'The Boys' returns more violent, fearsome and brutal

“We thought it would be too much of a scene for the story, or at least the focus we wanted to give it,” Kripke admitted reluctantly.

The Boys return and this time, the twisted satire gives way to a dangerous and mocking vision of power, the perception of prejudice as a weapon and beyond that, a direct criticism of all the evils and blank spaces of our culture. Welcome to the land without villains, without heroes and what is more disturbing, where good and evil translates into a sum of money.

A few months ago, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke commented in an interview for Variety that one of the great challenges of the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic adaptation was knowing when enough was enough. Enough of what? The producer had trouble explaining the challenge of bringing the thug, brutal, and often grotesque face of the superhero world to the small screen, so he turned to an example: one of the scenes that never made it into the cut. final. According to Kripke, in the sequence Homelander (Antony Starr) could be seen masturbating on the ledge of the tallest building in the city, while he made fun of all the citizens who were somewhere in it. “We thought it would be too much of a scene for the story, or at least the focus we wanted to give it,” Kripke admitted reluctantly.

However, the second season seems to have made the decision to exceed that invisible limit of what is bearable, to become a brutal and fearsome image about power and the way we perceive fame, recognition and revenge. If the first season of The Boys surprised by its dense atmosphere full of unpleasant, violent and often irredeemable characters, the second breaks any paradigm and becomes an icon about political incorrectness, latent cultural pain sublimated to monsters with a human face and something which surprises with its audacity: the series' ability to mock its own previous shyness.

The Boys more brutal than violent than ever

If before Homelander was a contained and almost two-dimensional version of the paper version of him, the twisted villain with supremacist aspirations arrives in the new episodes more ruthless and brutal than ever. A whole declaration of intent that encompasses the rest of the characters: Butcher (Karl Urban), shaken by a revelation that devastated the darkest region of his desire for revenge, assumes the role of the avenger now from the absence of limits. The same could be said for the rest of his assassination squad and the powerful group of "The Seven" (now subverted and diminished, obsessed with finding the invisible threat). One and the other are at the gates of an inevitable and catastrophic confrontation. One and the other are on the verge of complete destruction.

But while that is happening, the world around him is slowly falling apart. These superheroes, turned into corporate assets by the Vought megacorporation, are about to break free from all control and go through a new dimension of cruelty and violence. In The Boys, power is a precious commodity and the second season not only assumes the fact of that connotation from its most tragic consequences, but also from the horrors it engenders. Celebrity and fame are something much more powerful, fearsome and distressing than might be supposed and The Seven are now a symbol of a type of evil very close to reality. If in the first season the series hurriedly meditated on what a man or a woman with unlimited powers and subjected to the rigors of the demand for popularity could really do, the second is much more violent in its perception of the individual. Much more abrasive and especially, lacking any border with respect to the connotation of the world that supports between chills what is about to happen.

Of course, The Boys tried to manage the idea that in the gray and dirty world that it shows, there is something similar to graduations of the ethical and the reprehensible. In the first season Butcher and his “guys” — Frenchie (Tomer Kapon), Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and newcomer Hughie (Jack Quaid)—waged a vendetta against “The Seven,” for different reasons. reasons, reasons and from different perspectives. But in season two, the motives for lashing out at superheroes are unclear, as Butcher must rethink the value and meaning of his actions, as well as face the concrete reality that his entire ramshackle and often haphazard crusade against the power of superheroes, it was a farce.