Season 4 of The Boys is nearly over, and things are starting to go a bit off the rails. Not in a fun, wacky way as we usually see from the show but in a way that’s just…unpleasant and bad. A content warning follows.

This week’s episode, Dirty Business, has the group infiltrating an alt-right meetup where a coup of the government is plotted, led by Homelander and Victoria Neuman. And in this evening we get two of the worst aspects of the show this season, its ham-handed political commentary (a Republican quotes almost verbatim Todd Akin’s infamous “legitimate rape” declaration), and also The Boys trying to out-do itself not by better storylines or character moments, but by just being…gross. But in a way that doesn’t really work at all.

It feels like this episode was trying to ape the infamous “Herogasm” about a superhero orgy that led to a major showdown between characters. That doesn’t happen here, and a large chunk of the evening is mainly devoted to Hughie being sexually tortured by Tek-Knight and Ashley. Even if it’s largely things like feet-tickling and cake farting and then the threat of Tek-Knight doing something so bad to Hughie I can’t even write it here, it’s still sexual assault, and the show at least pauses to take a breath to let Hughie break down afterward. Still, it wasn’t funny or fun to watch or whatever it was supposed to be.

The more I watch the current iteration of The Boys, the more I realize just how much Gen V’s first season was by comparison. That show has plenty of gore and sex but it’s not the main focus, as it also has a coherent storyline and characters you want to root for. If The Boys ever had that, it’s now turned them into an abused Hughie and a powerless Starlight. Now, the show is trying to give A-Train some sort of redemption arc that, given the nature of the show, seems like it will be setting him up to be violently killed off shortly thereafter.

This has not been an enjoyable season. The politics have just gotten dumb, way too 1:1 paralleled with real life in a way that isn’t clever, even if I actually agree with those politics. And this desire to have viewers talking about the new, sick thing the show did the next day is overwhelming all plot development which after six episodes this season comes down to “Homelander thinks everyone is inferior and wants to take over the country.” Like I mean, of course he does, and his “world’s smartest person” he has working for him has not concocted anything resembling an interesting plan to make it happen. Meanwhile, the show has no idea to do with the rest of its central Boys cast giving them disconnected, undeveloped storylines and isolating Butcher with his brain tumor hallucinations.

There’s only one more season of The Boys after this, at least with this cast as the series movies to spin-offs. But at this point, I’m much more looking forward to Gen V season 2 than whatever happens next here.