Highly entertaining Season 4 of 'The Boys' brings another big helping of superhero anarchy

Erin Moriarty and Antony Starr are MVPs, but Karl Urban and Laz Alonso are treasures.

“I don’t know if I’m a hero. I don’t even know who the fuck I am.”

Erin Moriarty’s words as Starlight aka innocent hometown prom queen Annie, could echo through all of our souls as the election year truly takes hold. It’s no secret that Eric Kripke and his brilliant writing team know how to stir the political pot with their deliciously wicked adaptation of the graphic novel. The Boys has always thrived on being one of television’s wildest creatures, but it’s gathering focus as it prepares to film its fifth and final season.

Season 4, which just concluded on Thursday with the release of its eighth episode, seems to have gotten a bad rap from critics overall. “Unfocused, in over its head, or losing its touch” will all be thrown into a word blender in articles across the internet. After getting a late start to Kripke’s latest wild bunch shenanigans, I kept wondering if we were watching the same thing.

Little changes in the manner with which characters are dispatched: head blown off, body broken in half by a piano, shoulder and chest torn open, a fist going through skull, and perhaps a scene involving superpowered sheep taking out agents. The dialogue is still a wild batch of raunchy and delirious anecdotes and putdowns, and the cast is sharp as ever.

Quite frankly, this show is as good as they allow one of its central characters to keep going berserk. If Antony Starr doesn’t get nominated and win after his Season 4 work, something could be off. He injects Homelander (think Captain America if he was a corporate, power-hungry heel) with so much venom and disdain for the human species that you can sometimes feel it as a viewer.

With just a cheek wrinkle or movement of his eyes, Starr can do a lot and has gotten more comfortable in Homelander’s awful villainy each season. You won’t soon forget the scenes where he goes back to his original dungeon, where his once human body became a lab rat for scientists seeing green. If slow boil torture was a thing, Starr and the writers twist the knife just right.

Hats off also to Moriarty, who has gotten to show off sweet Starlight’s dark side only so often in the first three seasons. This is what happens when you drain the sugar out of the tea. She gets to lose her shit in Season 4, going off on an internet conspiracy Supe-loving crazy called Firecracker and getting to play multiple roles/personalities towards the end. The actress gets more to do, and excels at the chance to show the different layers of America’s sweetheart nominee.

Laz Alonso gives Mother’s Milk a weary sense of “this will be bad” dread, evoking the great Danny Glover in certain scenes. Before the show ends, he must blurt out at least one “I’m getting too old for this shit.” Perhaps I am infatuated with superhero anarchy being pitted against our modern day politics (“Make America Super Again” is a motto) and a group of humans who are misfit toys on a random island separate, but something more when fighting a force of nature head on.

THE URBAN EFFECT

Karl Urban throws a curvy spin on Billy Butcher, giving us the fearless leader wit and charm that we’ve come to love, and then something more sinister. Infected with the V-drug serum that he put into his own body to level the playing field in a fight against supes, Butcher’s last plea is to save the soul of his stepson, Ryan. The young fella’s father is Homelander, a drama that only builds as the kid grows older and realizes he has too many superpowers.

Hat tip to the talented Jeffrey Dean Morgan for infusing a key role in the latest season with a sinister wit. It brings all his tools to the table, and gave me a decent rug-pull twist in episode six. It doesn’t land as hard if Morgan isn’t playing it so well.

Again, I eat this stuff up like barbecue at a neighborhood cookout. Beans, burgers, slaw, chips, and maybe a cookie with a big helping of Starr. Since I discovered his massive talent on the then unknown Cinemax original, Banshee, I only hoped he would tackle roles like Homelander. Tested like an animal in a lab that enhanced every aspect of a comic book superhero power you can imagine, Starr wears the pain like a weather-torn badge of honor.

It’s a performance that makes everything around it better. Kripke has informed everyone that the upcoming fifth season is the series finale for the show that reinvented superheroes, in my humble opinion, for audiences everywhere. I’ll miss its mayhem more so than others, which is fine. Art isn’t always meant to be devoured together at once.

Thanks for reading, and happy entertainment hunting out there.