First of all, I know this phenomena has already been discussed, even in this sub in a far better written post, from 2 years ago titled “I fear Filler is turning into a buzzword”. It’s just that the word has been thrown around so much the latest days, I feel it deserves to be brought back in the conversation.
Filler is, lets say, an anime episode where nothing of the main plot is adressed, nothing from the manga is adapted, and the characters go to have a beach day. Filler could happen if the characters of a show took a detour from the story (in a purely plot driven show) to have a self contained adventure that is never again mentioned, that doesn’t have the slightest weight on the stakes or even the characters involved, and could be skipped and the next episode just goes on from the one before the “filler”. Hell, the clip show episodes from sitcoms are fillers.
Two episodes from The Boys, 4 and 5 from the latest season, have come out and Twitter is thriving with posts of people attacking the show, claiming the episodes suck and are the worst ever because they are filler. Filler this, filler that. I have seen this kind of opinions regarding many other shows, like The Pitt (???) or even Invincible.
I’m not a defender of the show. I think it never got back to the quality of the first season, and that after season 3 it really fell off. Hell, I even didn’t like season 2 that much except for the ending, I do prefer 3. Season 4 (and 5 to an extent) has been plagued by many problems, lets say the writing regarding politics and satire (it never was subtle, but it did get indeed unsubtlier and just cheap jokes), or even the stakes aren’t felt as they have stretched everything too much to keep always the same status quo. But those episodes are definitely not filler. They do advance the plot, and even if they didn’t, they do give characters some development of insights. Maybe they aren’t properly placed in the season, or well executed, but they aren’t fillers and I will die on that Hill.
I feel like people love to say something is badly written, even if they don’t know what good or bad writing actually is, and love to throw Words like that when they don’t like what they are watching or their expectations aren’t met. Hell, people are comparing this to the final season of Game of Thrones, claiming they want more action or deaths, when the actual problem with the later is they went in a “pure spectacle” direction for the second half of the series and let aside the brilliant writing they had in the beginning.
I don’t know what this people would think of other shows. Season 2 of Lost for example, they would lose their minds with half the episodes. The Sopranos, to them, would be a show composed of only filler episodes save for some scenes.
What do you think? Maybe there’s another, bigger, problem in the 8 episodes seasons, and how everything must advance and no story or character is allowed to breathe. Maybe this episodes work better on shows with more episodes. Maybe character development episodes (and I’m not claiming they are some masterpieces or anything, just not filler) don’t really work in shows that are purely plot driven. Maybe it’s just fans who only care for hype moments and aura, which instantly grant a 9 score on IMDB even if it was only an ending scene.