The Boys

[scottsdad]

The bank robbery 

[LIVIFOREVER]

Going to have to get back into this, think i was about half way through S3, and had only watched the first episode of the Gen V one too.

[D'Jaffo]

Thought there would be more chat about this on here. 
 

I binged Gen V over a weekend ahead of this season starting and whilst I did enjoy it, I didn’t really connect with the characters as much as I have done with some in the Boys. 
 

The latest episode in this series was great though. The scenes with Homelander had me on edge and actually had me sympathising with him for the first time which was bizarre. Also, Barbara has the biggest set of baws on the show with the way she was talking to him. 
 

I think someone called it on Twitter with regards to Billy. If anyone has read the comic then they’ll know what way this might go but the show runners have deviated quite a bit from the source material so I doubt they’ll follow that storyline exactly the way it’s written in the comics. 

[scottsdad]

Really enjoying the show.

[velo army]

I'm not really liking how on the nose the satire is at the moment. The political stuff is being wildly overdone I think. I'm enjoying the gore etc, but the new characters aren't great. Sage is obnoxious and there was a line earlier that just jarred. She said to Homelander something about her being a smart black woman with opinions so of course he'd be uncomfortable. He's not been shown to be sexist or racist before so this just seemed made for those brain-dead reaction videos on YouTube. Also Frenchie's relationship seems a bit tacked on and contrived. He and Kimiko seem to not gave much to do.

I'll keep watching, but I'm starting to see why if had such a low RT audience score.

[coprolite]

Looking forward to seeing what they do with a reanimated Simon Pegg. 

[yoda]

I don't quite get the "too on the nose" comments that are going around. It's never been a subtle show! The satire has always been clearly signposted and smashed into your face at a hundred miles per hour.

The backlash on Rotten Tomatoes and Amazon review scores seems to be driven by folk who somehow didn't realise they were (or are) the ones aligning with "bad guys" in the show. 

[scottsdad]

"Told where to stand, what to say. It was like slavery...only worse."

Some great humour in it this week. 

[Starksdynamo]

Been loving this season but the stuff with the sheep this week really felt a bit too much for me

[scottsdad]

37 minutes ago, Starksdynamo said:

Been loving this season but the stuff with the sheep this week really felt a bit too much for me

 "That man is in no position to f**k a sheep" had me in stitches

[velo army]

I'm really not enjoying it at all. I'd been feeling that the political stuff was a bit too on the nose, but they're just taking it ridiculously far this time. I don't particularly like the character of Sage, mainly as there's been so little exposition of her and also she's arrogant and obnoxious, but that wee bit of exposition about having the cure for cancer only to be dismissed by doctors because she's a black woman and her grandma was a black panther was just crazy. Dreadful writing.

I don't particularly understand this character or why nobody has asked the question why she never went to college and got a really good job, or started a business or invented something. She also hasn't demonstrated any real intelligence beyond the type of Machiavellian scheming that we saw in House of Cards. She lived in a crap flat, looks down on absolutely everyone and has a huge chip on her shoulder. The reason given above had me just shaking my head.

The moral tone of this show is increasingly weird too. There was a supposedly emotional scene where Hughie's dad is dying, but he's just killed three innocent people and I couldn't quite shake that which made the scene pretty numbing and frankly incongruent. 

They've also surrendered any character development and story in favour of gore and depravity apparently only for shock value.

I liked the first few seasons, but this is utter shite.

[D'Jaffo]

18 hours ago, velo army said:

I'm really not enjoying it at all. I'd been feeling that the political stuff was a bit too on the nose, but they're just taking it ridiculously far this time. I don't particularly like the character of Sage, mainly as there's been so little exposition of her and also she's arrogant and obnoxious, but that wee bit of exposition about having the cure for cancer only to be dismissed by doctors because she's a black woman and her grandma was a black panther was just crazy. Dreadful writing.

I don't particularly understand this character or why nobody has asked the question why she never went to college and got a really good job, or started a business or invented something. She also hasn't demonstrated any real intelligence beyond the type of Machiavellian scheming that we saw in House of Cards. She lived in a crap flat, looks down on absolutely everyone and has a huge chip on her shoulder. The reason given above had me just shaking my head.

The moral tone of this show is increasingly weird too. There was a supposedly emotional scene where Hughie's dad is dying, but he's just killed three innocent people and I couldn't quite shake that which made the scene pretty numbing and frankly incongruent. 

They've also surrendered any character development and story in favour of gore and depravity apparently only for shock value.

I liked the first few seasons, but this is utter shite.

I thought it was a weird story from Sage as well especially as the public would’ve been aware of Supes and didn’t think “maybe she does actually know what she’s talking about” but then having thought about it there’s every chance she’s made it up to manipulate Neuman to doing what she wants. 
 

I agree though that her powers aren’t exactly obvious or evident when she’s on screen. She just kinda plans stuff and is a bit of a Sherlock Holmes how she can deduce things about people. You’d have thought someone with those powers would’ve been in a higher up position before being recruited by Homelander. 

[Doctor Manhattan]

19 hours ago, velo army said:

They've also surrendered any character development and story in favour of gore and depravity apparently only for shock value.

I liked the first few seasons, but this is utter shite.

The first few seasons were fairly true to the graphic novels (or comics, depending on your preferred terminology) but they've deviated a fair bit this time around. The gore and depravity was always a big part of the books, and I've no major issues with that in theory, but they've started just making up a whole bunch of other shit now. Sage, for example, doesn't even exist at all  in the books, and by abandoning the previous "subtlety" and going all-in on hammering away at "racists are bad" they've got it quite seriously wrong in my opinion.

[coprolite]

I think Sage is quite an interesting character. My take is that you can’t take anything she says or does at face value and is playing everyone.

The whole show just feels a bit less engaging this time around. But it’s still very entertaining. 

[D'Jaffo]

My only gripe with the season is it feels like we haven’t made any progress at all in terms of end goals or real character development. 
 

A-Train has likely had the biggest shift and you just know he’s likely to bite the bullet in the next couple of episodes. 

[velo army]

51 minutes ago, coprolite said:

I think Sage is quite an interesting character. My take is that you can’t take anything she says or does at face value and is playing everyone.

The whole show just feels a bit less engaging this time around. But it’s still very entertaining. 

She's a mean girl from a high school drama, and not very well acted either. One of the red flags of shite writing is telling instead of showing. We're told that she's highly intelligent, but this hasn't been shown at all. She seems to be half decent at manipulating people, but what I've noticed is that for this to work the characters around her have been made stupider than previous episodes. There's no way that Homelander of previous seasons falls for any of her shite, and a woman who is candidate for  VP (Neumann), who has shown legitimate chops when it comes to manipulation and scheming would have seen through Sage's act quite quickly. It doesn't seem like the writers understand intelligence at all. 

The political stuff really sticks in my craw mainly because it's so lazy. The guy talking about how after rape a woman's body rejects the pregnancy was something an actual Republican elected official said. It's not satire when you just repeat what was said. It's lowest common denominator stuff now and is comedy through recognition rather than cleverness; wheeling out old favourites so that you can boo and jeer. 

The plot to go and plant bugs at Tek Knight's house was fucking brain numbingly stupid. It was entirely reliant on nobody asking the chump to take his mask off which, given he was in a room full of strangers in dinner suits, seems unlikely that nobody would have asked. Also the place had all of America's most influential billionaires, yet no security around to make sure nobody just wandered in (which Kimiko did before opening the locked door from the inside). It was all just set up so that we could see yet another scene of "hilarious" depravity. 

Anyway, aye, it's absolute shite now and none of the characters at all have anything interesting going on. Kimiko is just daunering about with nothing to do, Hughie is back to being a snivelling baby and Butcher is back to still just wanting to kill Homelander. Homelander is currently the only interesting character, which is a huge fall off from what we had before when I was invested in most of the characters (even the fucking Deep).

 

[D'Jaffo]

Felt like this episode had a bit more story progression to it although they’ve left it late in the day with next week being the last episode we’ll get for roughly two years. 

[Mr. Brightside]

I thought that was the best episode of the season, by far.

[velo army]

I'll give it a go then. I initially gave up when Homelander asked Sage again who the leak is and Homelander bought the idea that this megabrain doesn't know. It's not particularly believable and again relies on characters showing previously unseen levels of stupidity.

 

[velo army]

I've given it some obvious stick on here but that was a good finale. Still some patchy writing in the last couple of episodes (the Sage "plan" being laughably contrived) but the rest was great. b*****ds have got me looking forward to the next series, if there is one. This series absolutely tanked on its audience score so it remains to be seen if it'll be renewed.