Superhero Homelander wants more power, so he unexpectedly hires Sage, the most intelligent woman in the world, with the power of self-regenerating brain, to be his advisor. They concoct a plan to have superhero Victoria Neuman run as Vice President to US President elect Bob Singer, so that she can kill him, take over, and be de facto Homelander's proxy. Homelander gets a new assistant: Misty / Firecracker, who leads an internet propaganda campaign to always attack his enemies. Meanwhile, Billy, MM, Frenchie, Kimiko, Annie January / Starlight and Hughie from "The Boys" team up with A-Train who gives them secret information he heard from Homelander. They release Stan Edgar, who leads them to a secret laboratory that developed a virus that can kill a superhero. Just as Victoria shows up to talk with Hughie to team up, Billy, having injected Compound V in himself, kills her. Homelander announces martial law to hunt down all the "Starlighters".
The fourth season of "The Boys" once again shows what a patchwork and mixed bag it is: it has both one of the best episodes of the entire series, 4.1, where everything is so meticulously written and planned down to a T, and every little detail and action has a why and because; and one of the worst episodes, 4.6, drowning in sado-masochistic excess and banality. All the seasons are like that— inconsistent, walking between genius and garbage. Yet this one is among the better ones, with insane satirical allegory on modern American society, whereas Karl Urban and Erin Moriarty are once again excellent in their roles as Billy and Annie January / Starlight, respectively. Antony Starr is disturbing in the role of the villain-superhero Homelander, who seems like the evil, degenerate Superman from "Superman III" won in a fight against the good Clark Kent and went on a quest to gain more and more power, in a totalitarian aim to rule (and re-shape) the entire country. As the previous seasons warned, if someone is given unlimited power, how can there ever be a normal society based on rule of law? Who will stop him from doing crimes? Episode 4.5 embodies these disparate traits of "The Boys". On the one hand, it addresses these problems of absolute power when Ryan orders a director to apologize to his female assistant for harassing her, but his apology to her ("I'm sorry if I exploited our inequitable power dynamic and made you feel uncomfortable") actually refers to Homelander standing right next to Ryan, in his rule of fear over humans.
The new character of the super-intelligent superhero woman Sage has some wonderful wisecracking comments ("Y'all just think I'm stupid poor white trash", says Homelander-fanatic Misty / Firecracker, as Sage replies: "I don't think you're poor"). The bizarre joke where The Boys go to a top secret rural laboratory, but its superhero components accidentally leaked into the ground and "contaminated" some of the animals, so they encounter "superhero chickens" at a farm who are so invincible that they cannot be killed when shot at, is hilarious. But the flying sheep, revealed later on, were just stupid and too much. The same goes for Homelander's "revenge" against the laboratory scientists in episode 4.4 who experimented on him when he was a kid—it goes into extreme violence and torture, and is kind of a stretch (would all these same people still be working in the exact same place after 20 years? And after no more superhero experiments are necessary?). And as one scientists ironically adds, even as a kid, Homelander could have simply broke the laboratory door and walked away anytime he wanted. The worst episode, 4.6, involves Hughie dressed up as a superhero, but stuck in a dungeon of a rich sado-masochist, in an awful and unnecessary sequence of explicit perversions. Yes, upstairs in the mansion, all the billionaires and Homelander and planning a coup d'état to take over the US, but their perversion and decadence is already elaborated enough without a need to show the infamous dungeon sequence, as already Sage's comment at seeing so many billionaires in the mansion is sharp: "38% of the US GDP is in this room." The conspiracy theory convention episode 4.2 is also very funny and subversive, summed up in a simple scene where Sage asks: "What are you selling?", and Misty replies: "Purpose. These people got nothing." Different directors yield different results per episode, but season 4 has so many surprises that it is at times incredible (even Will Ferrell has a delicious cameo), with politics taking over the center stage. But then again, through its themes (corruption; false idols; domination of the upper class (in this case, the superheroes); criminals covertly taking over the entire country through propaganda claiming they are the good guys), politics was the main destination already hinted at in the first season.
Grade:+++
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