly and loudly.

But even a subdued Homelander (Starr) is still dangerous. The answer to taking him down may lie with the original Supe, Soldier Boy (Ackles).

Indeed, Homelander’s unpredictable nature has always been The Boys’ trump card in relation to other contemporary superhero content. Queen Maeve ( Dominique McElligott) is a bit shortchanged by the material in early episodes, but other subplots are heartfelt. But any concerns that The Boys’ capacity to shock has dimmed in the context of its new counterparts are emphatically blown out of the water within the first ten minutes, thanks to an Ant-Man riff so completely outrageous that it really has to be seen to be believed.

We live in a world over-saturated by superhero movies with obsessive fans clamoring for the next predictable energy battle finale and loudly campaigning for ...

Starr continues to give the most unsettling performance as Homelander—descending fully into a madness that we haven’t seen before, which is saying something because Homelander has been a narcissistic psychopath since day one, but Season 3 takes him to entirely new levels. By the end of the season, Soldier Boy’s introduction begins to feel a lot more like this is The Boys’ Captain America: Civil War, right down to a secret about parents that tears the Seven apart. While character development is a very important discussion, this review would be remiss not to dive headfirst into a character that fans have been anxiously awaiting the introduction of: Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). Riffing on the ever-popular trope of a superhero being taken by enemy forces, brainwashed, and turned into a weapon, Soldier Boy is brought in Season 3 as Butcher’s last-ditch effort in destroying Homelander. While he’s not quite the same cartoonishly ridiculous character that was created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson in their comic book series by the same name, he is almost everything that fans were hoping for. While he has come close a number of times, and he has certainly put a dent in the population of supes, Season 3 brings him the closest to achieving his goals—but at a great cost. Since the start of the series, Butcher has been on a singular mission to get revenge against Homelander for what he did to Becca and, in the process, bring down Vought and put an end to superpowered individuals in general. We live in a world over-saturated by superhero movies with obsessive fans clamoring for the next predictable energy battle finale and loudly campaigning for studios to release some director’s cut of the last big team-up movie.

As long as we must live in Marvel's Cinematic Universe, Amazon Prime Video's The Boys offers an oasis for everyone who wishes we didn't.

The situation is especially complicated for Annie, whose role in the Vought fight requires her to remain in the company as a double agent at ever-increasing cost to her own well-being. Other than, you know, everything that’s bad about contemporary life — politics, capitalism, patriarchy — The Boys’ most obvious satirical target is Disney, which owns the two biggest sci-fi genre brands in pop culture, Star Wars and Marvel. The show’s June 3 season three premiere is hammocked between the Disney Plus premieres of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ms. Marvel. Yet while there is an argument to be made that Disney is a malignant force in the world, or at least not a benign one, Amazon is probably worse — and as savage as cultural critiques can be in The Boys, the show’s creative forces leave their evil corporate overlords alone. It’s already been widely reported that this season includes a trip to the 70th annual superhero orgy known as Herogasm, but “graphic” is an insufficient term to describe what makes it on screen. Hughie, who closed Season 2 saying he wanted to attack Vought “the right way,” has gone to work for the Federal Bureau Of Superhero Affairs — not knowing that its director, former Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), is a supe who ascended to her current position in part by strategically exploding her opponents’ heads. So as we rejoin the story for season three of The Boys, which begins one year after we left off, Vought’s crisis managers have supplied Homelander with talking points; the company has also rewritten the narrative of the Rise Of The Seven movie to make Homelander look less complicit. Like The Avengers and Stark Industries, The Seven are closely tied to a corporation.