The Boys Season 3 Review: Still Surprising and Violent as Ever
It's not that the first two seasons of The Boys didn't feel like the comics from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, but season three of the Prime Video series REALLY feels like reading an issue of that Dynamite series. Many of the hallmarks of the comic are there, like the titular anti-supe team working for the government in secret, working out of the Flatiron Building, targeting specific supes across each episode for their larger means, as well as a totally out-of-his-mind Homelander. As a reader this is delightful, but fans that are only coming to the show will continue to find a compelling, hilarious, dark, and violent superhero series that has hit another home run. The best part about the new season, though, is that it remains committed to surprise you at every turn.
Picking up a year after season two's conclusion, The Boys Season 3 digs into the fallout of Stormfront's secret Nazi heritage in a big way, making it a major pressing point for Homelander and Vought as they attempt to navigate the bad PR while continuing to release movies and shows about their supes. It's one of many ripped-from-the-headlines plot threads in the new season that feels wholly prescient but with enough of a spin from the lens of this world that it's not exhausting to bear witness to all over again. Meanwhile, Billy Butcher continues his crusade to end supes — and Homelander, especially — for good. Part of that campaign, however, includes the arrival of Temp-V, a Vought creation that offers superpowers for a limited time, and which Butcher is eager to exploit to level the playing field.
Though this series is an ensemble effort, Karl Urban's Butcher and Antony Starr's Homelander are its most compelling in Season 3, and the anchors that hold everything together. Both are given significant arcs in the new season and a lot to chew on dramatically. But Starr continues to find new ways to make his character completely unhinged but totally believable, which is what makes his character the best love-to-hate-'em role in ages. Karen Fukuhara is the other major standout from the returning players, continuing her soulful performance sans dialogue and giving a depth to Kimiko that the comic series never even attempted.
The biggest new addition to the series in The Boys Season 3 is none other than Jensen Ackles, taking on the part of Soldier Boy, a proto-Homelander who has been presumed dead for four decades. Reunited with Supernatural creator and The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke, Ackles is clearly having the time of his life playing one of the nastiest, stuck-in-time characters in a series that has its fair share of them already. With a voice that hits like a boot on gravel, Ackles doesn't really make his premiere until about midway through the season but becomes such a larger-than-life presence that imagining anyone else in the role begins to feel impossible.
Where The Boys continues to excel is in its ability to totally lampoon real-life events, both the insane reality of modern politics and the nature of corporate branding/capitalism. Chace Crawdord's role as the world's biggest dumbass, The Deep, is another high mark, especially as his previously-maligned hero now begins a comeback tour that seems as purely orchestrated as what we read in that headlines every other week. Countless other topics are touched upon with stinging satire, from Fox News talking heads to the "Blue Lives Matter" movement, and they're all given a proper spin to fit into the world. That said, some viewers may find the show exhausting at times, largely because it's reacting to the last five years of our lives in major ways
What's remarkable about The Boys as a series is that each season has never felt starkly different from what came before it, each batch of episodes truly playing like the next collection of issues in a larger narrative, but at the same time has never gotten stale. When the series is complete there will seemingly be a host of seasons that all tell one big story, with the breaks between no longer carrying the weight of a hiatus and simply directing where the tale goes next. That is not to say that the series feels the same from seasons one to two to now three, or that at any point the show is spinning its wheels, because the surprises that they manage to sneak into literally every episode always manage to top what came before them.
The Boys as a TV show is entering a rare territory, one where it has staked its own claim with the property and seems poised to exceed its source material in many ways. While Ennis and Robertson's comics will always be present and available for readers, TV series creator Kripke has elevated the material to fit our current era like how the original text was a major response to early-2000s politics. Both versions of this story, in print and on screen, contain elements that will tragically always be timeless, but The Boys TV series has found where it can improve on its source, and it's done that.
Rating: 5 out of 5
The first three episodes of The Boys season three will premiere on Friday, June 3 on Amazon Prime Video.
