The worldbuilding in this season is fucking abysmal
I don't think I've seen any piece of media make the literal assassination of the president of the United States feel this inconsequential: so the person in the highest office just fucking dies and... That's it? There's no follow-up to this whatsoever, no Homelander stepping into the Cross Hall to perform a televised speech announcing his role as the new God-dictator of America, no attempt to cover it up as another vicious crime from Starlighters, nothing?
And what about The Seven? They've just been disbanded, the main antagonist team of this show is no longer a thing, the implications should be huge, and yet... This is just sidelined away as a minor plot point in a single conversation between Homelander and The Deep? And then a few scenes later The Deep is on the phone with his agent trying to find another gig like it's a scene from Season 2, as if it makes any sense to still be doing the "superheroes are fledgling celebrities who really need to boost their social media popularity" bit at a point in the show when Homelander has completely destroyed the entire status quo of their world?
What about the literal biblical fuckery going on here? Homelander is pronouncing himself as the actual Second Coming, and yet, the sole reaction we see from the general public is a small test audience at a Vought backlot? Where's the Vatican, where's the fucking Pope, where's anyone? Christians make up 2.3 billion of the worldwide population, can we just write all of this away as something solved off-screen with "ah yea, the pro-Homelander police just cracked down harder on the anti-Homelander people"?
I just don't get it: where's the entire world while this season is happening? Why is it that, beyond one brief scene of ICE-like goons separating a family early on, all the actual civil strife is just casually hinted at as something happening in the background? By this point in the story, it feels like we should be seeing major American cities converted into 1984-style dystopias with giant telescreens spouting pro-Homelander propaganda and streets being patrolled by U.S.-Vought joint corpo-paramilitary forces, but instead we get... A small internment camp with a hundred or so people? The first season of this show dedicated a major plotline to getting superheroes into the army and the second one opens up with all the ramifications of this, season three was almost entirely about the conflict between Homelander's public persona and his narcissistic sociopathy, even season four for all its faults was at least built around the fear of getting a supe into power, and all of this culminated in basically nothing. What's even at stake by this point if we basically no longer see a world existing outside of our main characters? I truly, sincerely have no fucking clue of what's going on in the mind of the showrunners by this point, what an abysmal fall from grace. Truly diabolical.