Does The Boys remember what to do with Starlight?
Although fans of The boys Although Butcher (Karl Urban) is often referred to as the main character, it was Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Annie (Erin Moriarty) who served as the true co-protagonists of the early seasons. They were the ones who changed the most, having their worldview shattered in the pilot episode and having to rebuild themselves from scratch. Butcher’s remained the same grumpy, morally dubious bastard, but Hughie and Annie are unrecognizable from where they started.
And while Hughie had more screen time between the two, Annie was the more compelling main character in season 1. While Hughie had the comfort of at least being surrounded by people who shared his hatred of supes like A-Train, Annie was thrown straight into the viper’s nest. She was forced to smile and make things work on a team full of rapists and murderers, in a position where escape wasn’t a real option and coming forward publicly seemed pointless. Annie’s gradual self-realization was more complicated than Hughie’s, but that only made it more interesting. Annie is always pulled between multiple evolving teams with conflicting, questionable motives, but in Season 1, the show managed this delicate balancing act. Now in season 4, almost any sense of consistency or direction with Annie has fallen apart.
Annie was very popular in season 1 Boys fandom, bucking the usual sexist internet trend of the most prominent female character in a franchise being the most loudly hated. As early as Season 2, however, fan sentiment began to sour, thanks in large part to a huge misstep in “Nothing Like It in the World.” That’s the mid-season 2 episode where Annie kills an innocent civilian, a man who was defending himself from what he assumed were violent carjackings. (An assumption that was correct in principle.)
The story uses this as part of a connecting subplot between Annie and Butcher, two characters who have had difficulty trusting each other up to this point. “Do you know what I thought when I looked at him?” she then tells Butcher. “Why did you pull a gun, you stupid bastard? That’s all. Maybe once I would have cried for him, but… now he was just someone in our way.” This hardened, cynical way of thinking is presented as the turning point in her and Butcher’s relationship, the moment when they fully support each other.
The monologue is often misinterpreted by fans as Annie bragging, or mocking the man for defending himself. But even among fans who understand this, when Annie expresses regret and self-loathing, and makes fun of herself for becoming so insensitive, it still doesn’t work. Her murder of that civilian was far more inappropriate than the episode seemed to realize, something that should have stuck in Annie’s mind for much longer than it does. The show really didn’t seem to understand the parallels to the murder of an innocent driver by the villain Stormfront earlier this season; it made that connection between the two characters, seemingly by accident, and then did nothing with it.
This incident has always stuck in the minds of fans who have grown irritated by Annie’s role as the virtuous voice of reason, an approach that caused even more controversy in season 3. First there was the messy season-long conflict between Annie and Hughie. about whether or not Hughie should use the Temp V. It was an interesting argument between the two; Annie was quite concerned about Hughie’s change in attitude and the possible consequences of the drug, while also not fully empathizing with how scary life is for Hughie as a non-supe in this violent world. The problem is that it’s a storyline that gives Annie no storyline. Hughie is the one who changes, who learns a lesson and ultimately grows from it, while Annie is presented as correct from start to finish. The end of the season puts an end to any moral complexity on the subject when it is revealed that Temp V will 100% give Hughie terminal cancer if he takes it again. After that, everything interesting that the storyline has told us about Annie’s value system is pushed aside.
Season 3 generally felt uninterested in diving into the hows and whys of Annie’s choices. Besides Hughie, there was also a lack of a clear, sympathetic explanation for her decision to focus on taking down Soldier Boy, and not Homelander. Annie had three seasons’ worth of personal reasons for wanting Homelander dead, not to mention the increasing likelihood that he would completely collapse and burn the entire world down. When she instead focused all her attention on resisting the one man who could take down Homelander, the show’s explanation for that didn’t feel organic. Rather, it felt motivated by the show’s need to keep Homelander alive as long as possible, not by a natural progression of her character growth from the first two seasons.
Photo: Amazon Studios
Photo: Jasper Savage/Prime Video
There’s a similar sense of aimlessness for Annie throughout the first three episodes of Season 4, with her already revisiting her Season 3 decision to give up the Starlight persona once and for all. Her feud with Homelander, which seemed to be her main priority for the first episode at least, has also given way to a refocus on a new secondary villain. This time it’s Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a new member of The Seven, who reveals that her main motivation is to get back at Annie for a mean, slut-shaming prank she did to her in their early teens. “Everyone thinks you’re so decent,” Firecracker says to Annie. ‘Do you know what I see? A sneaky, mean girl in there. And when I’m done, the rest of the world will see it too.”
It’s a weird revelation, almost as if the writers are talking to the part of the fandom that resents Annie’s status as the angelic voice of reason, essentially throwing the haters a bone in response to their increasingly loud complaints about the character . While the show will almost certainly side with Annie in this feud — basing your entire adult life on a sordid incident when you were 13 is deeply unhealthy on Firecracker’s part, and the show is aware of this — the entire dynamic feels strangely trivial. Annie had to hold her own against Homelander for the first two and a half seasons, and now she’s embroiled in a mean girl feud with the least powerful new member of The Seven. If you were hoping that season 4 would give Annie a sense of direction again, this isn’t a good sign.
It helps that Annie is so clearly better than her comic counterpart, an empty two-dimensional love interest that writer Garth Ennis barely seemed to care about. It’s hard to get too upset with the show’s portrayal of Annie when we already know how sloppily the character could have been portrayed. And season 4 takes steps to deepen her relationship with her powers, establishing that Annie is legitimately getting stronger, so hopefully she won’t be such an afterthought during the next big fight scene (as it was with Soldier Boy in a much-discussed moment in the season 3 finale).
But it’s also hard not to get frustrated knowing how well she can be written. Annie’s story over the past two seasons so far seemed scattered, with no appreciation for how much fun Annie is when she’s actively shaping the plot with her decisions, rather than just the plot shaping her. Season 1 Annie was a vital character, one whose scenes were filled with constant tension and intrigue. It’s hard to imagine how The boys will come back to this, but I hope they give Annie something meaningful to do again soon.
The first three episodes of The boys season 4 is now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes appear every Thursday.