The Boys Presents: Diabolical – Season 1 Review

I love animation, but I don’t particularly enjoy when a live-action show takes a detour into animated territory. The characters just don’t feel like themselves, and it’s hard to take seriously what happens in the animated world as canon. That’s definitely true for this Diabolical spin-off. Though to be fair, most episodes have nothing to do with the main The Boys cast, anyway. Which begs the question: why is this even set in the same universe? Amazon could have just called it a separate superhero anthology series similar to Netflix’s Love Death + Robots, and I would have been more onboard with the idea. The only thing that really ties it to The Boys is the fact that most episodes are about people getting their hands on some Compound V… to disastrous results. But I thought Compound V only worked on children over a long period of time? These cartoon episodes really confuse what the main show has tried to show us.

Taken as a cartoon, though, some of these episodes are pretty fun. I liked the Baby’s Day Out episode that was done in a more traditional animation style and featured zero dialogue. And the episode about a girl discovering that her power is to make poop come to life is certainly amusing. But, again, neither of these felt like they had anything to do with The Boys and would have worked better as their own random creations. Only two episodes play into The Boys storyline, but the first one models the characters after their comic book counterparts, so it means nothing to people like me who’ve only seen the live-action show. The second such episode feels more grounded, mainly because the characters look and sound how we would know them. That episode was about Homelander’s first (unsuccessful) rescue mission and further highlights how awful he is, but… we already knew that. Can we just get to Season 3 already?

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.