Amazon Prime’s The Boys has always been a “woke” show, but its latest season took the meaning of that word to a whole new level.
“The Boys has been a woke show since the very first season,” Lauren Chen explains. “I realized that in the later seasons, especially in seasons three and four, the wokeness really became too much.”
Chen points out one scene in particular that went too far.
“There was a really stupid, really badly written scene,” Chen says, that introduced Victoria Newman, a Latina politician with psychic powers, and a new character on the show called Sage, a black woman whose very existence is “so frustrating.”
“Her premise is that she’s the smartest person in the world, and here’s the problem: the writers of this show aren’t that smart. So the problem is, how do you portray the smartest person in the world when you’re a certified idiot yourself?” Chen asks.
The writers came up with a solution to this silly situation: tell the audience over and over that she’s smart, that Sage is smart.
In the scene, Newman and Sage appear to be at a right-wing political rally full of old white billionaires, trying to get them to back Newman for president, as Newman complains about being “mansplained about abortion” by a man who “refuses to be alone with any woman other than his wife.”
Not only is Chen upset about the abortion comments, but the whole plan is juvenile and an embarrassment for “the smartest man in the world.”
“This is something Sage, in his infinite wisdom, came up with: if you’re trying to gain political power, surely it makes sense to get other powerful people to support your cause,” Chen says.
“This is not a grandmaster strategy, it’s the bare minimum you’d expect when trying to stage a soft coup. Not genius level stuff. I’ve actually seen women’s book club stories with more complicated political betrayals and intrigue than this show,” she added.
