The third season was odd because it was generally gearing up for the better with each episode, but that finale managed to retroactively sour it. Everything they were building towards suddenly veered off into a completely direction that also managed to contradict the characters and the plot. The biggest criticism I would have beforehand was that this season increasingly relied on telling versus showing, and what they do show often winds up contradicting what they were telling. The finale came off as pretty much the crux of that, and it blew up any tiny cracks from earlier on into a larger mess of fissures.
For me at least, the entire build up towards Soldier Boy being the key weapon against Homelander, only for that to turn on a dime to him being "worse" without anything remotely justifying that sort of turn weakened the finale the most. Maybe I just didn't hear post-release interviews or commentary with the first or second season or they weren't nearly as pronounced, but the ones for this season come across as though the show's own creators don't understand their own series, or at least what they've been showing the whole time. Definitely gives me GOT season 8 flashbacks to when we got gems like, "they kind of forgot about..." and other excuses for flimsy writing that didn't align with what was actually on scren.
That homelander stuff was always odd, it doesn't follow a real pattern. Homelander has always had a horrible God complex. Soldier boy felt insecure in Nicaragua when his charm didn't work and went back to the fight
A lot of the Homelander stuff is becoming increasingly inconsistent, and I'd attribute at least some of that to how they're actively reworking his character into something completely different for their own egos, which the showrunner has now pretty much confirmed in interviews.
How he is supposed to compare with Soldier Boy is the real head scratcher when the latter is just shown to be a bit of jerk, but given who we're talking about in The Boys, it's no cardinal sin.
Also fuck the writers, you can't pull a shamalan bullshit showing what happens in the 70s/80s then have a twist that this is really what happened. In all reality this scene never happened. Soldier boy got attacked by his team and no fighters were killed invading the camp. I feel like moth man might still be alive since it was all bullshit
Even if Mindstorm was able to trick her about the events which I doubt they thought of, the twist is still garbage
If you're referring to the cartoons "reenacting" how Black Noir got his head smashed in, you're right, and all it does is now make me question if Black Noir was the one constructing a different interpretation through his schizophrenic hallucinations. That entire two episode side of the suddenly trying to flesh out Black Noir really doesn't make any sense if they were going to (1) kill him off, (2) give him no real payoff or resolution connected to any of his cartoon retcon, or (3) bring in a "new" Black Noir next season.
The latter is really odd because, again, why even go through the effort of having cartoon hallucinations deliver a backstory for a character who they are only replacing under the suit in-show? I'd almost go so far as to say removing the mystique of the character was an overall detriment because not only does it confuse what even really happened in the show, but they're just going to replace the character under the suit (same stunt actor) who now has none of the backstory behind the original's characterization. Personally, I liked the way they portrayed Black Noir before as a deadly assassin who showed these almost childlike shades through his actions. With that gone because it's now a different person in-show, all we have is a shoehorned explanation the writers used to try justifying Soldier Boy being the new "big bad" of the season.
Back to the Payback betrayal reveal, enough of the pieces can still add up if we take Grace being unconscious into account, but it doesn't really excuse the poor writing or that such an important revelation was depicted through an unreliable narrator via cartoons.
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