“The Boys” Gets Too Close for Comfort

The showrunner Eric Kripke has professed an interest in “how social media and entertainment are used to sell fascism,” and the new season opens with Homelander on trial for the protester’s death, pushing out messaging not unlike that of his Presidential analogue. (A fund-raising ad urges viewers to support their hero as he “faces his toughest opponent yet: our corrupt legal system.”) Homelander assesses prospective additions to the Seven with an eye toward their political cachet; an adviser says, approvingly, of a fiercely anti-migrant supe from Texas, “He bumps us with suburban women and white men over fifty!” Instead, Homelander opts to recruit a right-wing conspiracy theorist named Firecracker (Valorie Curry) and the nihilistic Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), who has to constantly remind people that she isn’t just the smartest woman in the world but the smartest person. Firecracker, who hosts a podcast called “The Truthbomb,” is an emotionally canny phony who knows exactly how to nurse her followers’ aggrievements. Sage, a Black woman who doesn’t bother to sand down the edges of her intellect, is acutely aware that Homelander’s allies tend not to have long life expectancies. That she chooses to partner up with him anyway lends her story arc a simmering sense of doom.