The Boys Finale Satire Political Reality Homelander Trump

What does one make of a TV show originally adapted from comics and conceived as satire that has since been outpaced by the very reality it sought to lampoon? The Boys, whose finale premiered just a few days ago, is about superheroes who belong to the multi-billion-dollar superhero and pharmaceutical conglomerate Vought, going rogue while presenting themselves as champions of the innocent, as a small band of ordinary humans mounts a resistance. Where it goes further than other TV shows grappling with the Trump era is in how its satire has served more like prophecy than commentary. Creator Eric Kripke has acknowledged that Homelander, the show’s most dangerous villain, was “always a Trump analogue”. The parallels become less subtle with scenes like Homelander being cheered after using his laser vision to blow a man’s head open in public (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters”). Yet if the US president’s actions over the past two months are any indication, one might be forgiven for suspecting that Trump is secretly taking cues from the show, rather than the other way around. Much of the parallel centres on Homelander's self-proclaimed ascent to godhood — achieved after he is injected with a compound that renders him almost immortal — because the American people, in his telling, deserve “a God who doesn’t die.” Trump stops short of claiming immortality, of course, but his repeated assertions about personal destiny and a quasi-divine sense of mission carry the same instinct. Things would probably be less unsettling if the timeline did not keep aligning so precisely, like when Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself resembling Jesus Christ. An episode revealing a giant golden statue of Homelander aired the same day that “Don Colossus” — a 22-foot, 3.1-ton bronze effigy of Trump, covered in gold leaf — was erected in Florida. So what, right? Satire works by exaggeration, by taking what exists and stretching it past the point of comfort, into absurdity. The point of satire is that this is where we are headed, if we are not careful. The Boys stuck to that in its first three seasons. By the fifth, it stopped holding up a satirical mirror. It is just a mirror. Also Read | The Boys Ending Explained: Who won – Homelander or Billy Butcher? Why there won’t be a S6 Which makes the ending complicated. If the show has been this prophetic about Trump, what are we to make of Homelander’s defeat, of the rare spectacle of the good guys, more or less, winning? The problem is not so much about who loses as what wins. The Boys makes no secret that while Homelander and other heroes and villains die, Vought survives, with its technology and institutional memory intact. The deterministic logic of capital is so resilient that even someone as powerful as Homelander cannot break it. Defeating him does not change the system that created and moulded him. Satirise whoever you want, the show argues, there is no satirising that reality. Focusing on Homelander may be exactly the mistake the show warns against. So when Trump exits the stage, by whatever means, the machine that built him will still be running, looking for the next iteration, one that is more disciplined, having learned from its predecessor’s mistakes. The next Homelander, then, is already in the making. The writer is deputy copy editor, The Indian Express. saptarishi.basak@expressindia.com