Amazon series “The Boys,” which manages in its second season to be even more boisterously bleak than the first time around. ... But don’t worry, action fans, there are also plenty of exploding heads, super-battles and mountains of mayhem. This show rarely rests.

As a whole, the second season of The Boys is a solid improvement on the first: Smarter, sharper, and more engaged with its stories and characters.

The Boys isn’t nearly as subversive at it fancies itself. The idea that superheroes have a dark side has been part of the conversation about the medium for decades. Indeed it is the basis for many of Marvel and DC Comics’s most compelling storylines (Captain America: Civil War, for starters). But The Boys takes a cleaver to the cult of the caped crusader with genuine glee. If the gore feels non-stop – watch out for an exploding whale early on – so, too, does the show’s wicked sense of fun.

Amazing that “The Boys” juggles each of its storylines without fumbling most of them. Conceptually, the season’s a jumble. Practically, it works remarkably well, juvenile in the way everything producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg touch should be but smart enough to know when not to be dumb as rocks (or, at least, to know when to take itself seriously and when to burst heads like grapes).

This is the season that helped me “get” the appeal of "The Boys," especially as it’s more fun to spend time with these characters well-past their try-hard introductions. ... But season two also proves that if the series is going to be so bloated and only sporadically punchy, it’s never going to be as powerful as it thinks it is.