This week, The Boys creator Eric Kripke announced that the fifth season of the show — presumably airing sometime in 2025, barring another strike — will be its final one. This was always Kripke’s plan, and it feels like a wise choice, especially as we get closer to the end. Last season, I got a little impatient with The Boys, even as it continued to provide reliably thrilling moments in every episode. The longer the show goes on, the more it feels like it’s spinning its wheels and putting off the actual fireworks — especially in season three, a batch of episodes structured loosely around a plot to get serious and kill Homelander once and for all. Of course, that was never going to happen because Homelander is both the main villain of the show and its most compelling character, especially in the hands of Antony Starr.
There’s still as much action and violence as ever, but the “shocking†moments are beginning to feel commonplace, and you can sense that at the start of season four. “Department of Dirty Tricks†is a perfectly solid season opener, but it might also be the first time a premiere hasn’t filled me with anticipation for the next seven episodes. I enjoyed this hour of TV, but once it was over, I felt no immediate urge to let the next episode play.
The episode begins in media res, during an Election Night mission set at least six months after the end of season three (and shortly after the end of spinoff Gen V’s inaugural season). With new VP-elect Victoria Neuman busy with victory speeches, this might be the best time for the Boys to take their shot — but Billy Butcher remains a liability, especially with the temp-V-inflicted sickness waging war on his brain. His teammates still don’t know the truth, but it’s gotten to the point that Butcher is hallucinating and having conversations with his dead wife. Still, he’s basically an even more stubborn, self-centered version of the same old Butcher.
He’s also preoccupied by a custody battle where the kid’s soul is at stake. Now, I’m not sure how old Ryan is supposed to be at this point — in general, this show’s timeline is pretty wonky, and Cameron Crovetti’s yearly growth spurts don’t help with the discrepancies — but I do find this story pretty interesting. Homelander has successfully wormed his way into Ryan’s mind and affected his sense of right and wrong, as demonstrated by that creepy smile from the end of the finale, but you can tell that Ryan is already starting to feel conflicted about being at his biological father’s side all the time. Homelander keeps reminding him that humans are just “toys for our amusement,†but for now, Ryan’s sense of empathy remains mostly intact.
Butcher compromises the Election Night operation by taking the opportunity to confront Ryan and offer him a way out, leading to a snotty “six months to live†prognosis from Homelander. Then, the mission further falls apart when Neuman’s daughter, Zoe, shot up with Compound-V last season, figures out what’s going on and opens her mouth to unleash a quartet of murderous snakes and kill two agents from Dakota Bob Singer’s security detail.
That’s right: Dakota Bob, president-elect, is working with Grace Mallory and the Boys! This is a smart development: After seeing how thoroughly our main characters got their asses handed to them last season, they needed a win, and it’s exciting to see that they’ve finally recruited an ally so high up. It also works because it makes sense: Neuman is now one step away from the presidency, which means it’s only a matter of time before she pops Bob’s skull and gets her Frank-Underwood-in-the-Oval-Office moment. She must be stopped before Congress certifies the election on January 6. (I wonder how the writers chose that date.)
The botched operation does lead to a much-needed conversation between Hughie and Neuman. One of my biggest problems with season three was the lack of follow-through on some of the emotional consequences of the bigger plot beats, especially when it comes to this pairing; the two of them formed a real and believable bond, shown in just a couple casual conversations, but Hughie never reckoned with the betrayal he felt when he discovered the truth about his boss and friend, and Neuman never got to explain herself.
This scene finally addresses that, with Hughie calling Neuman out for turning her daughter into a monster — and, more important, for keeping so many huge secrets from someone she called family. The two assassination attempts that follow (Hughie splashing her with acid, then Butcher shooting her in the head) are pretty pathetic, but Neuman doesn’t directly retaliate, content to simply threaten the lives of everyone Hughie cares about. The Boys goes this route far too often — practically anytime somebody gains power over an enemy, the writers can mitigate it with a lazily deployed death threat or blackmail — but the scene accomplishes what it’s meant to.
Much of the rest of the episode is spent introducing the various individual subplots for the season. Some of them fit pretty organically into the larger structure that the season is setting up: Annie January wants to vocally support the Starlighters, for example, but is having trouble making a difference without wearing the famous Starlight suit again. It feels right when she makes a public appearance at the courthouse later in the episode, but it’s clear that this story of reclaiming her supe identity isn’t over yet.
And Butcher’s ongoing moral journey is at the forefront, as always, with old military buddy Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) serving as the latest devil on his shoulder. With Mother’s Milk as the current leader, Butcher feels useless; he only has months to live, which isn’t nearly enough time to accomplish everything he wants to do for his family or for the world. His abuse of V24 got him to this place, but Kessler reframes his thinking: Maybe his biggest mistake was letting his focus stray by sparing Homelander to protect Ryan.
Either way, Ryan needs to be out of harm’s way if Butcher eventually takes another shot at Homelander, perhaps once the supe-killing virus invented at Godolkin University is strong enough. (In case you didn’t watch Gen V, Neuman discovered the virus’s existence and stole the samples, then Butcher discovered the lab where it was tested during a mid-credits scene in the finale.) Butcher contemplates making yet another deal with the devil — handing over Hughie’s dirt on Neuman’s childhood at the Red River Institute in exchange for Ryan’s protection — but ultimately doesn’t go through with it, thankfully. Returning to the well of sabotaging Hughie would be pretty disappointing at this point, even if Butcher’s morality remains an open question.
Elsewhere, some of the individual story lines feel a bit … not random but disconnected from the bigger picture. Frenchie wants to pursue a relationship with Colin, a man he met in Narcotics Anonymous (and who now works at Starlight House), but his co-dependent bond with Kimiko keeps him from going all in. By the end of the episode, he has overcome that hurdle with some gentle encouragement from Kimiko, but something about the situation still seems to be troubling him — something related to Colin’s family, whom he glimpses in a photo after he and Colin finally fall into bed together. Exploring more of Frenchie’s past could be intriguing, but I do wish he and Kimiko weren’t always so siloed off.
The same goes for Hughie this season, whose father is comatose in the hospital after having a stroke. There are some moving moments here, especially when Hughie listens to a voicemail from his dad, musing that he won’t take Hugh Sr.’s long rants about James Patterson for granted anymore if he makes it through this. But I’m not totally sure I care about the introduction of Hughie’s mom (Rosemarie DeWitt) yet, even if her absence affected so much of his life.
Still, there’s plenty of potential here, especially when it comes to Homelander’s midlife crisis. He and Stormfront had an interesting dynamic in season two, but we’ve never quite seen the man crave pushback like he does now, with Starlight and Queen Maeve’s absences leaving a void in the Seven. Nobody is willing to challenge Homelander anymore — which is why he seeks out Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), a supe whose power is simply being the smartest person in the world. Her solution for his gnawing unhappiness is to sow discord and then save the masses rather than crushing them.
The perfect opportunity presents itself: The announcement of the verdict in Homelander’s trial. As he pointed out to Neuman early on, it’s basically a formality; this man is not going to prison, especially with a bullshit self-defense claim to shield him. So with Sage’s help, Homelander puts a plan in motion: invite three of his biggest fans to meet him before the verdict (including Todd, the reactionary ex-boyfriend of Marvin’s ex-wife), kill them, show up to the courthouse, stoke the flames of the warring Starlighter and Hometeamer protesters, then blame the fans’ deaths on the Starlighters. And it works flawlessly, dooming Marvin’s daughter, Janine, to a very sad conversation in the morning.
All of this serves as a very obvious political allegory involving outside agitators and a certain insurrection from a few years back, and in general it seems like the show is leaning harder into the Trump (and Hillary) parallels this season, to the point that we might have to stop using the word allegory and start saying “faithful retelling, but with superheroes.†“Department of Dirty Tricks†is a little scattered as a premiere, and it doesn’t necessarily do anything to convince me that this show could last longer than five seasons, even if Kripke wanted it to. But knowing there’s an end in sight is reassuring — and so is knowing that I’ll be here unpacking at least one more season with you all.
Extra Frames
• “Come on. I do not want to miss Smash Mouth.â€
• If there’s any intention of giving the Deep a real story line instead of further comic relief high jinks, we don’t see it here. But shout out to Tilda Swinton for guest starring as his octopus girlfriend Ambrosius, who is hidden away at the back of the closet after his (now ex) wife exposed their affair.
• We also briefly meet Firecracker (Valorie Curry), host of a far-right InfoWars-esque show called The Truth Bomb. She seems just lovely: “‘An eye for an eye’ might be in the Jew section of the Bible, but it is still in the Bible.â€
• Homelander orders the Deep to blow A-Train to make a point, and nothing about what happens next surprised me: They both start to follow orders, but Homelander stops them before anything can happen, having proven his point.
• So where exactly does Neuman stand with Homelander? She says their arrangement is ancient history, but she’s still in bed with Vought, and Homelander is Vought.
• Waiting to see what exactly Starlight House does before weighing in on that story.
• “Yo, what the fuck? That was sooo fucked up, you guys.†At first I was skeptical of the choice to bring Black Noir back, even with someone else in the suit, but this was pretty funny.