I’m so fucking disappointed in this season and its finale.
I saw someone on Insta make an edit of what should have gone down, with Homelander just going straight-up, full-on scorched Earth and the show becoming basically a horror movie where Homelander is an actually terrifying figure. I think that would have been a lot cooler, and would have been more closely tied to the vibes from the first season.
And I know everyone loves the scene with him begging like a fucking baby but…that just reminds me that he’s a manchild who never really left that torture chamber at Vought. It wasn’t satisfying to me to see him die; what would’ve been more satisfying would have been to see him de-powered and beaten up, and then…idk. Jail? Psych hospital? Anything would’ve been more intriguing to me than him just whimpering, begging, and getting stabbed in the head…
And I get it. He’s the villain. He’s not intended to be sympathetic, and he’s basically just Trump (except that even Antony said he wanted to emphasize his tortured backstory to humanize him more and remove him further from just being a literal Trump parody). Like, I’m sure 99% of the fans loved seeing him sniveling and pathetic before he died. I just perhaps don’t see the point in giving him a tragic backstory, only for the writers to expect you to feel happy as a clam when he dies in such a pathetic way. May as well have just leaned fully into him being an irredeemable villain with a rich white family background.
Maybe it’s just because I work with psych patients (some of whom have been in jail and done some awful things—which is obviously different and taken in a real-life context, which changes things), but the way it was handled bothered me. I never hated his character. He did a lot this season that made me dislike him more than previous seasons, but I never hated him. So it wasn’t enjoyable for me to watch that. It just felt hollow and sad and cringey.
It probably didn’t help that they had that scene where he got patted on the shoulder and was shown to not kill someone for once. I thought they were building up to a semi-redemption with that—not like a full-fledged one, but more nuance to his character and his end? Idk. I feel like they shouldn’t have included that scene this season if the writers wanted me to be happy about the way they did his death…
I would’ve rather seen Vought be taken down, because are we forgetting that they’re the biggest villain here? The ones who started Supes to begin with, made Homelander, and who have profited immensely off of all the pain it’s caused everyone? Why act like everything is hunky-dory because the insane puppet-head lunatic guy was killed, when the corporation that started it all and tortured him is still standing?
Also…just to be clear…I’m not defending him. Homelander is evil. That’s a given. It’s a fact, and anyone who thought he was the good guy probably needs to have a psych evaluation completed on them. That being said, I still felt utterly disappointed with how his death was handled, and tbh would have preferred them to have leaned less into the Trump comparisons and made him more of his own character with complexity. I guess it’s just harder for me to hate villains who aren’t 100% black-and-white Bad (e.g. Voldemort).
This season overall made him feel more one-dimensional to me personally, and I wasn’t a fan of the religious psychosis aspect. It would have been more intriguing to me to see him snap in other ways instead of suddenly deciding that he’s God (which—they also built it up as if Oh Father did something to trigger that in him? And that he was manipulating him? But apparently not? I thought that would have made more sense tbh, to explain the sudden religious fixation).
This is all very messy and not coherent or structured so I apologize, I’m just dumping out my thoughts all at once. I’m just…idk. This show had such potential in the beginning, and they wasted so much of it on toilet humor, sex jokes, and gross-out gags to shock the audience, when they could have spent that time actually developing the plot and the characters into something well-rounded. Hell, if it was the budget that was the issue, then just give me shitty effects. I’d rather watch a show like Doctor Who with horrid effects than see a show sacrifice its full potential in order to make its few effects look cool.
Idk. It was so bad that I was literally hoping for a “psych! It was all a dream!” moment. As cheesy and horrible as that would have been, I honestly would have preferred it over them killing him like that.
And these are just a few of my Homelander-specific thoughts. Don’t even fucking get me started on the rest of the show and characters. I want to again reiterate that my thoughts and feelings are quite different in a real-life context, but in this particular piece of fiction, this is just how I feel.