Review: The Boys, "Blood & Bone" | Season 5, Episode 8

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There's a Howard Zinn quote I'm often reminded of when watching The Boys. During a public talk the historian gave in which he assessed The United States' role in World War II, he observed the following: "There's a tendency to assume that just because the opposing side was evil—and make no mistake, they were evil—that somehow automatically makes us good."

And during the first season of this Garth Ennis adaptation, nothing seemed more obvious than the absurdity of that assumption. The Boys started from a deeply cynical and nihilistic place, where actual heroism was a children's fairy tale, and anyone professing such ideals was either a naif who had yet to learn the bleak ways of the world, or they were full of shit. There was no room for the muddy complexities of a scenario where both things could not only be true and false all at once, but where there was room for a couple of other conflicting ideologies to play, too.

But this largely satisfying finale—despite the many ways the series set itself up for failure over the course of the season—embodies its deeply expansive embrace of humanism and hope. As the show diverged from its source material, it tackled not just timelier themes and more relevant satire, but the messy and shifting moralities involved in trying to do good in a world that continually forces you to choose from a series of not-so-good options. In a country that's about to provide material rewards and reparations for the very people who tried to overthrow it, I can't think of a much more pressing theme, and I'm glad the show committed to it.