Gen V: Justice Never Forgets

"Today, as you are inducted into our sacred brotherhood, our legacy, it would do you well to remember our three trinities: wisdom, honour and dignity. Now take off your pants."

A confession: it's taken me until the second episode of Season Two to work out that "Gen V" is a semi-pun, supposed to rhyme with "Gen Z", as my British brain thinks "Gen Zed" and not "Gen Zee". But I get it now...

Anyway, another top episode. Lots happens, of course, but the worldbuilding is superb, as ever, gloriously skewering MAGA with aplomb as the orange fascist runs amok in the real world. Firecracker's broadcast about Cate is chilling, but not as much as Modesty Monarch, a "trad supe." Brr. And all that Nazi and Klan stuff in the secret room within the archive... this is dark, but that's what MAGA is. And then there's Emma telling Marie, truthfully, that going back to uni and being very, very visible is her only real defence against being disappeared by some supe version of ICE.

We get revelations about Andre, who seemingly suffered from the same condition as his father, hence his death. We have a lovely scene with Marie and Jordan reconciling, mourning, forgiving and reconnecting... literally, and heartwarmingly. We get the Rememberer, a great little character. We get another reminder of how those American frat societies are creepy, weird and deeply, deeply wrong. We get the Deep spouting Lost Cause bollocks.

There are lots of little nuances and, yeah, a bit reveal at the end. But mostly it's the mood, the world, the grim humour and, most of all, the characters.

So what exactly is this with Marie...?

The Boys: Season Four Finale

 "I used to freak out whenever I saw blood. Now I barely blink at it."

Wow. That's how you do a season finale. Deeply satisfying, emotionally deep, devilishly clever and with the mother of all twists at the end. And, of course, it's about something. Far right skulduggery while certifyuing a US presidential election on January 6th, plus all the horrible Vought propaganda... yeah, this is not too far removed from realty. Indeed, that scene where Homelander is disgusted at Firecracker's coughing and humilates her for it, despite the fact it's a side effect of harmful drugs she's taking so that he can, er, you know... that total, cold ingratitude: he's Trump, isn't he?

The way this plays out is brilliantly done. Before the devastating endfing we have moments of hope. Yes, Annie is disgusted at Hughie for sleeping with her doppelganger, but she doesn't dump him. And Hughie's speech about forgiving a repentant Victoria Neuman persuades Frenchie and Kimiko to forgive themselves- and, at last, kiss!

But this is bleak, and seems to be leading inexorably to a dystopia, with Homelander's puppet as president. Billy Butcher is dying. The anti-supe virus isn't ready. And yet... the assassin is defeated. And Butcher reveals the power he's unknowingly had... and uses it to kill Neuman, a horrible, yet perhaps necessary act from a man who may be opposed to the baddies, but could never be called a hero. And the failure to persuade Ryan- and his casual slaying of Mallory- is horrible. As is Homelander's casual order to kill everyone on staff who knows too much.

So the ending, with Homelander thinking he's lost until Sage turns up and reveals it's all gone according to her plan, is inspired. Dystopia achieved, and Homelander has a newfound awe of Sage.And... most of the Boys are caught, no doubt destined for internment camps. Annie escapes though. And A-Train is out there somewhere. And then there's Ashley, last seen having taken V and undergoing ba horrifying transformation...

This is utter, utter genius telly.

The Boys: Dirty Business

 "Are Jewish space lasers brainwashing you into joining ther shuls?"

The above isn't the only appropriated quote from America's far right- we also have that old "legitimate rape" line and talk of a total ban on abortion, heavily dog whistled white supremacism and pushing of an oligarchy where the super rich can do what they like without regulation. It's all perfectly judged satire, highly appropriate in a week where the boy Drumpf said the quiet part out loud.

I've no intention of recounting all the myriad plot threads that you get in late season episodes of The Boys: there's a lot going on here. But the satire is the point. So is the hypocrisy. Hence the fact that these social conservatives have a BDSM dungeon, and we get a scene at once hilarious and horrifying, where Hughie, undercover as a very interesting riff on Spider-Man, is put in the situation of not knowing the safe word for the person he's supposed to be. Literally, ouch. Yet this all turns truly nightmaring.

I love the Batman parallels, too- Tek Knight is blatantly a Batman analogue, with an old money background, a masion and a "Tek Cave". Yet he's plotting to build internment camps... and his Alfred hates his guts.

Then there's the revelation about Butcher... Kessler is as much a hallucination as Becca, the devil and angel on his shoulder, respectively. Is he really going to engineer a virus for supe genocide...?

But even that pales beside the revelation of exactly what Firecracker is willing to do for Homelander. Wow. I mean, this is a blog, but words fail me. Exquisite, outrageous television that perhaps does more than any other art to show the true existential threat of the American Republican party to everything we hold dear.

The Boys: Wisdom of the Ages

 "Your life is literally in your hands..."

Wow, This is a dark, dark episode. For a start, much of it consists of Homelander slowly torturing, humiliating and killing those who made his childhood so damaging. It's all good character stuff... but damn, it's dark.

But so is everything else. Sage has her own demons, unable to be free from the burden of her genius. So much so... that she gets her toyboy the Deep to give her a te,porary fontal lobotomy so she can dumb down for a while.Wow. And that's only the second grossest moment in this episode. The worst is... you know.

Then there's the dying Butcher, the little worm that's roaming in his skin, and that... explosion or something that saves his life. Frenchie finally confesses to Colin. Hughie does his ultimaterly fruitless little deal with A-Train... and what's happening with his Dad?

And yet... the most distressing part of the episode is how cruelly Firecracker (who at one point say to Sage "You know, when I first met you, I thought you were kind of uppity. But you're one of the good ones"... just wow) ruins Annie's life on television via a six hour hatchet job. Liberals are always held to higher moral standards than fascists, because we have morals and they don't. The asymmetry explains why they succeed, and why we must sometimes compromise on our ethics in order to crush them.

This is darker, more of a downer, than most episodes. But, as ever, besides the grossness and the cynicism is a real moral outrage.

Blair Witch (2016)

"The Sun is not coming up!"

I wasn't expecting to like this film. I really wasn't. After all, both The Blair Witch Project and its somewhat unloved sequel are quite good but hardly seminal films and the law of diminishing returns did not seem to bore well. So I was surprised to find myself watching a fairly standard but well-scripted and directed found footage movie which, again, will grace no "Best of" lists but is rather good and, arguably, superior to its two predecessors.

It help that one of the protagonists, James, is the younger brother of Heather from the first film, and that we are restricted to a small cast of two sympathetic couples and another couple who are somewhat dodgy, a dynamic that works. The storytelling beats and plot structure are formulaic but done well, and there is just enough characterisation. No new ground is broken here but it's a solid example of the genre which the first film popularised.

It's nice to get the modern touches such as social media and drones, and to get some more historical backstory for the Witch. Best of all though is the interestingly directed final sequence in the house. An unexpectedly good sequel, then, which doesn't try to be clever but delivers exactly what is wanted.