This review contains spoilers for The Boys season 3 finale.
The Boys Season 3 Episode 8: The Instant White-Hot Wild
The Boys’ third run finale largely continues the two big themes of the season, setting up Season 4 to be another set of stories focusing on terrible father figures, and political satire. But it also provides closure to several running story threads, giving ‘The Instant White-Hot Wild’ a good sense of closure on this chapter, and it injects some much-needed joy into the show’s bleak universe.
The Boys TV show (as opposed to the original comics) has always been about satirising celebrity culture more than anything else. But this season, it’s increasingly shifted into political satire. That’s an entirely logical step, since the political culture it’s satirizing is precisely one where celebrities not only become politicians, but use their celebrity as the basis for their political career. It’s also tied up with the use of social media for political campaigns, not just campaigns for office, but political activism and social movements on both sides – and we’ve seen both used frequently throughout Season 3 in various ways.
Daddy Issues
Happy Endings?
The fact that several of these are happy endings – or happy pauses in the middle of the action, perhaps – is also really important. The Boys is a bleak universe, and viewers are well aware of that. The show started with the brutal death of Hughie’s girlfriend and nearly all its superheroes (with the exception of Starlight) are either deeply flawed or outright evil. But if all an audience ever gets is death and destruction with no moments of hope and no one to root for, they will eventually lose interest and switch off. If all the characters are too awful to care about, or likely to be killed in the next five minutes, why bother watching?
Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!
