Splat Go the Heads
The gleeful carnage of The Boys isn’t without purpose. But who benefits?
many heads explode in season two of The Boys, Amazon’s wry, messy, gruesome, sharp superhero drama. Some of the head explosions are figurative, as when a character’s surprising backstory is revealed or a particularly surprising twist arrives. This is The Boys, though—a show that loves its gore almost as much as it loves sardonic music cues and skewering capitalism—so most of the minds that get blown in season two are gleefully literal. Heads pop open at unexpected moments, splattering gray matter hither and yon. Mid-conversation, a head may simply cease to be, replaced by a bright spray of red and a sound like dropping an open carton of orange juice on the floor. “Heads will roll” is such an old-fashioned way of thinking about violence. “Heads that burst like party balloons full of shiny red confetti” is so much more fun!
The Boys relies on its audience’s ability to experience exploding heads as “fun”; it is unapologetically and unrelentingly the kind of show that asks you to be down for whatever bananas, bloody nonsense it can think of. If you’re uncomfortable hanging out with, say, a superhero who unthinkingly splatters a guy’s head into oblivion while getting a hand job from his