The Boys, Season Two

Much like Homelander, entertaining to watch although with some deep issues.

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MOVIES

- No new movies watched, although I have re-watched Event Horizon, Se7en and Zodiac again, so I guess my subconscious is feeling its dark side at the moment!

- All three of those movies are still great fun to watch, although for entirely different reasons.

GAMES

- Still chipping away at Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, although I think I'm somewhat close to the end of the story, so may just power through to see the conclusion and save the enjoyable open world exploration for later.

- After saying that I needed to get through some shorter games, I obviously had to go and re-install Baldur's Gate 3 again following its latest big update... so that idea didn't really work out.

- I do need to play some shorter games though, but they might have to wait until Jedi: Survivor is done at this rate.

TV

- I liked The Boys' first season, but wasn't quite as excited about it as others were when it first came out, and I continue to have the same feeling after finishing the second season.

- It's a little like my reaction The Favourite, where I really like most of the pieces that make up this show, but it somehow feels less than the sum of its parts as a whole.

- The cast is really good and I like the performances and chemistry between most of the major players this season, so they certainly aren't to blame.

- I think the show's biggest faults are one that many streaming shows suffer from and another that I think For All Mankind especially suffers from:

- Firstly, there's the constant nagging feeling that this is just one big story chopped up into smaller parts to make them more digestible.

- The issue there is every episode feels like the middle part of a trilogy: there's the dealing with the ending of the previous episode and then setting up the next one, without having any solid core of its own.

- As I said, this isn't a problem unique to The Boys by any measure, but it feels a little more pronounced here because even the first and last episodes feel more like linking pieces than a beginning and an ending.

- Secondly, despite the fact that the season is only 8 episodes long, there feels like far too much wheel-spinning happens, with the big events being saved for the finale.

- For All Mankind really suffers from this and The Boys certainly isn't as bad as that show for doing that, but it still feels like there's only around 4-5 episodes worth of material being stretched out to make enough episodes for a season.

- Which is why it is such a good thing that the cast is so good at their jobs and so much fun to watch that I didn't really notice the issue until I'd finished the season.

- And that's why I can still recommend The Boys' second season: it is still a lot of fun to watch, with even the less meaningful (for now?) subplots still being enjoyable to watch unfold even if they don't have any real impact on the season as a whole. [7/10]

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