The third season started out strong, was building up momentum with a few minor speed bumps, eventually started veering onto the grass, and then spun out in the end off a cliff so Lakitu plopped it back on the starting line.
The major highlight is that they put Soldier Boy on ice seeing as how he still wound up looking like the best character of the lot despite their desperate attempts at making him out to be worse than Evil Superman on the verge of a psychotic break. I found myself looking at the other characters I used to like as being at best slightly insufferable by the final stroke, and at worst totally regressed and unrecognizable.
Soldier Boy was great. Starlight guilt tripping Huey because he was trying to save her life which the show somehow made into a negative and blamed on toxic masculinity and Homelander not being all that much of a threat after all was also pretty shitty
Hughie was a character who I couldn't really stand in the first season, but he finally seemed to learn how not to be such a fucking doormat in the last season, only for the writers to re-emasculate him and turn him back into that hollowed out "yes, dear" meme.
I'm still waiting for one of these pussies to outline what in the nebulous hell "toxic masculinity" even is, because the real problem is clearly some people these days being spineless and terminally estrogenic.
Yeah like, what the fuck, they turned butcher into a bitch at the very end and make Soldier Boy to be the enemy "Racist"?
Butcher for 23 episodes:
"I'm going to kill Homelander and eradicate the supes once and for all. Also, my kid's a twat who I kind of hate because he's the supe spawn constant reminder of the cunt who raped my wife."
Butcher on the season finale:
"Actually, I don't care about killing Homelander because the only person who could possibly stop him gave my prick kid a slap. Oi, goodbye Homelander! Tell Ryan to eat his veggies and support his lego videos for me!"
As for Soldier Boy, apparently the writers sorta forgot they had him literally describe Bill Cosby as "America's dad," but because victims related to one of the main characters were collateral damage and happened to be black, he's racist. Never mind that "racist" basically implies the exact opposite of
collateral damage; it would be one thing for MM to call out Soldier Boy for being
negligent, but the show turned a mysterious backstory to his vendetta that could have gone
somewhere into him drawing the race card.
It's details like that where I struggle to have confidence in showrunners and writers who rely so heavily on not merely telling over showing the audience, but poorly trying to gaslight them into believing their wildly incoherent narrative shifts. E.g. how that "racist" man who wants to drink, smoke, and bang old women is somehow worse than the guy capable of committing genocide on a fly-by because someone pissed him off enough on the wrong day.
Technically the plot moved, but it's still effectively a soft restart (kind of like every season of Supernatural after a certain point), and it comes off as though they're hoping to just trick enough of the audience into thinking that everything still tracks in next season and the characters aren't all slightly schizophrenic since they're all back to where they started last season. That might be harsh, but I could see Amazon rethinking their plans after Rangz was received like a wet fart and relying even more heavily on The Boys being around for a while until they can come up with something else.