The Boys (Season 1)

 The Boys, an Apple TV series, is another series based on an original comic book.  It is the story of the Seven, an anti-anti-anti-hero band that lampoons the DC Comic and Marvel superhero collectivities.  At first, I was distrubed by the name of the series, There are, after all,  two women characters in the Seven.  However, I quickly realized that the focus will be the boys behaving badly, very badly.  First, of course, in basically the opening scene of the first episode, A-Train runs through (at supersonic speed) and obliterates a woman standing just off the sidewalk.  Her boyfriend, Hughie Campbell, is left literally holding her hands, severed from her fromer body.  Next, just as a new super, a sweet and innocent Starlight (aka Annie January), is introduced, another ‘boy’ of the Seven, the Deep, performs a Harvey Weinstein on her.  And of course, then there is Translucent, a super with the ability to become invisible, who has obviously perfected the art of the Peeping Tom.  From this first episode, it is evident that one must be prepared for the darkest, blackest humour since the advent of Breaking Bad.

The season gradually turns into a conflict between the supers and a vigilante group led by Billy Butcher, who is bent on reeking vengeance on Homelander (the duplicitous leader of the Seven) for the rape and subsequent disappearance of his wife.  Butcher recruits Hughie into the effort, along with former acquaintances Frenchie and Marvin (Mother’s) Milk.  They capture Translucent (who had been spying on them), and Hughie eventually kills him (in another glorious rupture of pseudo-human flesh) by exploding an explosive embedded within his body (to avoid the problem of how to puncture Translucent’s impenetrable carbon fiber skin). 

In a tangent plot line, Hughie meets, by chance, Annie on a park bench and there is the beginning of what will become a relationship.  As Starlight, Annie is booked at an evangelical festival, which enables another plan of Buther’s.  As such, Hughie’s descent from a decent, slightly cowardly man to a more confident person (e.g. killer of decadent supers) and blackmailer of the evil Ezekial (the secretly gay leader of the aforementioned Christian cult) continues to play out.  This leads to the discovery of a pipeline for Compound-V (not  to be confused with Compound-W, a real-life treatment for removing warts).  The vigilantes had previously discovered that both A-Train and his secret super girlfriend, Popclaw, were mainlining this drug like it’s heroin.

The trail of Compound-V gets ever more complicated, as the team finds an imprisoned asian woman who has been forcibly injected and turned into a super.  Even worse, it is uncovered that Compound-V is the very origin of the supers, having been used to secretly infect random babies across America and create the mutants.  And it is all the plot of the giant corporate entity, Voight, that is driving this conspiracy.  Voight is also endeavouring to have the Seven enlisted into the armed forces of the U.S., no doubt to increase their profits even more.  A failed rescue by Homelander of a hijacked airplane flight that results in many dead passengers (cue another coincidence to Breaking Bad) is then turned into a public relations coup by a stunning turn of hypocrisy and malevolence by Highlander.

It is then revealed that the ultimate plan is to introduce another wildcard into play, namely creating terrorist enenieswith super capabilities.  Surprisingly, it is Homelander (and not Voight) that orchestrated this stratagem.  It is increasingly clear that Homelander is veering out of control.  Starlight, meanwhile, definitely feels betrayed by Hughie’s lies and the fact that it was her mother that agreed to dosing her with Compound-V as a baby.  She does, ultimately, come around and ends up rescuing the vigilante crew (minus Butcher) who had been captured.  This sets up a showdown with A-Train, which is conveniently ended by an apparent A-Train heart attack (no doubt brought along by over abuse of Compound-V.  

The final scene of the first season features Butcher taking the Voight handler of Homelander hostage, decking her out with explosives, in a futile attempt to wound the super.  Yet, in a final twist, Homelander has discovered that the handler (with whom he has a rather sick, almost mother-son infatuation) has lied to him, about a son that supposedly died in childbirth.  The son is alive, and as Butcher also learns, the mother is Butcher’s presumed dead wife who is still alive and well.  All of the twists and turns of the series does take away from the intended  sarcasm and satire upon which it is founded.