The Boys Season 4 (TV series review)
I seem to be a little behind getting season 4 of ‘The Boys’ on blu-ray. Goggling says it was filmed in 2023 and post-produced in 2024. DVD and blu-ray release in 2025. Getting the Chinese release is in line with my earlier seasons and than turning off the sub-titles is as good as any. They also bag each disk so less cleaning problems.
Everything about this series is spoiler. There’s a lot of violence and swearing, occasionally touched with humour, often grossly so. Its also one of the best attention-grabbing series I’ve watched showing super-heroes behaving badly, on both sides of the fence.
The supes were created by the Vought company and this is the latest generation of them. They promote and get self-promotion through various films and TV appearances, all in the process of making money. The Seven is a group run by Homelander (actor Antony Starr) and very fluid in replacements when they are killed, often by their own leader for disloyalty. Did I say Homelander is a bit unstable? That’s putting it lightly. He sees humans as fragile and has no qualms now about killing publicly if you disagree with him. Who’s going to argue with him. He’s also taken over Vought and doing some in-house cleansing, especially to those who raised him. Objectively, they were testing the limits of his powers but gave no provision for things like affection to get in the way. If you raise a psychopath, then you have to expect retribution sooner or later.
The Boys are a small CIA/FBI-affiliated group ran mostly by Billy Butcher (actor Karl Urban) has a combination of supes and access to a temporary version of the Vought super-drug, which kills with over-use. Butcher has done this and knows he has months to live and thinks he’s imagining people he thought dead. They also want a drug that is capable of killing Homelander but, apparently, it will also kill all the supes as well. Oddly, this season where they are regularly referred to as The Boys, unless I missed something in the past.
That’s the brief outline. The acting from all the cast is intense. The number of deaths and of who makes for spoiler and integral to the plots. When I’ve finally caught up, I’m going to pick up the graphic novels. No doubt, some of the minor characters will make more sense from that perspective. If you want the hard realities of the dangers from super-powered beings amongst a fragile humanity, then ‘The Boys’ will reaffirm your worst nightmares. I do have to wonder if any real octopuses were killed in the production of this season.
GF Willmetts
August 2026
(pub: 2024 Production, 2025. 2 blu-ray disks 464 minutes 8*58 minute episodes. Price: varies. ASIN: LG-M4082)
