Last week’s The Boys was a pretty major downswing, the worst episode of a somewhat lackluster season to begin with. But yesterday’s new one was much improved, moving the plot forward in major ways, albeit at the expense of, you guessed it, Hughie being traumatized even more. Or he’s about to be, rather.
The main thing this episode did right was an actual superhero fight. This show forgets it’s about superheroes who should be slugging it out so much of the time that this was refreshing to see. We have Butcher and Starlight versus Deep and Black Noir, with an assist from A-Train.
Deep has gone 100% off the rails at this point, murdering his Tilda Swinton-voiced octopus lover and pledging his undying loyalty to Homelander as an assassin. If you were ever hoping for a Deep redemption arc, it does not seem like that’s ever going to happen now.
Rather, that arc goes to A-Train, who now appears to want to become an actual hero, albeit at the expense of being eternally hunted by Homelander as long as he’s alive, no doubt. But because of his speed he’s able to easily escape and even hide his family, and Homelander has too much else in motion to track him down right now, it seems, particularly after he’s also fired the world’s smartest person in his employ.
When we do get hero violence in the show, it’s usually Homelander just straight up executing people like we saw him do by tearing Webweaver in half, which shocked even Firecracker. He hasn’t had to actually fight anyone in earnest all season, but who knows what may happen next week. Right now they’re just trying to kill him with a virus, but with season 5 on the way, let me guess, that’s not going to work.
The most shocking, tragic development of the night was Hughie once again being abused, though this time in a different way. A shapeshifting assassin kidnapped Starlight and pretended to be her in order to have sex with Hughie and steal his compromising information on Neuman. While Hughie was sleeping peacefully by the end of the episode he will find out this happened and be horrified. This adds to Hughie’s absolute nightmare of a season where he A) saw his father become a murderous super before dying, B) was sexually and physically abused by Tek-Knight, his childhood hero and now C) has been tricked into having sex with an evil assassin posing as his kidnapped girlfriend. Give this guy a break man, not cool.
The overall plan here is good, though. Clearly the idea is that they are going to frame Starlight for the president’s murder, given that her body is now stolen. I don’t think this shapeshifter can use powers from supes it is imitating, and she may still literally take the shot with a rifle. That would be sort of weird, but my guess is this is indeed the plan.
The Boys has been a rollercoaster this season and while it’s had some good moments, many of which happened last night, man I really hope they lay off Hughie next season. The poor guy has suffered enough.
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