WARNING! Spoilers for The Boys season 2 are present in this article.

After a month of spreading out the latter five episodes, The Boys season 2 has finally wrapped up in righteous fashion. Personally, as convenient as it would be to binge the season in its entirety, I followed along week-by-week because I loved the first season too much to wait. With several stakes raised and some long-awaited retribution on the cards, I had to know what would happen after every oddball cliffhanger the show threw at us.

Season 2 saw a lot of new characters enter the fold, some certainly more prominent than others. The newest member of The Seven, Stormfront, took center stage as a fan favorite (both within the show and in real life) thanks to actress Aya Cash’s sarcastic, savvy portrayal of the character. Other inclusions are Lamplighter, back to exact his strange revenge on The Boys, and comic staple Terror, the dog of Billy Butcher.

The previous public darling, Homelander, is doubly-unhinged in season two of The Boys. From engaging in a fetishized fantasy with a shapeshifter supe, to manipulating his child into loving him and not his birth mother, Homelander barely has a sane second in season two. The tension in his uneasy relationship with Stormfront provides some hilarity and an interesting power-couple dynamic with sinister shared motivations that are dangerously close to being realized.

So, what about The Boys themselves? The season starts off with the group laying low in a dank, disgusting living space. Butcher is mere moments removed from realizing that his wife is still alive and is raising Homelander’s son. Developments ensue like The Deep joining a scientology-like church, A-Train getting the boot, and Frenchie/Kimiko struggling to understand each other. The pacing of the variety of developments is smooth and quick, but not too quick so as to forego anything.

Some of the moments in this season make for some of the best television in recent memory. From The Deep’s gills talking to him (with the voice talents of Patton Oswalt,) to the sequence leading up to the convenience store shooting and the “Girl Power” scene that Marvel attempted in Infinity War which was done in a less-shoehorned, more badass fashion, there was no shortage of great moments. I was certainly on the edge of my seat for the action and I was invested when there wasn’t any. The memes both within the show and ones encouraged from the show’s social media were a great companion piece, too.

There’s just a few gripes with season two preventing it from perfection. The plot armor of Stormfront not killing her enemies in her final fight took me out of the immersion, and it sucked to see some characters get thrown away with no second thought. Overall, the narrative drive of avoiding revenge and doing the true “right thing” makes the triumph at the end worth it. The cliffhanger has me aching for more of The Boys, and with a confirmed third season and a spin-off, it seems that not much time will be wasted before the supes grace (or disgrace) our screens.

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The Boys

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Heaps of great backstory
• Topical humor
• Invigorating performances

Cons

• Some throwaway characters