I’m a late convert to Amazon Prime’s The Boys. Even though the show is produced here in Toronto, and its stated goal is to bring superhero stories down a peg, the initial marketing campaign for Season 1 led me to think that it was a little too gimmicky and a little too performatively edgy for my taste.

Turns out (shocker) trailers only get you far. I find I now prefer The Boys to Netflix’s similar superhero genre critique, The Umbrella Academy. The show’s cynicism about mass market entertainment is just pointed enough without sounding like a whiny fanboy Twitter thread. The plentiful onscreen violence is deployed with the right mixture of perverse comedy and horror. And now, in Season 2, the writers room is building on the foundation from the first block of episodes, to begin filling in gaps in character development and lay groundwork for what will likely be a messy (in a good way) season finale.

I’m basing this review on the first half of the season, since The Boys adopted a weekly release schedule this time around - we won’t get the finale until October 9. The action picks up not long after the end of Season 1, which finds the titular crew of anti-superhero vigilantes hiding out in the basement of a drug operation, with both the federal government and the so-called Supes from Vought International on their tails. Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), the group’s leader, is missing - after attempting a power play on Homelander (Antony Starr) in the Season 1 finale, he realizes that his long-lost wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten) is alive, raising the son fathered by Homelander at a Vought compound.

With the crew reeling, you might expect the Supes to get the upper hand. But despite Homelander’s belief that he now pulls all the strings at Vought, the reality is more complicated. Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) still has complete command of the company, and many of Homelander’s efforts to either fill openings in his team or respond to the efforts of the Boys fall apart. In fact, Homelander finally faces a significant threat to his leadership from Stormfront (Aya Cash), a social media-savvy, truth-talking Supe who may or may not be an immortal white supremacist. Through all of this, Antony Starr proves to be one of the best members in a great cast; I can see him being in contention for a Bond or Marvel villain role at some point.

The first half of the season spends a lot of time laying groundwork. Whereas the first season was more character-driven, often choosing several characters per episode to focus on, now the show takes on a more plot-driven, serialized structure. There’s a trickle of information about Stormfront, and the side hustle she may be running to import supervillains into the country. There’s also a comic-relief arc running between episodes, with The Deep (Chace Crawford) accidentally joining a sort of Scientology-like cult in Ohio. It’s unclear yet what the payoff for the Deep storyline will be, but I expect it might split the difference between comedy and actually relating to the main plot. It would be classic Boys style to have Deep’s cult involvement lead to some bombshell that forces the other characters to take him seriously.

Mercifully, our original protagonist Hugh Campbell (Jack Quaid) is crawling toward some kind of agency. Now he only goes into “deer-in-headlights” mode 50% of the time, instead of the 95% in Season 1. As Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) points out to Butcher, Hughie is a canary character, meant to give us an outsider’s perspective on what’s going on. But the longer Hughie spends in this world, the more desensitized he’s going to get, and that might lead to some great storytelling moments later on, provided we can last out his wide-eyed freeze-ups.

I’m also happy to see Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) get a little more attention this season. She was skipped over so often in Season 1 (even in fight sequences) that I had a hard time grasping what her powers are, but now we get a bit more information about her background and her motivation. Her stalled relationship with Elena (Nicola Correia-Damude) is revived, and she’s the subject of one of Homelander’s ham-fisted attempts to look like he’s running Vought. Still, she remains the least-developed member of The Seven after Black Noir, and considering that guy’s whole thing is being a complete blank slate, there’s plenty of ground to make up.

With four episodes to go and considering the characteristic gonzo tone of The Boys, there’s any number of directions for the season to head. On my wishlist: some multi-Supe fights (Homelander vs. Stormfront would be the natural one), and a nice, thorny mission for Butcher and crew to attempt. But I’ll pass along an interesting prediction that my collaborator Jason made: Hughie will dose himself with the power-bestowing Compound V and become a Supe. There’s a slight Syndrome-style risk to the storytelling if this happens, but I’m willing to go along if it does. Maybe Hughie’s power will be mind-controlling people to have crippling anxiety? A development worthy of 2020, I’d say.

Stray thoughts

• One of the early episodes drops in a Canadian media cameo from movie theatre pre-show host Tanner Zipchen.

• I don’t know how Hughie and Starlight’s burner phones haven’t been picked up by Vought yet.

• I keep wishing for one of the Supes to drop Ashley the PR director (Colby Minifie) out of a window.