The first three episodes of The Boys season 3, reviewed and explained
By Dan Selcke
Episode 302: “The Only Man in the Sky”
The Boys slows down a bit in its second episode, by which I mean there’s no scene where a tiny man crawls up a guy’s penis, sneezes, and explodes out the guy’s crotch leaving him a bloody smear on the bed. No, I’m still not over that scene.
Having hooked us with that, the show is now in build-up mode as we explore the storylines we’re going to stick with all season. Butcher and company are hunting down Soldier Boy, a World War II-era hero who was killed sometime in the ’80s, the hope being that if they find whatever killed him, they can use it to take out Homelander. The show gets plenty of satirical digs in as Frenchie and Kimiko visit Voughtland, a Disneyland parody that is chock-full of pandering progressive propaganda, e.g. BLM BLTs.
Anyway, Frenchie and Kimiko inelegantly corner the Crimson Countess, an old colleague of Soldier Boy’s, and try and pump her for information. She escapes and explodes a dude in a Homelander costume on her way out. Honestly, their approach here is so blunt force it’s kind of hard to take seriously, but those shots at Disney make it worth it.
This will end well: Butcher becomes a supe for a day
We get more satire when Butcher hunts down another of Soldier Boy’s old colleagues, Gunpowder, at a jingoistic, conspiracy-laden gun show. My favorite bit there is when Butcher goes through the metal detector, hears the buzz, shows the guard his handgun and is waved on through. It’s a weaker version of an old Simpsons gag but it’s still funny:
Butcher nearly dies confronting Gunpowder the first time, but comes back later having taken the 24-hour superpower potion Queen Maeve got him last episode. And he gets dark. Gunpowder, like 90% of the people on this show, is a scumbag and I’m not going to mourn his passing, but seeing Butcher beat him to death is still disturbing, particularly since he does it not because of what Gunpowder did — the beaten supe gives Butcher the information on Soldier Boy he’s after — but because of “what you are.”
So Butcher murders the guy because he’s a supe. How long before he starts applying that line of logic to characters like Starlight or Maeve?
This season seems to be about the difficulty of personal growth, and how easy it is to sink back into bad habits. At one point Butcher considerers abandoning his one-man war against superhero-kind and helping to raise Homelander’s son Ryan, who is almost too precious for this world. But when Hughie tells him that Victoria Neuman is the supe who’s been popping heads left and right, he springs back into action with a vengeance. It feels like progress now, but who knows what dark paths this could lead him down?
Mother’s Milk is also backsliding. He wants to be there for his daughter, but he can’t stop obsessing over how supes — particularly Soldier Boy — have hurt his family. When Butcher comes to him with the opportunity to look into Soldier Boy and get closure, it’s too enticing an offer to pass up.
Somehow, Homelander becomes even more dangerous
It’s an old question: can you fight monsters without becoming a monster yourself? The Boys is great because it repackages classic dilemmas like this in fun new ways, in this case covering it in several lays of blood, raunch, and up-to-the-minute satire. But the central conflict remains as rich as ever.
And there’s no question who the monster of this particular story is: Homelander, as always, is the best part of the episode, moreso now because he’s barely holding back his madness and megalomania. For his “birthday,” Vought arranges for him to stop a woman from leaping off the ledge of a building, and he can barely bring himself to care. And once he finds out that Stormfront has committed suicide back in his penthouse (she bit off her own tongue, which I guess shows that even superheroes can bleed out or choke on their own blood or whatever happened to her), he starts encouraging the woman to jump. We don’t see it, but he probably pushed her.
We don’t know exactly why Stormfront kills herself. Aside from the obvious — she’s doomed to spend the rest of her very long life in agony — I wonder if she realized that Homelander isn’t the Nazi messiah she was hoping he’d be. Think about that: even the Nazis thought Homelander was too selfish and crazy.
But he’s the one with all the power, because he was made that way; “poured out of a test tube,” as he puts it. And now he’s done trying to make everyone like him, he’s done taking orders from Stan Edgar just because he runs Vought, done trying to pretend like he has respect for anyone who isn’t him. In a chilling speech during his birthday celebration, he goes full Trump and says that he’s the “only one” capable of saving people. “You’re not the real heroes,” he says. “I’m the real hero.”
We’re only two episodes in and The Boys season 3 has already generated a ton of narrative momentum. I can’t wait to see the fallout from Homelander’s freakout. And since Amazon released three episodes at once, we don’t have to wait.
The Bullet Points
- The episode opens with a trailer for a Lifetime-esque movie about the Deep’s recent brush with not-Scientology. It’s kind of an out-of-date reference, but The Boys’ strategy is to make the biggest waves it can and see what gets wet. It’s a cute bit.
- A-Train (Jessie Usher) is trying to rebrand himself to capture the African American market, a move Ashley is trying to stop its tracks. We’ll see where that goes, although it seems like small potatoes next to some of the other developments in this episode.
- Okay, I don’t know the character’s name so just bear with me here: when Mother’s Milk’s ex-wife’s new partner was watching Homelander’s I’m-so-great speech, he had a hungry look in his eye. Maybe he’s gonna be part of Homelander’s new cult?