@anotherhomelanderblog has a great essay about how The Boys pulls back the camera away from being as closely aligned with Homelander in e4-8 of season 5, presumably in an effort to make his death at the end feel more fitting. I agree with basically everything except one point.
Probably a controversial opinion in this HL fandom corner of tumblr, but I think it was a mistake by the show to let us so deeply and explicitly into Homelander’s head in s3-4. I enjoyed it anyway because Antony Starr (largely) prevented it from getting corny and I love the character. But the show is supposed to be about how superheroes are not the protagonists. And then they slipped back into basically treating him like a protagonist anyway, by screen time and the level of intimacy the audience was allowed into his thoughts. It was starting to edge towards MegaMind. It made Homelander less imposing, less scary, less of a force to be reckoned with. As @anotherhomelanderblog points out, s1 maintained Homelander’s mystique, by the end of it we’ve gotten some intriguing glimpses, but not full explanations. S2 gives us more scenes where he’s alone and grappling with his feelings, but it’s still not spelled out with monologs. We see him cringing and whimpering over the footage of himself with the protest crowd, sighing nervously before knocking on Becca’s door, and we see him have a pretty meta exchange with Doppelganger. But it stops short of him talking to himself in almost Shakespearean fashion. The show expects less and less of the audience’s deductive powers in s3-4 and begins to spell out that Homelander is really sad, really crazy, really emotionally weak. Antony Starr gives it nuance so it doesn’t feel like complete flanderization but it starts to feel like… well, like fanfic where we can read the character’s thoughts. Which can be great in fanfic, but feels a bit lazy onscreen. Again, lazy writing salvaged by thoughtful, nuanced acting. I still think Mirrorlander was a crutch for the writers to convey Homelander’s anxieties, bless AS for making it not stupid 😶🌫️
Maybe the worst the thing about making s3-4 (and e1-3 of s5) so closely aligned in POV with Homelander is that they effectively built his death up to be a tragic event, but then proceed to treat it like a farce we were expected to gloat over. No, distancing from HL in the last 5 episodes was not enough to undo all that, especially not when (some of) the writers’ favoritism toward Homelander slips out in e7 again. It’s baffling that instead of just distancing the camera so to speak, they didn’t also use the virus/V1 plot as a way to:
Render HL so dangerous and violent that as an audience member you’d have to concede he needs to be put out of his misery die, or
Have HL suffer some sort of V1 side effect as punishment for daring to want to be immortal that would explain why he’s suddenly easier to kill for Butcher et al. so it’s “poetic justice” or whatever, or
Give HL the choice to save himself from the virus by getting himself depowered and having him choose death because of the tragedy of how the character defines himself and his life’s worth
They could have made him too dangerous to live, too full of hubris to live, or too scared to live depowered. They somehow didn’t take any of those options and didn’t really change anything about him towards the end to get the audience ready for the ending they had in mind. I think him wanting to be “god” was supposed to make him too full of hubris to live, but since it was all talk and no actions on his part, it was a pretty abstract reason to give a mentally ill person the death penalty so gleefully.
Just pulling the camera back a little less than halfway through season 5 after letting us so deeply into his inner world (and establishing a tragic backstory) made his dying alone and terrified feel much more out of place than it should have. I think that’s why so many people (even those who aren’t Homelander fans) came away with the odd feeling that the ending felt inevitable but also somehow very unsatisfying, hollow, and even disturbing.
2087
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