Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Boys. This week’s episode is named “Cherry”, the show is a slow burner, heavy on dialogue, but this is NOT a bad thing, I’m loving the exploration of this universe and getting to know everyone, in this episode, we meet Frenchie and he comes with a hell of a soundtrack. Let’s dive right in.
1. To Kill a Mocking-hero
The Boys have the task of getting rid of Translucent’s body, that must be a fairly easy task, if it weren’t for the fact that he is still alive, so, they go to meet Frenchie, some kind of tinkerer who comes up with ways of killing supes.
In this particular case, Translucent is a tough motherfucker, because his skin is practically diamond, and how can you kill something that you cannot penetrate? Well that’s the thing, you can penetrate a body, if you know were.
So, they put a bomb up of Translucent’s ass to torture him, this makes him scared as hell, he has been previously studying his captors to notice flaws in them, to help him escape, he has also been mocking them for their inability to kill them, but when they came up with an idea to kill him, he turns from god to a crybaby.
This opens the chance to talk about something rarely explored in other movies, the possibilities of heroes dying. In a world where we didn’t mourn the death of Gamora or Loki because of time travel, or Superman’s death because they revived him who knows how, here, Translucent is confronted with his own mortality, hell that’s the Butcher’s mission! To kill as many superheroes as possible in his death-wish style mission.
It’s refreshing to see a show where it’s characters will dedicate a bunch of their time to come up with ideas to kill heroes, and it’s also refreshing to see rescindable characters, if anyone must die for the cause, it will happen. And we will enjoy seeing gods confronted with their own humanity.
2. Supes as WMD
In the b-plot of this episode, we see Stillwell doing some PR Damage Control after an airplane ‘mysteriously’ fell last episode. While also confronting politicians to gain contractor-status at the military, to bring the metahumans to war and get some of that blood money.
Her strategy is to blackmail the Chairman of the Senate and that obviously works, my first thought is to think about the fragility of the American senate, where everybody can be bought by private interests, and how it affects the imaginary world of The Boys, as I said last week, this might very well be the most realistic representation of a world of superheroes: they would be corrupted so fucking easily for economic interests.
The Second thought is that, if they were real, they obviously would participate in wars, this is not a new idea, “Watchmen” did it over 30 years ago, but it’s interesting to see it play in this modern era of for-profit war. And I’m eager to see what happens next in the series, will heroes go to war?
3. Homelander
Fuck, this dude is crazy and dangerous. Following that idea of a realistic superhero world, how would and all-powerful super like Homelander react to the world? The answer is “in fucked ways”.
After killing a bunch of people, including a boy, in a plane, The Deep goes to Sitwell and tells her that it was destroyed by two beams. And she confronts Homelander, who feels that he is not doing enough to protect her and the company. Then, he takes on a mission to recover Translucent, in a very tense scene between him and Frenchie. He can do whatever he wants and nobody is going to stop him.
Then, after threatening The Deep for talking, we see how Homelander seems to have a crush on Sitwell, only to be revealed that it’s a full-on creepy obsession, as he watcher her getting milk for her child.
He is seriously out of this world, earlier this week, Eric Kripke talked in an AMA, that the only scene that Amazon asked to cut was one in this episode where he masturbated in New York’s Chrysler building, mumbling “I can do whatever I want” and climaxing over the city. He is dangerous and I’m seriously disturbed every time he is on screen, like watching a ticking bomb under the table, knowing it will explode god knows when.
Continued below4. Hughie
We are seeing Hughie go very slowly on a downward spiral. After the death of his girlfriend, and confronting his murderer despite of his anxiety, he now has to deal with two guys trying to kill a superhero while he only wants info on A-Train to bring him to justice.
We are seeing him slowly evolving into an important member of The Boys, while also overcoming his crippling anxiety. At the last scene of this episode we have a new Hughie, he is not a kid anymore, and a fucking corrupted hero will not go free without consequences for his actions, he pulls the trigger and Translucent explodes. Man, these last scenes of the episode were fucking amazing with the tension of Homelander creeping around, and Translucent getting into Hughie’s mind. This is an awesome show!
5. Life after rape
After what happened on last episode, we see Starlight coping with it. She confronts The Deep after being forced to work with him, and she threatens him to stay away from her. Then she saves a girl about to be gangraped, which must be a cathartic experience, only to be scolded by her agent because of the liability of punching people in the streets.
I cannot start to know how women cope with life while hiding stories of rape or harassment, it must be is really tough and, as far as I’m aware, this scenes with Annie January dealing with what happened to her are very well written, this is not a cheap “I’m stronger” story, she is coping but the world has not time for her actions.
We can have this realistic scenes (as realistic as a world of superheroes allows) thanks to the fact that we have 5 women credited in the eight episodes of the show, when you have a writing team with women, you have a real representation of the world, you have serious themes, written seriously, respectfully and with real information.
One last thing, for the very few people reading this and still saying “this is bullshit, I did not come here to talk about a non-existent problem” let me tell you this, and I hope that you can empathize more with victims: Rape and sexual violence are a real problem, RAINN estimates that 1 of every 6 women has been victim of a rape or attempted rape, the studies cited in Wikipedia put the number as high as 20%, 1 in 5. And if we talk about harassment, the number goes up to 85%, so virtually every woman you talk to has been victim of harassment.
BONUS: French Hip-Hop is the fucking shit. Here’s a playlist.
And that’s it for this episode, an excellent episode for an excellent show so far. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 103, “Get Some”.
