The Boys season 4 has a Starlight problem

Although fans of The Boys will often refer to Butcher (Karl Urban) as the main character, it was Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Annie (Erin Moriarty) who served as the early seasons’ real co-protagonists. They were the ones who changed the most, who had their worldviews shattered in the pilot episode and had to rebuild themselves from scratch. Butcher’s stayed the same cranky, morally dubious bastard, but Hughie and Annie are unrecognizable from where they began.

And though Hughie had more screen time between the two, season 1 Annie was the more compelling main character. Whereas Hughie had the comfort of at least being surrounded by people who shared his hatred of supes like A-Train, Annie was thrown right into the viper’s nest. She was forced to smile and make things work on a team filled with rapists and murderers, in a position where escape wasn’t a real option and coming forward publicly seemed pointless. Annie’s gradual self-actualization was more complicated than Hughie’s, but that only made it more interesting. Annie is always being pulled between multiple evolving teams with conflicting, dubious motives, but in season 1 the show was pulling off this delicate balancing act. Now, in season 4, almost all sense of consistency or direction with Annie has fallen apart.

Annie was well loved in season 1 among the Boys fandom, breaking the usual sexist internet trend that the most prominent female character in a franchise is the most loudly hated. As early as season 2, however, the fan sentiment started to sour, largely thanks to one giant misstep in “Nothing Like It in the World.” That’s the mid-season 2 episode where Annie kills an innocent civilian, a guy who was defending himself from what he assumed were violent carjackers. (An assumption that was basically correct.)

The story uses this as part of a bonding subplot between Annie and Butcher, two characters who’d struggled to trust each other up to this point. “You know what I was thinking when I was looking at him?” she tells Butcher afterward. “Why’d you pull a gun, you stupid fuck? That’s all. Maybe once I would’ve cried over him, but… now he was just another person 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’ve fully got each other’s backs.

The monologue is often unfairly interpreted by fans as Annie bragging, or mocking the guy for defending himself. But even among fans who understand this as Annie expressing regret and self-hatred, kicking herself for how callous she’s become, it still doesn’t work. Her murder of that civilian was way more uncalled for than the episode seemed to realize, something that should’ve lingered on Annie’s mind far longer than it does. The show really didn’t seem to understand the parallels to the villain Stormfront’s murder of an innocent driver earlier in the season; it drew 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’ve grown irritated with Annie’s role as the virtuous voice of reason, an approach that stirred up even more controversy in season 3. First there was the messy season-long conflict between Annie and Hughie over whether or not Hughie should be using the Temp V. It was an interesting argument between the two; Annie was reasonably concerned about Hughie’s attitude shift and the potential consequences of the drug, while also not quite empathizing enough with just how scary life is for Hughie as a non-supe in this violent world. The problem is that it’s a storyline that doesn’t give Annie an arc. Hughie’s the one who changes, who learns a lesson and grows from it in the end, whereas Annie is presented as correct from start to finish. The end of the season shuts down any moral complexity on the topic when it reveals that Temp V will 100% give Hughie terminal cancer if he takes it again. After that, anything interesting the storyline might’ve told us about Annie’s value system is tossed to the side.

Season 3 in general felt uninterested in diving into the hows and whys of Annie’s choices. Beyond Hughie, her decision to focus on taking down Soldier Boy, not Homelander, also lacked a clear, sympathetic explanation. Annie had three seasons’ worth of personal reasons to want Homelander dead, not to mention the ever-increasing likelihood that he’d snap completely and burn down the whole world. When she instead turned all her focus on opposing the one guy who could take Homelander down, the show’s explanation for it didn’t feel organic. Rather, it felt motivated by the show’s need to keep Homelander alive as long as possible, not by any natural continuation of her character growth from the first two seasons.

Photo: Amazon Studios

Photo: Jasper Savage/Prime Video

There’s a similar sense of aimlessness with Annie throughout the first three episodes of season 4, with her already backtracking on 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 refocusing 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 teenage years. “Everybody thinks you’re so decent,” Firecracker tells Annie. “Know what I see? A conniving little mean-girl bitch in there. And when I’m done, the rest of the world is going to see it too.”

It’s a weird revelation, almost like the writers are engaging with the section of the fandom that resents Annie’s angelic-voice-of-reason status, essentially throwing the haters a bone in response to their increasingly loud complaints about the character. Although the show will almost certainly side with Annie in this feud — basing your whole adult life around a mean-girl incident when you were 13 is deeply unhealthy on Firecracker’s part, and the show is aware of this — the whole dynamic feels oddly trivial. Annie spent the first two and a half seasons having to hold her own against Homelander, and now she’s been thrown into a mean-girl feud with the least powerful new member of The Seven. If you were hoping season 4 would give Annie a sense of direction again, this is not 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 mad at the show’s depiction of Annie when we already know just how sloppily the character could’ve been portrayed. And season 4 is taking steps to deepen her relationship with her powers, establishing that Annie’s legitimately getting stronger, so hopefully during the next big fight scene she won’t be such an afterthought (the way it was with Soldier Boy in a widely mocked moment in the season 3 finale).

But it’s also hard not to be frustrated when we know how well she could be written. Annie’s arc across the past two seasons so far has seemed scattershot, and unappreciative of just how 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, someone whose scenes were filled with constant tension and intrigue. It’s hard to picture how The Boys will return to this, but here’s hoping they give Annie something meaningful to do again sometime soon.

The first three episodes of The Boys season 4 are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes are released every Thursday.