Review: The Boys Season 2 Gives A Little Extra to Keep Viewers Hooked

Take Amazon’s The Boys Season 1 and inject it with some V, and you end up with The Boys Season 2. It’s a little more hyped up to keep overly jaded viewers hooked on a premise that cannot possibly be as outrageous as the original outing. But Eric Kripke and gang keep the weirdness coming, along with entirely new twists unimaginable coming out of Season 1.

Cults, eviscerated whales, pandering feminism and real feminism push the plot along until it hits a fascist/socialist (yeah, and know you can’t really do that, but you know) not so modern turn on the Nazi’s and their final solution.

It’s A Lot

Kripke’s superpower: cynicism. While an occasional optimistic moment flutters like a damaged butterfly into the edge of the frame, The Boys presents a pretty fucked up worldview. And Kripke takes fanboy deep cuts so deep sometimes the ones that pop up, like the “Joss rewrite” on a movie about The Seven just made me laugh.

Binging The Boys Season 2 feels like a motorboat streaming down the gullet of a sperm whale. Fast, out of control, and completely wrong. Whatever is happening should never be happening. Childhood ideals are picked off like black booted thugs at the tip of Homelander’s laser beam eyes.

The raucously charged up baselines make emotional moments between Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Starlight (Erin Moriarty), along with Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and Becca Burcher (Shantel VanSanten) crackle like pop rocks on a watermelon. Even these couple’s often morally incorrect choices seem to arrive with better angels guiding them in—albeit with the angels dodging flack as they descend from the heavens.

Quality Control

The costumes, the music, and the atmosphere all make for an immersive world that sometimes seems just a thin veil away from ours in an alternative universe where our dreams turn to nightmares, but they all still come true.

Kripke doesn’t just take the superhero mythos out for a run around an alternative block. He shreds it like he shredded Hughie’s girlfriend. He then picks up the bloody entrails and crafts a monster out of the guts, sinew, bone, tendon, organs, and muscle until the reimagined model appears appealing—but inside the synapses, all fire in a different quantum realm where Stan Lee remained a mail boy and J. Jonas Jamerson collects Pulitzer Prizes with an Edward R. Murrow Awards‎ on his mantel.

RELATED: Review: The Boys, Season 1

Look. And you won’t be able to look away. The Boys expertly crafted point-of-view can’t be denied even when it devours your soul like dermestids nibbling through a dead rabbit. I love nature shows.