Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Boys. This week’s episode is named “The Innocents” and the cat is out of the bag, Homelander discovers who killed Translucent, and The Boys learn Vought’s plan and the Female’s backstory. Let’s dive right in.
1. Super in America & Homelander’s homely home story
This episode began with what seemed like a trailer for a reality show of The Seven, Homelander with kids at a park, Maeve at a refugee camp, Deep teaching CPR, Black Noir taking tea?, and a swing as a stand-in for Translucent, you know, given that he is MIA. And of course, this is all part of a plan from Vought to show their heroes as humane people.
Then, we focus on Homelander, talking about his fake childhood, fake grandparent, fake baseball trophies and fake cakes, the only real thing seems to be a blanket, which infuriates him, later it is revealed that he is offended to be forced to tell the fake story, and that his anger at the guy who put the blanket is because that was the only thing he got at the lab where he was breed, showing that he has a little bit of human after all, and he wants it close to him, private. And actor Anthony Starr is stealing this show, every single thing in his performance show confidence, a little bit of malice and a scary perspective on his version of a Superman-analogue.
The other scene involving the documentary is about Maeve, and her ex visiting her on the set, there’s not much to say about it, only that the team kept recording for those drama scenes of the realities, showing us that Maeve is getting sick of Vought too, but we will talk about this on the next couple of episodes.
2. Where’s your fucking rage?
I think a big theme of this episode, and Butcher’s journey through the series is rage, and what we do with it, we will talk about Butcher’s plot later, now I want to focus on other stories.
First, the Association of Collateral Damage Survivors, akin to Nick Spencer’s the Lookups on his “Amazing Spider-Man” run, and Endgame’s Decimation support group, in this world we have regular people coping with things bigger than themselves.
After Hughie’s insistence on being with Starlight, Butcher brings him to a group, where the amazing Malcolm Barret (an hilarious Hoover on Preacher) tells the story of his “Ice-Capades” with a superhero and how he lose his penis due to frost.
While Butcher tells Hughie about how all supes are bad, he is forced by the lead member of the group to talk, and he obviously refuses, and tells everybody how pathetic they are, how they are numb to a world of problems and they just accept it as their reality.
I feel that this hits hard to us, the audience, I apologize if you think I’m going deep in “political” stuff, but we had around 30 dead people JUST ON TEXAS in LESS THAN A MONTH because of mass shootings, damn, how numb can we allow ourselves to be? At the beginning of August people were talking about ways to prevent the next tragedy and how surely congress was not going to do anything, and to confirm our expectations, another shooting happened, in the same state. I mean, how numb can we be? We create support groups, we help GoFundMe campaigns, here in Mexico everybody lost someone or knows somebody who lost a loved one by the war on drugs, and nothing happened. Where’s our fucking rage?
Well, sorry for the rant, let’s go back to the show. What comes after the rage is the acting, and here, we see Annie having her comeback, she goes to Stilwell’s office and set the record straight, she wants justice, and she is going to do things her way, after all, they can throw shit at people for talking about empowerment, but she is in control now, se can’t be fired and she can’t be silenced. Sometimes, justice can be late, actions by authority can be meaningless, but what matters is her change, her action after the rage, and that’s badass.
Continued belowBONUS: Sandusky, Ohio. Speaking of meaningless acts of justice, Deep is forced to apologize, and we see it in a Fox News-alike channel, only to be changed to an interview of Seth Rogen and Black Noir and then to a rerun of “The Mesmerizer”. This scene is powerful, because it shows us that an apologize is not enough, it is practically useless if society doesn’t care about justice.
3. The Mesmer
We are introduced to Haley Joel Osment’s Mesmer, a super with the ability to know other people’s thoughts and memories by touch, famous for his cop show as a kid and now a failed TV actor, he is divorced, he hasn’t seen his daughter in years, he uses drugs and is desperate to be part of Vought again.
The Boys solved the puzzle of Compound V last episode, and here MM explains how the business is done, there are 53 hospitals where babies become supers, the only missing piece of the puzzle is the Female, and MM is very uncomfortable with a person who came back from death and works with him.
So, he manages to convince Mesmer to touch the Female in exchange for time with his estranged daughter, but after having his arm broken by the Female, and being threatened by The Boys, he goes to Homelander to show him the people that are stirring the pond, messing with supes. He knows his daughter doesn’t want to see him, and he is desperate for, at least, Vought’s approval. Fucking snitch.
4. Kimiko
Well, our heroes are known now, but at least they learned about Kimiko and Vought’s plan. Turns out that she is from some Asian-pacific country, she got kidnapped and is a war child, forced to kill people, somewhere along the way she got shipped to US and they started experimenting on her.
She is part of a plan to create super-villains, which would help Vought getting supes on the military, but she is not willing to be the monster that they want her to be, she only wants to go back to the jungle where her brother is still a slave and save him, but first, she is going to stay with Frenchie, and together, The Boys will get vengeance for what they did to her.
5. Butcher’s justice or revenge
While he is lecturing Hughie about the danger of superheroes, Butcher reveals his reason for going back after supes, his wife was raped by Homelander, then, she disappeared and is likely dead, Butcher believes that she was killed by Homelander to leave no clues about his crime.
Now he has all he needs to fully fund his team, Susan from the CIA is willing to fund his team, so, why does he not take the deal? Because in his conditions to work for the CIA he wants the full strength of justice against Homelander, and that is not going to happen.
He is risking every member of The Boys not for justice, but for revenge, is he going to get it? I guess we will have to wait for the end of the season.
And that’s it for this episode, if you ask me what makes a great show, I would tell you that the fact that it makes you think and reflect on the real world, and The Boys is doing exactly that every fucking episode, so yeah, this is an exceptional show. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 107, “The Self-Preservation Society”.
