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Five Thoughts on The Boys’s “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed”

By | July 15th, 2022
Posted in Television | % Comments

Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Boys. This week’s episode is named “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed” and this one is all about the family we make along the way, let’s dive right in.

1. Black Noir and Buster Beaver

It is revealed where Black Noir fled to in the previous episode, he is hiding in an abandoned Chucky Cheese-style restaurant, where his imaginary animated friends are helping him deal with his fears.

Buster Beaver and the rest of the cartoons put up a show, where they reenact key moments in Black Noir’s life, for example, what happened in Nicaragua, where the Payback got the order directly from Stan Edgar to get rid of Soldier Boy, and the animated friends try to convince Noir that this was the correct thing to do, because Soldier Boy was a dangerous man. And they convince him to do what scares Black Noir the most:

He has to face Soldier Boy once and for all.

2. Lenny and the importance of Hughie

While hunting another member of the Payback, Mindstorm, Butcher is hit with is powers, and enters into a deep comma, Soldier Boy says to Hughie that there’s nothing they can do, he will be living his worse fears trapped in his mind until he dies of dehydration. Of course, Hughie won’t let that happen, but we explore some of Butcher’s memories with him.

Back when Butcher talked with his father in the second season, we knew that he was one of the worst humans alive, and thanks to these flashbacks we know why, he was a drunk man who beat the crap out of their children without reason. When Butcher attacked his teacher, instead of punishing him, his father congratulated him.

And when Butcher left, the only option out that his brother Lenny saw was to kill himself, and this time Butcher was there to see it. We learn many things of Butcher, he fears becoming like his father, and walks the fine line between turning into a monster and using the violence in him “for good”; he also blames himself for the death of Lenny, him leaving and Lenny using the gun are directly related in his eyes, and, maybe more importantly, he sees Hughie as his little brother, a person that he can protect and a way for redemption, and Hughie also sees him as a Brother, because he risked his life to beg Mindstorm to wake Butcher from the comma.

The problem is, back in the real world, Butcher has a mission and nothing will stop him, not even Hughie.

3. What Kimiko Wants

After what happened with Nina, Frenchie is very high on ketamine and Kimiko is still badly hurt, but they are eager to help the rest of the Boys, meaning Annie and MM, and while Frenchie discovers what knocked Soldier Boy in Russia, Kimiko has a plan of her own.

She asks Starlight for a dose of Compound V, she wants to have her powers again and her justification is very valid, when she first got her powers, it was forced upon her, but now it’s a choice that she is doing for her family, meaning Frenchie; and she is willing to have powers again because, as she sees it, the V is not bad itself, it depends on what you do with your powers.

I think that the sacrifice that she is doing, confronting something that she hates of herself, is very heroic, she accepts her powers, because that way she will be able to protect the people she loves. Also, I like the way their relationship evolved, Kimiko communicated openly that she felt weird about the kiss and that’s because they are now above that, they are family.

4. Will other supes get redemption?

It is disappointing to see a person learning from consequences of their actions, only to be given a second chance and seeing them waste it again. I’m talking of course about The Deep, a predator that sexually abused Starlight at the beginning of the show, we have been following the aftermath of that action for three seasons, and when it seemed that he might have reformed at least a little, he is back to his old habits.

Continued below

As we saw last episode, Deep met someone in Herogasm… and that someone was an octopus, so he cheated on his wife, and when he tried to “fix it” by proposing a threesome. This tells me that he did learn something, the bare minimum is to ask for something, but he’s just doing it to cover for himself, instead of doing authentically from the beginning, instead of cheating who knows how many times. Now that he’s back to the glory, nothing matters, no lesson was meaningful enough to redeem himself.

On the other, we learned what happened to A-Train after his heart attack when he killed Blue Hawk, he wakes up in a hospital bed and is greeted by Ashley, who already prepared the news: both heroes where in the process of reconciliation when the “terrorist supervillain” (Soldier Boy) attacked, and Blue Hawk did not survive, but he will live forever in A-Train, literally, because he received a heart transplant.

So, the piece of shit racist super that left A-Train’s brother permanently damaged, is going to be painted as the white savior of A-Train despite their differences, and the speedster has an upcoming new movie, where he will be cast as a black boy from a poor neighborhood, saved and turned hero. A-Train is trapped in the Vought Machine.

5. Stormfront was Palin

At the end of the second season, I was relieved that Homelander rejected Stormfront’s ideology, although for different reasons than the good reasons, for him, the white race was not better, HE and only him was above everybody else.

But now, that we have scenes directly referencing the reality of Trump’s America, including the poorly attended rallies in weird places like a farm, I realize now that Stormfront wasn’t just a “narrative deviation or device,” she was the Sarah Palin of Homelander’s Trump. She set up everything that we are seeing and will surely see next season, a world divided by radicals telling lies and projecting their crimes onto the other side.

But that’s what America has being doing all this time, that’s why there’s a panic for CRT and fear The 1619 Project, and why they are banning books; as The Legend put it: “To be American means knowing you’re the hero… So what do we do? We sweep all our filthy shit under the rug and we tell ourselves a myth like Soldier Boy and I get stinking rich selling it.”

BONUS: Speaking of family, the reveal at the last scene was incredible, and in can only mean bad thing for The Boys.

And that’s it for this episode, it was packed! A ton of thing happened in this one and it set up a lot of things for the next one. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on the season finale, “The Instant White-Hot Wild,” to be honest, I was already spoiled one scene and I’m honestly scared of how this is going to end, they haven’t been pulling any punches.


//TAGS | the boys

Ramon Piña

Lives in Monterrey, México. He eats tacos for a living, literally. You can say hi on Twitter and Instagram. Besides comics, he loves regular books and Baseball - "Viva Multiversity Cabr*nes!".

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