Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Boys. This week’s episode is named “Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker” and there’s a fuck-ton of things to talk about, I think the main theme of this episode was radicalization, and either the journey to get radicalized or the already radicalized journey of out characters, so let’s dive right in.
1. Fuck the Far Right
This episode’s cold open features a “regular guy” that keeps listening to Stormfront, and we see his slow descend into a rage-filled racist murderer when he decides that an Indian store owner is a super and not only that but a super-terrorist.
This was an incredibly sad way to start this episode and, adding to that, we got Jon Batiste’s version of ‘What a Wonderful World’. It is sad because obviously it happens in real life all over the world, and particularly in the United States, where the Republicans are not hiding at all that they are real life villains, they constantly tell on TV, on radio, on Facebook and all over the internet that there are “terrorists” approaching from the border, that immigrants are here to kill you, as if White Supremacy weren’t the biggest terrorist treat right now, and the worst part, people believe them, they are willing to kill whoever they seem dangerous, damn, devastating.
I don’t know how are the writing team going to “end” the white supremacist storyline, because, depressingly so, we haven’t figured it out in real life either.
2. Congresswoman Neuman
Now let’s look at the show’s “radical” left, where we have Congressman Neuman, a very AOC-inspired, young woman of color, she taking matters into her own hands being the main force behind the Congress hearing against Vought.
She is painted as a terrorist-lover by Stormfront, and has a target on her head, and she is the only hope for The Boys, because they have the star witness, but they need someone to bring him to the spotlight.
In real life, AOC and the Squad are not taken seriously by the old guard of the Democrats, and this seems to be also reflected here, where Neuman was forced to leave the hearing after the murder of a whole bunch of people, leaving the only hope for a change literally dead.
3. Sam and Connie
Moving on from politics, the episode is named after Butcher, so what did he do this time? Well, we met his father, a fucking asshole that was violent to Billy, his mother and his brother. Sam Butcher has cancer and is going to die soon, and Connie wants Billy to talk to her husband, have some closure.
But Connie doesn’t care about Sam, she cares about Billy’s closure, maybe if he let’s go a little he could stop being so apprehensive and maybe learn to move on. Of course this doesn’t work out and Butcher goes to threaten the lives of Vogelbaum’s sons and daughter if he doesn’t testify in congress.
And it gets worse, when everybody dies at the hearing, we see Butcher fuming as the episode ends, so you know, he is going to be on full murderer mode on the season finale.
4. Starlight, the terrorist lover
Finally, Annie met with her mother, but the woman decided to inform Vought and they were spying on them, so, when Annie says bad stuff about the company, Black Noir appears and kidnaps her.
She is locked in a room that doesn’t let her use her powers and Homelander and Stormfront frame her as a mole (which, technically, she was) and a terrorist helper (again, not entirely wrong). And when Hughie tries to save her with the help of Lamplighter, who kills himself, Annie is able to escape.
This is the breaking point, now she is wanted and in hiding, maybe she can now be full time a member of The Boys, given that she doesn’t have other option, but it will be interesting to see, now that she is free, if she is going to unleash her whole power, how far is she willing to go?
5. Be a fucking human being, for once
Maeve’s story is sad, and what is sadder is that she brought that on herself, she enabled Homelander and Vought, and rightfully so Elena is afraid of her, so Elena leaves.
Continued belowAs we saw, Maeve helps Annie defeat Black Noir, who seemed to be practically immortal and a simple tree nut allergy ends up killing him (apparently), so now she crossed the line, she is clearly against Vought and I guess she is going to try to defeat them from within as long as she is able to do so.
6. Do you question your savior?
Meanwhile, at the Church of the Collective, A-Train and Deep, friends again, meet Alastair at his birthday party, and he tells them that Eagle the Archer is now exiled from the church and they are forbidden to talk to him, for all purposes Eagle is dead to them now.
We see the contrast between both characters, Deep, more naïve and gullible, immediately changes what he thinks of his old friend; while A-Train accepts but is shown wary of the whole situation.
As we are shown how two different persons react to the influence of a cult, I’m very interested in see how the season wraps this storyline, will Deep come out of his enamorment with the church? Is A-Train going to fall for their tricks? How will it affect the members of both the Seven and the Boys?
7. Becca loses his son
After their rally, Homelander empathizes with Stormfront’s feeling of loneliness and decides to introduce her to Ryan, his son. The kid seems excited to meet her, but Stormfront always has a plan and just like Becca feared, they turned him against his own mother.
As they fly away we see Becca screaming, and I’m a 100% sure that she is going to seek Butcher’s help to save Ryan, which probably is going to be the final fight of the season.
8. The use of news
This one is off topic, but I think I am not going to be able to say it on the season finale so I’m saying it now: at the beginning of the season I saw the “Honest Trailer” for The Boys, from Screen Junkies, and they mocked the extensive use of exposition trough newscasters. And it stuck with me like a thorn in my side.
I mean, this kind of criticism is meant to be a funny joke, and I get why it might feel excessive, but I think there’s a justification for the heavy use of “newsposition”: we are constantly hit with news all the time, Fox News is indoctrinating old people, we choose between MSNBC, CNN or whatever other company to inform ourselves, and even if we chose to not see any news, they are constantly retweeted and shared, if we want to watch a comedy show, they all have the same format, they show us a newsreel and drop the punchline, if we see news every time on real life, it’s only reasonable that we are also bombarded with news on the show, after all, they always try to be a poignant reflection of society.
Oof, that’s it for this episode, there was a lot of ground to cover in preparation for the season finale, I didn’t even had time to talk about Hughie or Kimiko and Frencie, or the implications of porn parodies. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on the season finale, episode 208, “What I Know”.
