“Viewer discretion advised,” the warning reads. “The episode contains scenes of fictional political violence. Any similarities to recent events are completely coincidental and unintentional.”
The political commentary on the streaming series has never been subtle. It is set in a parallel United States in which a benevolent-seeming mega-corporation, Vought International, manages a group of elite superheroes called the Seven who purport to be helping the world but are really getting away with wanton murder and destruction to advance their egos and corporate greed. “[Homelander] has always been a Trump analogue to me,” showrunner Eric Kripke said in 2022 of the villainous, virtue-signaling leader of the Seven. After the third season, Kripke, who declined to be interviewed for this article, acknowledged that the show’s plotlines were getting more “bald” because the real world he’s satirizing has grown “more coarse and less elegant.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
While an episode of “The Simpsons” depicting an assassination was pulled from a planned Season 7 marathon, “The Boys” continued on — although the show did pause promotion for several days, which is both unusual for its active social media, and especially noticeable preceding a highly anticipated season finale.
Known for its graphic content and gory effects, the show follows a group of vigilantes (the titular Boys) attempting to limit the unyielding and often immorally used power wielded by superheroes (or “supes”) in their world. Amid such delights as flying killer sheep and a Tilda-Swinton-voiced octopus, Season 4 focused on Homelander (Antony Starr) trying to get his political puppet, the secret supe Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), into the Oval Office by any means necessary — leading to a finale focused on assassinations.
Here are six times “The Boys” mirrored political figures and events.
Political assassinations
A main theme throughout the eight-episode season was the impending attempt on the life of president-elect Robert Singer (Jim Beaver), which came to a head Thursday. A war has been brewing between right-wing superhero supremacists and the Boys-led, corruption-fighting resistance. Singer had become Homelander’s target after getting elected on an anti-supe agenda — and was whisked away to a bunker when Secret Service assignments and blueprints to a political rally were found in the hideout of a shape-shifting assassin (who, of course, later infiltrates his protective circle). While Singer wasn’t killed, his VP-elect Neuman was, and Singer was blamed for her assassination. The outcome and subsequent fallout is explained through an in-world news announcement.
Amid the chaos of an uprising over a “stolen” election, the secretary of state is declared president and immediately declares martial law, deputizing Homelander to activate an army of superhero loyalists to round up dissidents and throw them into internment camps.
Homelander vs. Trump
Kripke’s less-than-subtle stand-in for Donald Trump, Homelander is the most powerful superhero in the world, whose invincibility took on new meaning during a season that aired as the U.S. Supreme Court granted Trump broad presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. A blond, blue-eyed equivalent of a sociopathic Captain America or a white supremacist Superman, Homelander has a love/hate relationship with the media but always succeeds with his base.
In the Season 3 finale, Homelander kills a protester who challenges him in a crowd of people. After the man throws a bottle, the superhero shoots him down with red laser beams from his eyes in broad daylight with no repercussions for his actions — a visceral representation of Trump saying “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”
An AOC stand-in
To play Victoria Neuman, the secretly supe-powered vice president-elect, Doumit said she drew on the mannerisms of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for inspiration. Introduced in Season 2, Neuman soars in popularity as a young, activist liberal congresswoman leading a charge to hold supes accountable for the collateral damage they cause in their “saves.”
But, as the audience later finds out, Neuman is actually superpowered herself, and is, indeed, the notorious “Head-Popper,” who has been assassinating witnesses and members of Congress during hearings on Vought, the omnipotent corporation that has ushered in the corrupt superhero era by injecting children with a drug called Compound V that grants them powers.
In Season 4, Neuman secures the vice presidency when, in a closed-door meeting with billionaires, she declares her intentions to switch sides as soon as she’s in office, and condemn the “defund the supes” movement. “The truth is, America is not a democracy,” she tells the billionaires. “The word ‘democracy’ makes people feel safe. But the founders never trusted the masses.”
The pandemic
The main mission of Season 4 centers on control of a virus created in a lab (sound familiar?) that may be the Boys’ only shot at killing Homelander. Discovered in the spinoff series “Gen V” — set at an academy where young supes learn to harness their powers — the virus is lethal only to the super-enabled. Should it become airborne, it could lead to supe genocide, killing off not just the bad guys at Vought, but anyone in the resistance with Compound V in their blood.
In “Gen V” the virus is shown as catastrophic, but the scaled-back version in Season 4 is still dangerously effective, taking down ravenous, V-enabled sheep (the drug got into the drinking water of a farm), and nearly kills beloved supe freedom fighter Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), who is saved only because her best friend/love interest Frenchie (Tomer Capone) quickly saws off a leg he knows she can regenerate.
The virus also dovetails with the show’s larger commentary about overwhelming corporate power and the use of fear to sell pharmaceuticals.
The Fox News starlet
A subplot of Season 4 follows the rise to fame of Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a right-wing exhibitionist who hosts a far-right fringe show called “The Truth Bomb” and eventually works her way up to being the main anchor of flag-pushing Vought News.
The Boys track her down at a QAnon-like conference called TruthCon, where Firecracker is accusing good-guy supe Starlight (Erin Moriarty) of being part of “the Hollywood Pedophile Cabal.” We learn that she holds a grudge against Starlight from back in their teen superhero pageant days. And when Starlight threatens to spread word that Firecracker had sex with a 15-year-old boy in her charge at a Bible camp, Firecracker tweets out the scandal herself and says it led her to Jesus. Then she turns around and reveals that Starlight had an abortion.
Nazis in populist clothing
Much of Season 2, which aired in the fall of 2020 following the rise of the alt-right and Black Lives Matter protests, chronicles the blazing popularity of Stormfront (Aya Cash), a supe who can conjure up lightning and extreme weather events. Stormfront gains a rabid following for being an outspoken feminist speaking out about the hypocrisy of Vought, where she works. But she turns out to be an actual Nazi who takes sadistic pleasure in killing people of color.
When she and Homelander become a nightmare power couple, Stormfront reveals that she was born in 1919 and was the first superhero, injected with Compound V by the founder of Vought, who tested out his supe-creating drug on imprisoned Jews at Dachau. In the modern day, she teaches her supe-boyfriend the key to success in presidential politics. “You can’t win the whole country anymore. No one can,” she says. “You don’t need 50 million people to love you — you need 5 million people f—ing pissed.”
