#This isn’t even accounting the whole plot line with Rebecca that didn’t make it into the final cut

[abigailnussbaum]

The Boys 2x07 - 2x08

I’m actually not going to say much about the first of these episodes, which was enough of a table-setting hour that I didn’t even bother giving it its own review. There are, as usual, a few well-crafted moments that show off the thoughtfulness that this show applies to its characters and worldbuilding - Maeve’s silent reaction when Annie asks her to come with her; the realization that horrible as she is, Stormfront is still a better parent than Homelander is or could ever be. But the for the most part it’s just setting things up for the finale (and next season).

Also, this is not the point of my discussion of the finale or the season as a whole, but it does need to be acknowledged that both Annie and Rebecca are made to apologize to their love interests for things they have no business apologizing for. “After everything I did to you”, Annie says to Hughie. What... what did she do? Aside, that is, from holding him to account for his own behavior? (Some of which, like his role in the death of Translucent, he is still lying to her about.) S2 seems to be working really hard to make Hughie its moral center, with both Annie and Billy using him as a sort of external conscience, which is really hard to justify given everything we know about him, and undermines Annie considerably as a character. You want to explore her darkness? Great - episode 6 did that really well. But Hughie doesn’t have to be a paragon for that to happen.

This, however, is not my main reaction to the episode or the season. Several times over the last few weeks I’ve found myself thinking that S2 of The Boys was going to be about getting from here to there. You see this sometimes - a show comes out of the gate with a gangbusters first season, something really thought-through and exciting. But also something that is very much about itself rather than an opening volley for a continuous story. And when the writers sit down to write season 2, they realize that they’ve left themselves in a bind - maybe you’ve broken up interesting pairings or teams; maybe you killed off your most magnetic character; maybe you’ve locked everyone in a situation that will make future stories impossible. So the next season becomes about getting all the pieces and players to a place where you can start telling stories again.

Watching the finale, however, my reaction to it was that it was taking the show from here to where it started. It’s almost shocking, how hard this finale works to put every destabilizing plot element from the end of the first season back in the toybox. The Boys are no longer fugitives. MM and Frenchie get to go back to their lives. A-Train goes back to the Seven. Annie is back in her old outfit. Ryan gets packed off into CIA foster care. They re-refrigerate Rebecca (I’m not quite over that one - imagine knowing enough to realize that the saintly dead wife is a tired trope, and revealing that she’s alive and has an agenda of her own, and then killing her again; between that and the Girls Get Things Done combo attack on Stormfront, there’s a real whiff of Avengers: Endgame about the whole affair). Sure, there are a few new details - Hughie is supposedly going to get some distance from Billy, and goes to work for a congresswoman who is, unbeknownst to him, a supervillain - but for the most part the episode gives off the feeling that this entire season has been a whoopsie, a hurried, tire-screeching U-turn with no plot or thematic weight.

What’s meant to distract us from this, of course, are the Nazis. And I’m not going to say that there hasn’t been some good stuff on that front during this season, or even in this episode - Stormfront’s line, “they agree with me; they just don’t like the word Nazi” slides in like a knife. But it also encapsulates the problem with this entire storyline - that once you introduce the idea of a Nazi superhero, “superhero” stops being the most important, or scariest, word in that combination. 

You see this, of course, in the way that the plotline is resolved, with the public categorically rejecting Stormfront once they find out she’s a Nazi. And you know what? I’d take that. I’d sign up to live in a world where there’s a non-zero chance of being disintegrated by a stray speedster or catching a heat-ray intended for someone else, if it was also one in which the public was so immediately hostile to Nazism that it could strangle your career and movement in its crib to be credibly called one. Because that is a better world than the one we’re currently living in. And, well, if you’re writing a supposedly trenchant political commentary and your satirical world is less horrible than the real one, something has gone seriously wrong.

The thing is, The Boys has a pretty serious problem. It can’t be a pure superhero story, because that would very quickly expose the hollowness of its critique of superheroes - you can’t mock corporate girl power posturing in episode 3 and then revel in it yourself in episode 8 without revealing how little you actually have to say. But when it tries to be political, it keeps running up against the problem that the ills it uses superheroes to expose - capitalism, racism, militarism, evangelical christianity - are a hell of a lot scarier on their own than the metaphor that’s being used to expose them. 

That’s a thorny problem in its own right, but the show’s response to it is positively glib. Not only does blowing the whistle on Stormfront immediately shut down that entire storyline, but the show then wastes no time in pivoting to set up next season’s story arc, “what if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a supervillain?” The implied equivalence isn’t just galling, it retroactively makes everything that worked about the Stormfront storyline seem shallow and insincere, the show posturing rather than making a genuine political critique.

After two seasons, I think we have to conclude that this is a show that works really well on the anthropological level - given a situation, it explores it with great insight and creativity, and in a way that connects to real-world ills in surprising and illuminating ways. That worked really well in the first season, when we were just learning the show’s world. But when asked to tell a story in that world, the show stumbles horribly, failing at almost every level. The characters remain strong, and those anthropological insights are still sometimes sharp enough to make the entire thing seem worthwhile. But at this point I’m struggling to imagine how The Boys can justify its continued existence. Maybe, having rebooted their setting so thoroughly, the writers can now get around to figuring out a story to tell within it. But I have to say, I’m not very hopeful.

#the boys

[yufay11]

Last week I read 6/24/20-6/30/20

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America by Sarah Menkedick

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I read The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle last year, and didn’t like it. But I was intrigued enough by the premise of her new book, In Five Years,  to give it a try… and didn’t really like it again =/ It’s very much on me, since I read a review that kinda spoiled the whole book for me, so I skimmed some parts and never really got into it. But I also wasn’t drawn to any of the characters.. they are either really bland or annoying to me. Also, the blurb of the book made it seem like a romance story, which it really is not. I’m fine with the plot line not centering on a romance, but I’m irked by the ending where there was a promise of a relationship, as if the main character needed that or as if that’s a reassurance for the reader. 

The Guest List by Lucy Foley is a mystery book with an extravagant wedding on a remote island as its backdrop. I liked the scene setting - although at times it did feel a little too on the nose, like the author was trying too hard to foreshadow something menacing, but overall I enjoyed reading about the different threads leading up to the wedding night from different perspectives. It felt a little slow in the middle, but I think the author tied it up well in the end. It didn’t feel like a plot twist when I got to the thing/the reveal, more like.. just progression of the plot. 

I’m reminded of Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner, which I read just two weeks ago, also about a murder mystery taking place at a glamours wedding. The vibe is very different, but I feel like there’s something about wedding being the ultimate performance one puts up, with a cast of characters that you have history with? Another interesting theme in both book is the glamour and carelessness people perceive, paralleling the misery and lack of love the bride feels. 

I was really looking forward to reading Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America by Sarah Menkedick. It’s got good reviews and feels like a timely, necessary topic for me to read about. It’s a very well-researched book about perinatal mental health. I skimmed through some of the neuroscience-y parts that I know I wouldn’t retain… and haven’t finished the whole book yet, but from what I read the main thesis can probably summarized as the whole system is rigged against women: “here’s an overwhelming amount of info that doesn’t really help you comprehend the risk involved, presented to you at a time when everything in your life is super overwhelming! You make the decisions, just make sure you never hurt your baby! Good luck!” The author cites a lot of research about how becoming a mother changes the woman’s body and brain chemistry, making her more prone to anxiety, fear, obsessive thoughts, etc. But from all the case interviews and the author’s account of her own experience, the real gaping hole is when these women suffer, they are not believed and helped with adequate mental health care in a timely manner. Which goes back to the system being set up to keep women disempowered, “oh you keep having suicidal thoughts and/or visions of your baby being hurt? That’s normal, it’s the hormones, just deal with it! Conveniently there isn’t much medical research that look into perinatal mental health!” The doctors could just dismiss their patient, not even registering what she said as red flags; they may not be equipped with basic screening questions for depression, anxiety, OCD, etc; they might have made a referral but it requires too much work on the patient part to follow up; the mental health provider may not be a good fit... none of it should be this hard! But no change is brought about by waiting around - be unsatisfied, be angry, and speak out.