The Boys season 3

In Prime Video's superhero show, a penis is blown up within the first 15 minutes.

Instead, it covers even more ground, bulging with gags, topical issues and ludicrous action sequences to create the most potently entertaining, eye-popping cocktail. At the same time, The Boys covers a huge amount of heavy subject matter with even heavier doses of irony. Otherwise, The Boys risks being repetitive and too full on to digest. The sardonic humor, pop rock soundtrack and handful of sincere characters undercut the relentless stream of lurid superhero activities. Season 3 starts with changes for the titular group of vigilantes hunting down corrupt superheroes. Kicking off its third season, The Boys splashes even more blood, gore, profanity, nudity and sex onto its boundary-free canvas.

This review of The Boys season 3 contains no spoilers and is based on all eight episodes. Ever since satire was invented people have loved to claim that ...

In that respect, The Boys remains the rare streaming TV property that understands how to exploit both the advantages of streaming (accessibility, memeification) and traditional serialized storytelling (escalation, rhythm, and *ahem* consistent episode lengths). It’s in exploring that question that The Boys bumps into its first major character introduction of the year. Like we said, the show really does have a handle on the Western cultural landscape. Just as important as the shock the opening minutes of this season provides, however, is how economically it catches viewers up with each character in the show’s sprawling cast. Something has to give with Homelander in season 3 and wouldn’t you know it, it eventually does in breathtaking fashion. I’m just so tired of losing.” It’s a valid question, borne of frustration that is eerily reflected in much of our political discourse today. Characters like Annie January a.k.a. Starlight (Erin Moriarty), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) build upon the cheeky “Girls Get It Done” Vought campaign from last season to uh…really get shit done. When The Boys season 3 premieres its first three episodes this Friday, June 3 on Prime Video, even the most satire-agnostic among us will have to concede that the show is onto something. In speaking to Den of Geek at SXSW prior to season 3’s premiere, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke revealed that the first 15 minutes of season 3 was “by far” the craziest thing the show had ever done. No pop culture entity in living memory has better understood the human inclination towards hero worship better than The Boys and this third season puts that understanding to use in profoundly insightful and entertaining ways. The impulse is understandable as sometimes the world is so intensely bizarre that there doesn’t appear to be much point in comedically exaggerating it further. The rubber meets the road quickly and loudly.

Throughout the eight episodes, the show continues the narrative that Homelander (Antony Starr)--and many superheroes in general--is corrupt with power, and The ...

It continues to grow and evolve the world it lives in without losing that identity either. Homelander is constantly dealing with this, and A-Train has a few moments where he's really trying to appeal to the public, to regain his popularity--in one of the funniest faux commercials to date, mocking an infamous beverage ad from a few years back. There is one bump in the road later on where some characters resemble certain real-life politicians a bit too closely. It's a limited series that works in a lot of government intrigue as well. This leads to one of the most disturbing moments in the entire season in a sequence where he's psychologically torturing someone else. Because the basics for this series are so simple and easy to understand, branching out to make new stories and new lore that fits within the already presented narrative feels simple and because of this is easy to digest by the viewer. In The Boys, that's what being a superhero is all about--and it's been about for a while. In the comics, it's a getaway where the supes have sex, do drugs, and let off some steam. She's on a path to becoming the change the world needs. In the broadest strokes, The Boys is all over the place, in the best way possible. Prime Video's original series The Boys arrives for Season 3 on June 3, and the upcoming slate of eight episodes takes the series in numerous directions. The worldbuilding is built into the stories, rather than the stories being squished into a box in order to fit what's already been presented the past two seasons.

In Season 3, Eric Kripke's Amazon Prime Video series "The Boys" tackles America's warped perception of what makes a man strong. —NO SPOILERS.

Near the end of the season, a big thematic speech wraps with the listener shouting, “I fucking told you so!” And it’s hard to blame them for being so annoyed. “The Boys” is a black comedy, an action extravaganza, and a vicious editorial all rolled under the same cape. Combined with a desperate need to protect his wife’s son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) and the swearing Brit’s own longstanding, well-documented, all-consuming rage, Billy makes some bad choices in Season 3. For the most part, “The Boys” wields its double-edged sword with focused finesse over two increasingly ambitious seasons, and Season 3’s use of orgiastic bloodshed (and one actual orgy) to punch up at its targets is still consistently satisfying. As in the past, the series still enjoys its macho perspective a little too much, producing a few nagging blind spots (in addition to some extremely blunt real-world references). But hey, Season 3 isn’t pulling its punches, and most of them land with an outsized wallop. They’re all integral to the lessons being imparted. Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), harboring the mother of all grudges against Homelander, can’t help but wonder what it would be like to land a punch that actually hurt his typically invincible nemesis. Behind the scenes, Victoria is working with Vought CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s pushing a new version of Compound V. The drug that made so many superheroes is now available as a 24-hour hit — one dose and you’ll have powers for a day, before returning to your old, normal self. That’s the idea anyway, and it’s enough for one unlikely customer to cut the line. She and Hughie are doing well, though it’s a little too easy to spot simmering resentment every time she opens a stubborn jar of jelly for her powerless boyfriend. When “ The Boys” burst onto the scene three years ago, creator Eric Kripke’s superhero satire thrived, in part, by having its cake and eating it, too. Good or bad, super or not, fights in the Amazon Prime Video original are well-choreographed spectacles, separated from Marvel and DC’s PG-13 friendly brawls by their extreme (though arguably accurate) violence.

In the latest season of Amazon's 'The Boys,' the gang discovers that Soldier Boy might hold the key to stopping Homelander for good.

The series hasn’t lost its bitterness or its bite, and the chilling final shots of the finale should wipe out any fears to that effect. And yes, it’s queasily ironic that this takedown of powerful institutions is coming to us from a series funded by one of the most powerful corporations at all. The other is Soldier Boy (a well cast but somewhat underused Jensen Ackles), an early Captain America-esque Supe whose mysterious demise in the 1980s might hold the key to stopping Homelander and his kind for good. Unfortunately for these characters but fortunately for us, the season two finale planted a ticking time bomb in the form of Victoria’s secret head-exploding superpower. The Boys is still the show that’ll serve up exploding bodies with a smirk and make time for a field trip to a superpower-fueled orgy. “With great power comes the absolute certainty you’ll turn into a right cunt.” That line, delivered with a weary sigh by Karl Urban’s Butcher in the new season, has been more or less The Boys‘ thesis statement from the beginning.

We live in a world over-saturated by superhero movies with obsessive fans clamoring for the next predictable energy battle finale and loudly campaigning for ...

Starr continues to give the most unsettling performance as Homelander—descending fully into a madness that we haven’t seen before, which is saying something because Homelander has been a narcissistic psychopath since day one, but Season 3 takes him to entirely new levels. By the end of the season, Soldier Boy’s introduction begins to feel a lot more like this is The Boys’ Captain America: Civil War, right down to a secret about parents that tears the Seven apart. While character development is a very important discussion, this review would be remiss not to dive headfirst into a character that fans have been anxiously awaiting the introduction of: Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). Riffing on the ever-popular trope of a superhero being taken by enemy forces, brainwashed, and turned into a weapon, Soldier Boy is brought in Season 3 as Butcher’s last-ditch effort in destroying Homelander. While he’s not quite the same cartoonishly ridiculous character that was created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson in their comic book series by the same name, he is almost everything that fans were hoping for. While he has come close a number of times, and he has certainly put a dent in the population of supes, Season 3 brings him the closest to achieving his goals—but at a great cost. Since the start of the series, Butcher has been on a singular mission to get revenge against Homelander for what he did to Becca and, in the process, bring down Vought and put an end to superpowered individuals in general. We live in a world over-saturated by superhero movies with obsessive fans clamoring for the next predictable energy battle finale and loudly campaigning for studios to release some director’s cut of the last big team-up movie.

Previously scheduled to arrive on Friday, June 3, Amazon Prime Video's hit series The Boys has officially landed on the streaming platform early and is ...

Season one of the series premiered to an 85% rating and a "Certified Fresh" distinction on the review aggregator, while season two improved to a near-perfect 97% rating. As of this writing The Boys season 3 has a perfect 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a "Certified Fresh" label, with 28 reviews available right now. The first three episodes of the series can be watched right now with new episodes arriving weekly afterward (as Amazon Prime Video is want to do, it will likely stream early on Thursday nights for any fans that can't wait for the next episodes).

As long as we must live in Marvel's Cinematic Universe, Amazon Prime Video's The Boys offers an oasis for everyone who wishes we didn't.

The situation is especially complicated for Annie, whose role in the Vought fight requires her to remain in the company as a double agent at ever-increasing cost to her own well-being. Other than, you know, everything that’s bad about contemporary life — politics, capitalism, patriarchy — The Boys’ most obvious satirical target is Disney, which owns the two biggest sci-fi genre brands in pop culture, Star Wars and Marvel. The show’s June 3 season three premiere is hammocked between the Disney Plus premieres of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ms. Marvel. Yet while there is an argument to be made that Disney is a malignant force in the world, or at least not a benign one, Amazon is probably worse — and as savage as cultural critiques can be in The Boys, the show’s creative forces leave their evil corporate overlords alone. It’s already been widely reported that this season includes a trip to the 70th annual superhero orgy known as Herogasm, but “graphic” is an insufficient term to describe what makes it on screen. Hughie, who closed Season 2 saying he wanted to attack Vought “the right way,” has gone to work for the Federal Bureau Of Superhero Affairs — not knowing that its director, former Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), is a supe who ascended to her current position in part by strategically exploding her opponents’ heads. So as we rejoin the story for season three of The Boys, which begins one year after we left off, Vought’s crisis managers have supplied Homelander with talking points; the company has also rewritten the narrative of the Rise Of The Seven movie to make Homelander look less complicit. Like The Avengers and Stark Industries, The Seven are closely tied to a corporation.

Hughie tells Starlight about what he learned about Neuman, and they speculate on what they should do. Billy goes to see Marvin and Janine.

After Homelander is heckled during a public speech, he loses it and says that he is done apologizing. Although, he adds that the CIA was involved and that their case officer was Grace. Billy then beats the man to death before using his laser eyes to split the man’s head in half. Hughie goes to a school for the super abled and pretends that he is infertile. He finds a video that shows that Stan “adopted” Neuman. Meanwhile, Stan reads a book to a little girl. Billy calls Hughie; he tells him things aren’t good and that he should leave it all along before he f**ks it up. But as he obsesses over a newspaper article on Soldier Boy, is Marvin becoming tempted by finally finding out the truth?

Within 15 minutes, The Boys season 3 will deliver one of the show's wildest moments ever. Or at least that's how two cast members think.

We can't wait to see how over the top they go for Herogasm, but with the shock and gore we've already seen, The Boys has clearly sent a message. And then she gets a little sexual, right as she's starting to talk shop about the ubermensch army she wants to create. Doumit referred to this moment as "The first 15 minutes of episode 1," and Crawford called it "the most insane thing of anything, of any of the moments, of which there are plenty." This isn't the next moment, but I wanted to save that big surprise for last. After lingering there for a little bit, he makes a mistake, and a scene that made me squeamish gets all the more disgusting. So, consider this your spoiler warning for The Boys season 3 episode 1, because some of this stuff requires explanation.