Sick, puerile, inappropriate and delicious: Amazon Prime’s The Boys reviewed

There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr) is introduced by a minion to a potential new member of his elite superhero group, the Seven.

Homelander watches this bright new talent performing wonders in a gym-style training zone: the young man is agile, eager, skilled with weaponry; but perhaps his most valuable features, the minion suggests, are that he is disabled and belongs to an ethnic minority. This could play really well with the youth demographic, who are into that kind of woke stuff, the aide suggests.

The potential recruit approaches Homelander, sweet, modest and starstruck. Even though the kid is blind, his batlike hearing more than makes up for his loss of sight, and he’d clearly make a great new member of the team. But Homelander has one reservation. And — spoiler alert — he boxes the kid’s ears so hard that the drums burst and he writhes helplessly in a pool of blood.

It was at this point I realised, to my delight, that the rumours I thought I’d seen on the internet — that The Boys had lost its mojo — were most definitely untrue.