The Boys Season 4 Sets Up Endgame With One Theme For All Characters

Summary

• The Boys Season 4 has received some criticism from fans.
• Among the complaints is the fact that every character has their own seemingly unrelated storyline.
• However, it looks like Eric Kripke's team is setting things up for the show's endgame with this approach.

The Boys Season 4 kicked off with a surprising real-life twist. The first three episodes, which landed on Prime Video on June 13, received an extremely poor audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, making the new installment the first rotten season of Eric Kripke's show.

Such a discouraging reception from the audience could be the result of a severe review bombing, but there seem to be a few criticism points that many fans agree on, the main one being too many disjointed subplots where all the characters deal with their own thing instead of focusing on the Homelander-Butcher conflict.

However, it seems that such a structure was adopted for the season with a very important purpose - to get The Boys characters ready for the endgame.

The Boys Season 4 Theme

We know that Season 5 will be the last for the Prime Video series. No doubt Eric Kripke and his team are planning a truly explosive end to the Homelander vs. Butcher war that will affect every beloved character. But for that to happen, the Boys and the Seven need to be prepared, not only with sophisticated weaponry, but also psychologically.

Hence the theme of the new season - 'back to the beginning'. Or as Kimiko wrote to her therapist, 'our pasts don't define us.'

Confronting the past in order to know oneself better is exactly what every fictional hero must do before he can finally face his enemies. And it seems that the creators of The Boys are following the classic pattern here.

Every Arc Explained

If you take a closer look at the first three episodes of The Boys Season 4, you'll see that each character has his or her dark past come back to haunt and change them, whether it's accepting past misdeeds, confronting failures, letting go of old grudges, or being true to themselves.

Let's look at each character individually.

• Homelander: The sociopathic Supe struggles with his own mortality and decides to stop the nightmares he suffers from by going back to his roots, or whatever the red door may symbolize.
• Butcher: Living on borrowed time, the vigilante encounters an old friend (Joe Kessler) who shows him that their old ways may not work anymore. Whispering in his other ear is Becca's ghost, encouraging Butcher to make things right with Ryan.
• Hughie: The protagonist finally meets his mother, who abandoned him when he was a child, and gets a chance to hear her side of the story.
• Starlight: The liberal icon of The Boys universe, has to face the fact that she is not as perfect as everyone thinks. Her cruelty became the starting point for Firecracker.
• Frenchie: Meeting and falling for Colin Hauser, whose family he killed, sends the tormented antihero into a downward spiral of guilt and self-destruction.
• Kimiko: We saw the Female being rescued from the Shining Light, but we never got to know the full backstory. So her going rogue to deal with the terrorist organization is exactly what her arc has always called for.
• MM: With Todd gone, Mother's Milk has a chance to get his family back.
• A-Train: The brother's resentment and accumulated dissatisfaction with Homelander's violence and Vought's policies are causing the Supe to rethink his motivations.

All in all, The Boys Season 4 set up some promising arcs for the show's endgame. If the writers can pull all these subplots together into a cohesive second act, the characters will enter the final chapter stronger than ever... or crazier, depending on who you're talking about.

The Boys Season 4 Episode 4, Wisdom of the Ages, premieres June 20 on Prime Video.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes.