Herogasm underwhelms, but “Herogasm” takes things to a new level

I’m gonna get this out of the way early: Herogasm doesn’t quite live up to the hype. Not the episode “Herogasm” — pretty much every episode of season 3 so far has been a banger and this one continues to turn up the heat — I mean the actual Herogasm event, where a bunch of C-list Supes get together to engage in a bacchanal of unholy appetites. The producers spent a lot of time ahead of this episode talking up how sick and depraved it was going to be…but it’s all relative. Simply put, The Boys has set the bar for “sick and depraved” so high that it’s hard to raise it, and this didn’t quite do the trick.

Oh sure, there was fun stuff. The long member guy from season 2 showed back up, but we’d seen him already. Mother’s Milk got covered in a geyser of reproductive material and the Deep got intimate with an octopus, but I dunno; when you start the season with a guy exploding out the crotch of his lover from inside his penis, there’s nowhere to go but down. The funniest part of the whole sequence was Starlight talking up MM’s oral sex skills, and that mostly came down to Erin Moriarty’s excellent comic timing.

But just because Herogasm underwhelmed doesn’t mean the episode did; in fact, this is one of the best of the season so far. Herogasm was the gimmick, but the focus on fundamentals was as strong as ever.

Homelander continues to be the best villain on TV

Everyone’s headed to Herogasm for different reasons. Soldier Boy, who reveals some very antiquated notions about society left over from his day at the head of the Greatest Generation, wants payback on Payback, his old Supe team. He’s killed the Crimson Countess, and now he’s set his sights on the TNT Twins, a pair of bickering siblings clearly modeled after the Wonder Twins from DC. Like them, they are useless. They’re also hosting this year’s Herogasm, so off go Soldier Boy, Butcher and Hughie.

Meanwhile, MM and Starlight suss out that Soldier Boy will go after the TNT Twins next and move to intercept. Homelander heads there for the exact same reason, and soon we have an entertaining crossing of the streams. Everybody wants something different: Butcher and co to kill Homelander, Homelander to kill Soldier Boy, and Starlight and co to get everyone out of the house before this Supe brawl kills everyone in a three-mile radius.

The four-way fight between Homelander, Soldier Boy, Butcher and Hughie is entertaining, if not quite as spectacular as you might expect from a fight where Homelander meets his match. It’s all contained in the Herogasm house, which feels small considering how powerful these characters are supposed to be; I’d have liked to see the fight sprawl out some. I wonder if they’re saving the budget for something more spectacular in the finale.

Still, I’m not kidding when I say that Homelander meets his match here; he can’t take the combined powers of all three of them and flies away to do god-knows-what to himself high in his lonely room. The best scene of the episode is probably Homelander going full Smeagol-Gollum in his mirror, excoriating himself for still wanting to be loved, for clinging to a last bit of humanity. The revelation that Homelander isn’t invincible, that he can be beaten if the right people come at him…it’s hard to know if that will give him a wake-up call or push him further into insanity…but it’s probably the second one.

I also liked Homelander’s sincere shock and hurt that Black Noir, someone he always considered loyal, would skip out on him. I presume Black Noir skedaddled because he didn’t want to face Soldier Boy — apparently he was the one who planned to turn him over to the Russians, after all — but Homelander isn’t interested in the reasons; he has the strength of Superman and the emotional maturity of a tiny baby, and he’s wounded.

Man, I cannot get over how great a villain Homelander is; he’s terrifying but also vulnerable, fantastic but also rooted in very real emotional phenomena. If he goes crazy, if he gets saved…I just wanna see what he does next.

A-Train, Mother’s Milk and Starlight all get great stuff in “Herogasm”

A shotgun blast of subplots rounds out the episode. Kimiko and Frenchie need to reconnect with the rest of the team, because they’ve felt like they’re in their own separate TV show for a couple of episodes now. I sympathize with both of them — Nina tortures them both brutally — but I’m ready for them to rejoin the narrative.

MM’s plight is more immediate; he’s gotten a lot more depth this year after we learned that Soldier Boy killed his family, which is what kick-started his Supe vendetta. MM is often the most rational and level-headed of the Boys, so to see him put up his dukes to fight Soldier Boy, a fight he’s destined to lose and lose badly, says a lot about where his head is at.

Still, when push comes to shove, MM does the right thing and helps Starlight tend to the wounded. Starlight, for her part, officially quits the Seven on Instagram Live, hoping to use her status as America’s sweetheart to convince her followers how rotten Vought and the Supes it creates are.

And this after she and Hughie seem to finally break up; I don’t know if you come back from blasting your boyfriend with a burst of light after he tries to stop you from doing your job. I guess I overestimated Hughie; I took him at his word that he didn’t buy in to the toxic pursuit of strength for strength’s sake, but he’s weaker than he looks.

And finally we have A-Train, who has also been having an excellent season as he kinda-sorta comes to grips with what a complete monster he’s been. I loved the scene where he genuinely apologized to Hughie for murdering his girlfriend back in the series premiere, and then Hughie — drunk on Compound V and vengeance — punches him. And the bit where he dragged Blue Hawk at 100 miles per hour down the road, letting the pavement tear off his face? That was way more shocking than anything at the superhero orgy.

And because A-Train used his super-speed, his heart may have given out. And I think I’m sad about that? This show has me all over the place, which is the way I like it.

The Bullet Points

• Here’s the weekly bullet point where I sing the praises of Ashley and Colby Minifie. Dressing down A-Train, feuding with the Deep for Homelander’s approval…she’s a hysterical mess.
• Soldier Boy says he started Herogasm way back in the day with Liberty, who we know to be Stormfront.
• Victoria Neumann wants to team up with Starlight and…promises to protect her from Homelander? Very hard to know whether to trust her; Starlight probably made the right call in rejecting her outright.

Episode Grade: A-

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