Review: The Boys, "Assassination Run" | Season 4, Episode 8

It’s a grim state of affairs when the most optimistic element of your season finale is that our side’s strongest player gets her powers back—just in time to flee while every single other member of the good guys gets rounded up by supes serving fascist stormtroopers aligned under a psychopath Superman, who is now President in all ways save for official capacity. Forget all those previous times things seemed bad—that was just prelude to things being awful.

“Assassination Run” caps off a fascinating but uneven season of The Boys, one that (admirably) tried to do too much, but as a result ended up dropping a lot of narrative threads or rushing through character arcs in a mad dash to push it all forward. I’ve said it before: I much prefer this strategy to the “padded-out movie” vibes of far too many streaming shows. Still, just because your way is more fun doesn’t make it correct. The Boys has always been more-more-more, but this season didn’t know when to stop and take a breath, and thus lost some of the adrenaline-spiked momentum through sheer refusal to pause and let its audience take it all in.

Still, if you’re going to go dark, have a good time doing it. And this season closer gave us a lot of enjoyable moments en route to such a seemingly hopeless end. Some of it was gallows humor, but much more was effective character beats, borne of steadily enriching the inner lives of our protagonists and antagonists alike, so we can laugh at them inevitably being who they are. Whether it’s Kimiko brightly giving a big “Hi!” to a bedraggled Annie, freshly escaped from shapeshifter prison, or Hughie and M.M. clumsily attempting to pretend they don’t know faux-Annie is the killer with a labored “Heyyyyyyyyy!,” there were so many nice little moments of humor borne from the sheer delight of seeing our heroes in awkward situations.