Entertainment
The Boys Goes All-In On Politics For Season 5, And Activates Super-Raunchy Mode
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Since it began in 2019, The Boys (which adapts the demented Garth Ennis comic of the same name) has done an excellent job of skewering franchises like the MCU and the DCU. Long before the term “superhero fatigue” entered the public lexicon, this show revealed the problems inherent in movies and shows focusing on tights and flights. In short, the show’s thesis is that obsessing over superheroes is infantile, revealing a desire to let someone powerful control us rather than take responsibility for our own messy lives.
Of course, “messy” is how many fans described Season 4 of the show, one which focused more on horrific spectacle than subversive comedy. Fortunately, the fifth and final season kicked off with a bang, effectively resetting its creative focus even as it breathes new life into characters that have grown old and stale.
Not every joke hits its mark, of course, and not every character change is for the best. Plus, if you hated the show’s increasingly political bent, you’ll despise how Season 5 goes all in on political allegory. But if you have loved The Boys since the beginning, you’ll enjoy this final season premiere that returns to form and easily sticks its superhero landing.
The Inevitable Time Jump
Season 5 of The Boys rejuvenates the show through the oldest television trick in the book: the inevitable time jump. Taking place one year after Season 4, the premiere finds our titular heroes in some very dire straits.
Hughie, Frenchie, and Mother’s Milk have been captured and placed in an internment camp overseen by murderous supes. Miko has been deported, while Starlight carries on a one-woman rebellion against Homelander’s hegemony. Butcher has largely lain low, but he comes out of hiding and gets the gang back together when he learns that his buddies in the internment camp are about to be executed.
For the most part, this time skip works very well: it showcases how Butcher has disappeared even deeper into the all-consuming rage that drives him while illustrating how Starlight has increasingly become like Butcher, one moral compromise at a time.
That compromise and Hughie’s interment trauma (including regularly seeing camp friends beaten and blown apart) threatens to put a wedge between the two young lovebirds. Plus, the jump makes it easier to accept that Homelander has become even more deranged, ready to imprison or outright kill anyone who so much as makes fun of him on social media.
Arguably, the most surprising effect of the time jump is that the mute and murderous Miko has learned how to talk. This becomes an unexpected source of humor, as she does a hilariously weird job of expressing her thoughts and basically has no filter (“listening to you talk makes me want to kill myself”). The change adds some much-needed levity to certain scenes, but it undeniably changes her character for the worse. Instead of being a silent assassin with the soul of a poet, she’s now a TikTok-obsessed girly-girl, albeit one with a healing factor that even Deadpool would envy.
Getting The Band Back Together
While The Boys has always skewered the conventions of superhero media, the show is often at its best when it leans into tried and true tropes. The Season 5 premiere episode “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite” effectively blends together two beloved storytelling tropes: a prison break and a “getting the band back together” story.
They blend together very well, as Butcher getting his old team back together helps restore their old dynamic while illustrating how much each character has changed. Meanwhile, the jailbreak provides a great climax filled with unexpected moments, including the tragic redemption of the show’s earliest villain.
If this sounds a little too by the numbers, don’t worry: the second Season 5 episode, “Teenage Kix,” takes the story in some very unexpected directions while cranking The Boys’ gross-out humor up to 11. This episode reveals a Catwoman-like character that has her own litterbox and a rocky superhero who has turned into a man-mountain thanks to nonstop wanking.
On a more sober note, this episode also features the return of Soldier Boy. His presence threatens Homelander’s delicate psychological state while ramping up the existential threats facing our favorite antiheroes.
Are The Boys Truly Back In Town?
It’s an open secret that Season 4 of The Boys was a low point of the series. If you’re someone who was disappointed by that season, you are likely curious as to whether or not Season 5 has fully turned the ship around. The honest answer? It’s really too soon to tell.
The first two episodes are quite solid and easily on par with the best that the fourth season had to offer. However, with six episodes left to go, there is still time for the show to (as Butcher might say) make a bollocks of things.
As a fan of The Boys from its days as an ultraviolent comic book, though, I’m cautiously optimistic for this fifth and final season. The actors are clearly bringing their A game: Antony Starr has never been more quietly menacing as Homelander, and Karl Urban has never been so loudly dangerous as Butcher.
These first two episodes are just foreplay for the final showdown between these two, with some strong hints that Butcher may ultimately prove more dangerous than any of the evil superheroes he puts down. Will Season 5 ultimately end The Boys on a high note or just devolve into the raunchiest train wreck in all of streaming?
Either way, true believers, I’ve bought the ticket, and I’m more than ready to take the ride.
Entertainment
Hurdle hints and answers for April 19, 2026
If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.
There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it’ll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.
An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.
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If you find yourself stuck at any step of today’s Hurdle, don’t worry! We have you covered.
Hurdle Word 1 hint
The edge.
Hurdle Word 1 answer
BRINK
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Hurdle Word 2 hint
Moody.
Hurdle Word 2 Answer
POUTY
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
Hurdle Word 3 hint
America’s bird.
Hurdle Word 3 answer
EAGLE
Hurdle Word 4 hint
A platform.
Hurdle Word 4 answer
FORUM
Final Hurdle hint
Cheapskate.
Hurdle Word 5 answer
MISER
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Most Ambitious Villain Helped Create The Franchise’s Most Complex Hero
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Star Trek: Voyager first came out, the most fascinating character was the Doctor. While Robert Picardo’s performance was superb, it’s fair to say this character was mostly fascinating on a conceptual level. We had seen things like hypercompetent Starfleet captains and exotic aliens before, but what we hadn’t seen was a fully holographic chief medical officer. Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram seemed like the perfect embodiment of the Star Trek ethos. He’s a technological strange new world and new life, all rolled into one.
However, what casual audiences didn’t realize is that the Doctor wasn’t completely unique. Long before Picardo’s character ever sawed bones in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Picard dealt with another extraordinary hologram: Moriarty, the brilliant foe of the famous investigator Sherlock Holmes. Over on The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge accidentally created this villain as a sentient hologram when he asked the holodeck to create a challenge worthy of the android Data. Later, Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor revealed that, in-universe, the holographic Doctor was created because Starfleet took advantage of the same accidental breakthrough that created Moriarty!
It all started in “Elementary, My Dear Data,” the Next Generation episode in which the titular android and Geordi LaForge recreated Sherlock Holmes’ adventures on the holodeck. Thanks to his positronic brain and his encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, Data is able to easily solve every mystery that is thrown at him. That’s when Geordi makes a seemingly simple request. He asks the Enterprise computer to develop a holodeck foe that could actually defeat Data, one of the smartest beings in the entire galaxy.
The computer obliges and creates a sentient version of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ greatest foe. Following Geordi’s instructions, the Enterprise computer included much of Data’s vast programming, which resulted in the holographic character becoming self-aware. Moriarty ended up threatening the Enterprise on two different occasions, and Picard eventually got rid of him by trapping the unknowing villain in a simulation where he thought he had left the holodeck and could explore the stars. This was meant to be a happy ending for Moriarty, but in the show’s typically bleak fashion, Star Trek: Picard later showed us a different, more hostile version of this character created by a malevolent Section 31 AI.
How A Villain Created A Hero
What does all of this have to do with Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager? Elementary, my dear reader! Very early in Voyager’s development (the show didn’t even have a name yet), executive producer Jeri Taylor was inspired by Moriarty to create a new character. As reported in A Vision of the Future-Star Trek: Voyager, Taylor wrote down notes for a holographic doctor “who, like Moriarty, has ‘awareness’ of himself as a holodeck fiction. He longs for the time when he can walk free of the Holodeck.”
A few days later, she wrote down additional notes that contain a startling bit of Star Trek lore. “The Holo-Doctor represents a new, state-of-the-art technology which has capitalized on the serendipitous incident which created Moriarty, and has programmed a holographic character which has self-awareness of his situation and limitations.” While Moriarty is name-dropped on Voyager a couple of times, the show never mentioned what Taylor’s notes seem to confirm: that Lewis Zimmerman could never have created the Emergency Medical Hologram program if not for Geordi LaForge accidentally creating Moriarty on the holodeck.
From Villain To Leading Man?
If that’s not strange enough, there was a period of time when Voyager’s producers were considering making Moriarty a mainstay character on the show. As reported in Star Trek–Where No One Has Gone Before, Taylor’s notes mentioned that “everyone agreed that was a little too broad, and we couldn’t figure out why anyone would take him along.” After dismissing the idea, they decided “that having a holographic doctor with the full consciousness of being a hologram might be fun, and we’d never done anything like that before, except for Moriarty.”
There you have it, gentle reader. Without the character of Moriarty on Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’d never have the Doctor on Voyager. In this way, Trek’s most ambitious villain helped create the franchise’s most complex hero. Thanks to Jeri Taylor’s notes, we also know that, in-universe, Lewis Zimmerman would never have been able to create the Doctor if not for Geordi accidentally creating a sentient Moriarty so Data could have fun. In retrospect, this does make Zimmerman’s arrogance that much weirder. After all, he has a lot of attitude for someone who owes his entire career to the two biggest book nerds in the galaxy!
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 19
After days of almost (and complete) darkness, the Moon is finally starting to reappear. We’re currently in the Waxing Crescent phase of the lunar cycle, which means each night until the Full Moon we’ll see it get more illuminated from the right side.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, April 19, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 5% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Despite more of it now being illuminated, the percentage of surface is still too little to be able to spot any surface details. Check again tomorrow.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
NASA states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. We call these the lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
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Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
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