[7.7/10] “The house always wins.” It’s a piercing, demoralizing phrase. And maybe the unofficial theme of the episode. Annie speaks her truth. She withstands the backlash from her speech at the Believe Expo. She doesn’t fold when Stillwell threatens her. She’s ready to stand her ground and focus on saving people and being real rather than selling the corporate line.
And she wins, sort of. Stillwell forces The Deep to make a public apology and reassigns him to Sandusky, Ohio. For the time being, at least, there’s no major consequences and nobody making good on the threat to kick her out of The Seven.
But like everything else, her real life is processed, polished, and commodified for a public that wants authenticity, but only when it’s palatable. The machine uses her #MeToo story as part of a superhero reality show that only bears the faintest resemblance to reality. The Deep picks up fake garbage on the beach to sell the image of environmentalism. A-Train tells his origin story but is asked to leave key parts out to make it more upbeat. Maeve’s personal quarrel with her ex after a moment of crisis is turned into reality show fodder. And even Homelander, the most vicious, unlikable asshole in the show, is given a measure of sympathy, when he’s forced to pretend he had an idyllic middle American childhood when he was a Stranger Things-style lab rat.
Whatever the truth is, there’s nothing about it that can’t be manicured and sold to meet the needs of some corporate interest because the public demands that. Maeve is jaded, and has seen it time and time again. Her making that comment to Annie comes from experience, as Starlight discovers, if not for the first time than certainly one of the most significant, that Stillwell and her crew have ways of getting what they want, even if they have to mold your truth into a pleasing shape to do it.
But Billy has reason to feel that way too. We get the clearest detail yet about why he continues to pursue this crusade. We learn that his wife was raped by Homelander. We don’t know all the detials, but we know that it was traumatic, that it resulted in either a cover-up by way of homicide or a trauma-induced suicide. We can imagine that Billy and his family were also leaned on to keep quiet, much as Hughey was. And we can understand why he goes to a collateral damage support group and encourages them to stay angry in his usual fiery and sarcastic tone.
He’s still angry. He can’t believe that the rest of the world just accepts this. Nobody tries to fight back. Nobody tries to question it or challenge it. He’s lost everything and it burns him up inside. He can’t understand why the rest of the world allows the superpowered house to keep winning.
But even he can’t break through that logjam. He comes to his CIA contact with the evidence they've gathered, and it’s enough to net him resources and office space and immunity to keep pursuing this. But it won't get him the one thing he really wants -- Homelander. He is part of the system that reinforces all of this, that’s stacked in his favor, and even the deputy director can’t disrupt that, regardless of whether it’s the one thing Billy truly wants.
And you know what? She’s not wrong. So much of this is framed in the context of boardroom profiteering. Rayner brings up the point that there are thousands of lives in the balance. Homelander is already on the edge, in a way that we’ve seen. If he gets pushed too far, if he turns on a people that idolize him, he would be terrifying. The lack of justice here isn’t just an easy excuse to generate more revenue for Vought and its enablers. It’s to avoid pissing off a walking WMD who can only be controlled via his mommy complex.
But Billy himself is also “The House” here. It’s clear that Hughey is falling for Annie. The whole escapade with the support group and Billy spilling his guts about his past is to try to show him that all the supes stomp on the little guys and don’t care. There is a matter of principle, something that you can’t let yourself turn away from thanks to a pair of fluttering eyelashes. Billy is virulently anti-supe, and we understand why now.
But Hughey isn’t. He sees Annie for who she is, not what she is, and there’s a warmth and connection between them that neither can deny. And yet, when positive persuasion doesn’t work, Billy resorts to threats and blackmail, basically telling Hughey that if he continues to go too deep with Annie, Nilly will spill his secret about who he’s been working with and what he’s done, thereby scuttling the relationship one way or another. He gets what he wants too, no matter what.
That just leaves Kimiko, the X-23 takeoff who officially gets a name now! I love the introduction of Haley Joel Osment, playing an exaggerated version of himself as a child star grown up, who just so happens to have mind-reading powers. Those powers are the key to ascertaining Kimiko’s identity despite her inability to talk, and MM’s connections to CPS and his estranged daughter give them the leverage they need.
The fakeout with her being a terrorist is pretty unnecessary, but it gives Frenchie the chance to continue showing faith in her. Tht faith is ultimately rewarded, as it turns out she’s a child soldier who was kidnaped and impressed into service by a paramilitary group, and she just wants to go home to save her brother who’s still there. The way she bonds with Frenchie (which I hope is more big brother/little sister than romantic given the dynamics) through all of this is very sweet.
What isn’t sweet is the way they uncover that Vought or some other shadowy group were trying to make her into a supervillain, presumably so that they could justify The Seven and others joining the military to be able to go overseas and wreck this terrorist group in the name of escalation. Surely there’s more to the story, but that’s plenty for now.
Even then, Homelander wins. Mesmer helps them, under duress and with the carrot of seeing his child dangled in front of him. But he’ll give it all up, give them up, to help Homelander and maybe get back in Vought’s good graces. There’s no winning, which doesn’t portend great things to come for anyone.
"because you had to be a big shot .. Didn't ya. You had to open up your mouth .. "
I appreciate the subtle (?) detail that The Deep was driving a gas guzzling H3 despite being "Mister Environment", topped off with the straight-from-the-script ,,You're speaking your truth!'' line, spoken like a trained monkey like the moronic, self-centered cad that he is. I don't live in a big enough city to know that kind of performative hypocrite personally, but it's only a slightly more obvious version of typical environmental hypocrisy from most people.
This show is exemplary in showing the difference between the ungrammatical "W" word that rhymes with "spoke", and actual social awareness and honesty, written competently into cutting satire. It's not a question of degrees, it's a question of honesty and legitimacy. It may be on Prime, but it is not of the beast, like the Disney properties that The Boys skewers. I'm only just starting this show, but I hope it can keep its fire.
I don’t trust that fbi woman!
Well, Butcher loves to say how much the supes are dirty (all of them, even the ones he dont know) but he could end all the fuckery if he did gave the evidence to the FBI, but he is too blind with his personal revenge to do that.
In the end the supes and Butcher are not so different.
Finally! XD and the part when the music was fading away was really funny :joy::joy:
Stillwell: "You want to be famous. But nobody's famous alone."
Woman: "Trash back on the beach, please."
Starlight: "You really stood for something. But now... Pretty sure that was just written by the marketing guys."
Butcher: "What kind of nobber falls for a Supe?"
Butcher: "Supes are all the same, every fucking one of them."
Seth Rogan: "Our new movie, 'Insurrection', it's really exciting. It's my first, uh, movie with the, uh... in the Vought Cinematic Universe, uh, the VCU."
Butcher: "Homelander raped her."
Elena: "I still know you."
Maeve: "Oh, come on."
Elena: "Afraid to be seen with me. Afraid to ask for help. Just... afraid."MM: "Frenchie... you're dating a terrorist."
Raynor: "I can give you everything you want on this list..."
Butcher: "Except?"
Raynor: "Except Homelander."
I'm sort of endlessly surprised by the turnaround from the past two episodes and to be completely honest I think a large portion of the credit goes to the eye for empathy that both director Jennifer Phang and writer Rebecca Sonnenshine infused into this episode. Finally we get to see something of an empathetic break for Butcher which in turn leads him to double down on his stances (well-written) and Hughie's internal struggle is being pushed to the forefront.
But there's also something extremely smart about how the show utilizes real life actors in the supporting roles, lending the universe created here a sense of believability. Seeing Haley Joel Osment in here was a bit of a treat as well as the cameos provided by Billy Zane and Tara Reid. Nice.
Best episode yet. Anthony Starr is just amazing. And can we please get more Hayley Joel in more things?
A little less action-packed of an episode compared to the previous episodes, more slow-paced. That was basically foretold with there only being two content warnings at the beginning of the episode as opposed to more. It was, of course, still enjoyable. Homelander was the highlight.
Shout by Pradipa PRBlockedParent2019-08-01T20:42:09Z
The pace gets a bit slower in the first half, like with Mesmer's reunion and Billy's conversation. But it quickly catches up in the second half. The tense was well built and it is interesting to see how much grudge and narrow-sighted Billy could be and what have made him that way. As a professional group, they seem to make some stupid amateurish mistake (letting them be seen in cameras) but since this was not the first them they did that I am getting the impression that they are not much a professional assassin, just hired killers. Regardless, this episode is a nice driving plot to see what is going to come up forward--with clues and hints spread out well through out--but as it stands by itself, it is not the greatest.