The Boys review: Episode 304, “Glorious Five Year Plan”

I don’t think there’s been a villain as good as Homelander on TV since the days of Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones. This guy…is such a loathsome piece of sh*t, and he just keeps getting worse and worse. And I don’t mean that as an insult; he’s wonderful at driving conflict, I’m truly scared of him, and I don’t know how the other characters are going to topple them but I’m in their corner 100% of the way.

I basically want to start at the end of the episode, where Homelander whisks away Starlight on a creepy magic carpet ride to show her the mess he’d made of Supersonic, who was helping her foment an anti-Homelander alliance. I’ve been side-eyeing the inclusion of Supersonic for a minute because I didn’t know what point he served. Were they using him to make Hughie jealous? That’s tired. Was he going to betray Starlight and rat her out to Homelander? That’s predictable. But having be the person he says he is — a nice dude who wants to help Starlight because she’s trying to do the right thing — and get beaten to death for it…that I wasn’t expecting. I’m not sure if he’s actually dead or not — as Stormfront showed us, Supes can survive a lot — but neither way, this is a genuinely shocking turn for him.

I also love that Homelander found out about Starlight’s alliance because A-Train tattled after Supersonic tried to recruit him. Obviously, The Boys is a ridiculous, over-the-top show — I don’t know if I will ever be over that exploding penis scene from the first episode — but it’s doing a great job of realistically depicting how a petty bully like Homelander gains power. They don’t get it on their own merits — as Stan Edgar points out to him later, Homelander is basically an empty shell who has no idea what he’s doing. They get it because they get help from people who buy into their facade of strength. The Deep and A-Train are also insecure, also desperate to be seen as strong, as successful, as important. They both hate Homelander, but they’ll still debase themselves and fight each other to get his approval, because they’re trapped in the same toxic cycle he’s apart of. After Homelander cruelly insults Ashley, she repeats his words verbatim to an underling, because becoming just as bad as he is seems like the only option. Homelander’s toxicity is contagious.

And if we’re talking about petty bullies who gain power because other people let them, we need to at least mention the obvious metaphor The Boys is working with this season: Donald Trump is slathered all over this show. They wrote this season during Trump’s presidency and it clearly inspired some thoughts. And it works; given how prescient a good satire like The Boys can seem, I’m not even sure we realize how much yet.

In fact, given how pointedly The Boys has been taking aim at right-wing posturing, I’m surprised I haven’t seen a bigger backlash of people online calling the show out for being too “woke” or “political,” but maybe the superhero metaphor is helping those people maintain some distance. For now, it’s enough for the series to be electrifying.

A Billy Butcher divided cannot tear guys apart with his laser eyes

The Boys is ever at its most interesting when Homelander is involved, but the titular crew of Supe-hunting mercenaries also makes some strides. This lot head to Russia to hunt down a weapon it’s said can kill Supes, and on the way Butcher and Hughie both take some of that 24-hour Compound V. Honestly, I found it a little hard to believe that Hughie would be stupid enough to do something like that, but I get what they’re going for: he feels angry, powerless and wants to do something about it. It won’t end well.

I’m always at a crossroads with Butcher. I think Karl Urban, terrific an actor as he is, always plays him a bit too cartoonishly, always smirking and ready with a macho one-liner; it almost reads as tough guy drag to me. But the show is working to bring him down to Earth; Butcher has a great scene with Mother’s Milk where he admits that he’s intentionally turning himself into this larger-than-life asshole character in order to achieve his goal of ridding the world of Supes, even though he knows it’s going to destroy his soul and body. I can’t tell if that’s an ad hoc addendum to his character, but it’s appreciated; he can become the north pole to Homelander’s south pole the show wants him to be.

So far as the plot goes, they do not, in fact, find a weapon capable of killing Homelander, the same one that killed Soldier Boy back in the day. Instead they find Soldier Boy himself, who’s been kept in containment for decades as the Russians study him in the hopes of making their own super army, probably.

I really wish they had kept that reveal under wraps. We’ve known that Jensen Ackles was going to reemerge as Soldier Boy in the modern day and do his Captain America thing for a long time, and while I’m sure the show will have fun with this thread, I would have liked to have been surprised. Still, overall, a solid outing.

The Bullet Points

• Before the Boys can gain access to Soldier Boy, Kimiko has to do a job where she kills some oligarch during his superhero-themed sex party. It’s pretty standard The Boys fare, complete with Kimiko punching the guy clean through the back of the head, and she is definitely tiring of it. She and Frenchie make plans to leave the group, which ones one of them will die, or Butcher will pull some horrible s*it to make them stay, or something.
• Shoutout to the super-gerbil who digs through a guy’s face. There were a lot of things borrowing through heads in this episode.

Episode Grade: B+

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