1x05 Good for the Soul

[7.7/10] I like that this episode is anchored around the idea of religions and belief. It’s not an idea you see tackled in comic book stories too much, either because it’s a sensitive issue that four quadrant entertainment doesn’t want to touch, or because it’s a little awkward to talk about deities when your own pantheon has people with incredible abilities, many of whom come back from the dead in one form or another. Whatever the reason, it’s not something you see a ton of, and I like the explanation.

My favorite story in this one is Annie’s. She has seen the world outside of her bubble, and coming back to the place where she once felt safe and warm, it’s now cold and alien to her. That’s a strange feeling, one exacerbated by the way her mom doesn’t seem to care about how her daughter is suffering, but instead just wants Annie to deliver her this moment of reflected glory as recompense for all the time and effort her mom invested in her. It comes at the same time Hughey seems more interested in the perks f dating her than her. That’s a lonely feeling. The courage it takes, amid that sense of questioning everything eslet aht led her to this life, to also question her religion and admit how much she doesn’t know, is powerful.

It moves Hughey, who is maybe at his most intriguing here. He is at once both relatable and abominable, in an impossible situation where she’s trying to get justice for someone he loved who was unjustly killed, while at the same time using her death to lie to someone who cares for him, while also bending that lie back into a truth about how Annie’s words spoke to him. His scenes with Homelander are scary in the way every scene with Homerlander’s “menace behind the smile” is, and his improvised blackmail of Ezekiel is sweaty and hilarious. But it’s that scene with Annie, where he's lying and telling the truth at the same time, that really hit me.

My second favorite storyline in this one is the one with Frenchie and the ersatz X-23. I appreciate the irony that while everyone is out at a glitzy, well-manicured religious event, there is an actual person out there who’s mistreated and understood, who is resurrected. But she is unkempt and seems to be an immigrant and is maltreated with the complicity of the authorities, rather than celebrated like Homelander is. The way that Frenchie again shows her kindness when he doesn’t have to, and ultimately sees that kindness returned, is heartening in a show with few moments of sweetness.

(Two little asides -- I’m curious to learn more about the Batman expy, since he’s the member of The Seven we know the least about. I’m also curious about what’s up with the little bug that’s audibly flying around the Anti-Super Squad for multiple episodes now. Some kind of Beast Boy-esque spy, maybe?)

Speaking of Homelander, uh...wow. It’s unnerving to watch him go off script and deliver a Trumpy speech about wanting to unilaterally deliver fire and fury in lieu of going through Congress, practically invoking the divine right of kings and having his own little “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” moment. It’s a good commentary on the hypocrisy of these events where people drape themselves in the cloth in the name of self-aggrandizement and whatever they want to do anyway.

But man, the show took the latent oedipal complex to another level here. Stillwell nigh-literally babying him after his creepy interruption of her visit to the pediatrician with her child is, as another President reportedly said, some weird shit. There’s a commentary there too, how the supposed bastion of manliness is actually a submissive little boy at heart, but it’s a strange, albeit striking, way to dramatize the idea.

We also get a little more backstory on Billy Butcher. It turns out his wife went missing eight years ago, which helps explain his crusade in a way that was hinted at in a previous episode. The scene with his sister-in-law is emotional, in a good way. And him taking a sledgehammer to her gravestone, since he doesn't believe he’s dead, shows the depths of his denial. It’s a little odd for him to do in the middle of everything, but it speaks to his own sort of blind faith, which is an interesting note to play for a character so dismissive of religion.

Likewise, I really like the scene with Maeve and her ex girlfriend. It’s clear that Maeve screwed a lot up in that relationship, and her former partner has good reason to be reluctant to let her drunk ex saunter in. But Maeve admitting that all of this B.S. is too hard is another truly humanizing moment for her, and I’m intrigued by the subplot about her coming to realize she can’t take the injustice and fakeness of all of this anymore.

That just leaves poor Popclaw dying at the hands of A-Train in one of those “nice thing happens before brutal thing happens” moments the show seems to like to do, and Billy and MM discovering that the Supes (or somebody) is breeding (or at least enhancing) baby supes for their purposes. There too, there’s a commentary to the contrast between Ezekiel’s speech, who credits their powers to gifts from God, with the grim truth that some bad actor is growing super-babies instead.

Overall, this one is a little more thematically unified but narratively assorted, which is a neat approach structurally. I wouldn’t want it every episode, but meditating on these ideas for an hour is a cool way to go with a superhero show.

It’s kind of incredible the amount of nuance that was able to be packed into Annie’s arc in this episode. And yeah, I’ll credit that to the fact it was written by a woman. Those minor gripes I have about how the commentary was getting too broad was significantly more focused in this episode. It was an entirely new topic that dovetails from our primary thesis on fascism, but it works here because they use it as a detour to go right back into the central theming.

It feels like Annie finally gets the writing she deserves for her character and Hughie’s internal struggle is becoming so deeply conflicted. I’m kind of won over by it too because I like the questions it raises and I love how much the episode leaves open to suggest that all these events could play out very differently.

A couple issues I have here, though: I’m a little worn out on the closeted homosexual thing. It’s just another layer of slapping gay trauma onscreen—even weirder that it’s central to the same episode where Maeve is revealed also to be gay. Feels a little done before and in a religious setting it really only works out to be plot dressing for blackmail in Ezekiel. A minor gripe, maybe, but still. Additionally, I think we’re pushing our absolute limit on what’s going on with Butcher. It’s getting more difficult to be empathetic towards a character who is doing pretty awful things because I think there’s a genuine desire for us to want to like him, but the suggestion of prior hardship without spelling it out beyond cursory foreshadowing is difficult. I am FULLY aware this is intentional. I know they’re creating a dichotomy to later show us that he’s neither good nor bad, just complicated, but these types of characters perpetuate stereotypes of toxicity in men—especially when you see that literally every woman in this show is also facing hardship on some level.