OMG Homlander is getting creepier every episode
Wow Stormfront...Classic Gretchen behaviour
I swear I can't stand any more Homelander drinking milk scenes
I felt so uncomfortable watching Homelander outing Maeve on live tv without her consent.
I'm still stuck on how storm front even got into the seven in the first place. I mean she's not exactly a team player; How would an image-minded corporation like Vought even hire such an outspoken individual to begin with?
I don’t know why I so naively thought that homelander didn’t rape Becca, like for some reason that scene where Becca leaves the office gave me like walk of shame after a consensual encounter vibes, so I thought she chose to go for it cause she thought he was hot and he’s like a pop star, so I wished that scene was a little more explicit or like overstated, that we could see her crying or something because when you are dumb and naive like me you don’t get it and all these episodes I was like yes homelander is a killer but at least not a rapist so now I’m here looking stupid.
And Stormfront being Liberty is such a unique and exciting twist!!! My theory is that of course Vought and Mr Edgar know and he put her there to bring down homelander from the inside and motivate the public from a different angle! Or my other guess is that she is working with other forgotten supes to bring down Vought?
Also I find it a little unrealistic that Annie, a Vought property, can go and come as she pleases, but I guess technically Ashley and Mr Edgar don’t really know about Hughie, like no one from management knows all the mess that’s happening and it’s more like a homelander, annie and a-train business.
I used to have a huge crush on Elizabeth Shue in the 80s and apparently still do but then THAT happened!!
Homelander: Change the fuck back dobbelganger
[9.0/10] Nothing works out on The Boys. As Annie points out, they basically succeeded in their mission from season 1. They spilled the beans about Vought’s baby dosing, and it seems to have changed nothing. Maybe it even made people’s lives worse. This show seems brutally cynical sometimes, and it makes me brace when good things seem to happen, knowing they’re destined to fall apart.
So Annie joins the road trip to North Carolina to find out the deal on Liberty, some B-lister supe from the 1970s. And despite MM’s best efforts to tell her and Hughie that this is a bad idea, and to avoid playing chaperone, the two fall into old habits. They bond over Billy Joel songs. They joke about sharing the candy bar preferences of serial killers. They smile and flirt and make love with just enough light so that they can still see each other and are generally adorable. In the midst of all this grim brutality, they remain the one good thing to come out of this for either of them.
Except it is, like so many good things in this show, fleeting. Annie confides in Hughie over the constant fear and abuse she lives under at Vought Tower. This isn’t safe for anyone. They can’t keep doing it. Even if they love one another, they have to be alone. The bubble pops, and it’s the last thing an already distraught and crestfallen Hughie needs to hear. Love is grand, but nothing gold can stay here.
The same goes for Billy. Mallory gives him Becca’s address and he somehow manages to sneak in. He and Becca have a blissful reunion, the catharsis of eight years of searching and secrecy and absence made whole. They make plans to escape, and apologize, and promise to make up for mistakes and lost time, and sleep together, and in the end, Billy tells him that Becca saved him. It is sweet, and wholesome, and the actors sell the hell out of it.
But there’s two giant problems with it. One is that Becca loves her son and Billy can’t or won’t. He’s spent so long hating supes, so long hating Homelander, that he can’t imagine taking a “supe freak” with them, especially one who will put such a target on their backs, and Becca knows it. It’s been eight years. Ryan is her son. She’s not going to abandon him, and she knows that this part of her old life and new life are irreconcilable given who Billy is. What they had is great, for a moment, but it doesn’t work anymore, and she can’t just leave an eight-year-old child without a mother to grow up as another Homelander.
Even if Ryan weren’t there, though, it wouldn’t make a difference. Billy’s made the Gatsby mistake. Over the course of his crusade, and even before, he stopped treating Becca as a person and turned her into an ideal and idol, something to solve all his problems. But there’s a well of hate in him, one that she couldn’t fix, and it made her scared to even tell him she was raped for fear of what it would turn him into. Love is grand, but it isn’t a cure-all, and they don’t work anymore.
Even MM’s love for his father is complicated. We get an incredible scene with him and Annie, where he talks about his father’s embarrassing ice cream-sampling quirks, but also about how he’d give anything to see him again. Annie picks up on his OCD, a measure of control in a world beyond his. He tells an inspiring story to their contact to get in the door, about how his father was smart and courageous even when the whole world was against him, trying to pursue Vought through every legal channel he could, and inspiring his son to continue the fight.
Only, when they get in the car, MM tells Hughie that what his father passed down to him was a disease, one that took his father away. And now, it’s taken MM away from his own child. Everything has a darkside on this show.
That includes Stormfront. Again, not surprising given the name, but there’s a good chance she was, in fact, Liberty, the racist 1970s superhero who killed a young black man for no reason beyond hate. The great Dawnn Lewis (reuniting with Lower Decks co-star Jack Quaid for a scene) gives a heartstopping performance of recounting the racial injustice she witnessed as a child and has been forced to keep mum about for fifty years for fear of death from above. It’s another brick in the wall of the malevolence at the heart of the supes, and the insidiousness of their “collateral damage” that draws a line between Liberty killing the poor woman’s brother and Stormfront’s casual murdering of the apartment’s residents while she was hunting down Kimiko’s brother.
We get the most salient social and political commentary in the episode. The dialogue is on the nose, but Stormfront has given up on admiration and turned to manufacturing anger. The “You’ve got fans, I’ve got soldiers” is chilling, especially as it reflects online far right radicalization in an outsized fashion. I’m still not 100% sure what her game is, but the picture’s becoming clearer, and it’s not pretty.
Speaking of Kimiko, I’m uncomfortable with Frenchie getting high and trying to kiss her in her grief, but I think that’s the point. The show seems to know and acknowledge that, so I’m okay with it, especially when his partner (girlfriend? therapist?) says the smartest thing in the show. That he did that for him, not her; that he needs to give her space to grieve; and that this is him trying to make amends for what happened to all the people who died because of him, including Mallory’s grandchildren. I don’t know where they’re going with this storyline, but the show’s perspective seems to be right even as Frenchie makes some questionable choices, and Kimiko’s out for potentially self-immolating revenge.
But nothing is creepier or more unsettling than Homelander. Good lord, the guy just keeps topping himself in fucked-uppery with each new episode. I was definitely wondering what the hell happened when he seemed to be “romancing” Stillwell again. The payoff with Doppelganger is clever. In a weird way, Homelander’s doing the same thing Billy is, turning the woman he cared for into a self-flattering ideal rather than a real person with needs and wants outside of him and his.
But his confrontations with everyone else are just as subtly horrifying. He outs Maeve, with no warning, and implicitly threatens Elena behind his faux smile. He kicks A-Train out of The Seven with the pretense of his heart condition. Most notably, he threatens to kill Annie in a way that’s both menacing and violating, in a scene that is one of the show’s most uncomfortable. Homelander’s choice to “tear up the weeds” and sever his connections to his supposed family makes him that much more frightening, now untethered to even the faintest notion of a human connection with others.
Stormfront can seem to manipulate him just enough to get by. But Doppelganger’s not so lucky. The fact that he tries to play on Homelander’s vanity by turning into a duplicate of him is...weird. It’s a messed up scene, both for Doppelganger’s effort at a self-styled seduction, and because there’s something grimly portentous about Homelander symbolically killing himself and declaring he doesn’t need anyone else.
Oh yeah, and The Deep workshops girlfriends a la Tom Cruise, but doesn’t even get to pick the one he likes. Even and especially in this weird kabuki theater of a Scientology knockoff, the good things are a wisp and float away just like that. I don’t have a good takeaway for that. The Boys has never been shy about letting us know what it’s about, a cynical satire of superheroes and more. But while this one is extraordinary in its quality, it’s also pretty hard to take, on multiple levels, given how bleak a path it sets for nearly everyone.
Homelander: "It's not even gay, if it's with yourself, right?" :joy::joy::joy:
♪ We didn't start the fire... ♪
But now we know that Vought might have poured some gasoline in it... I wonder if some events cited in the song might be connected to them at some point.
Homelander's descent has been entertaining but the thing with Maeve has been brought up too many times to be just a red herring. I expect we'll see more on that front as well as A-Train's.
Gretchen being a Hancock-like superhero makes so much sense. Though I guess FX didn't want the "racist grandma" angle. :rofl:
Eww Homlander is creepy yet the most interesting character... wish we could see more of Maeve this season. Deep disgust me
Every day I get more and more hooked on this series, but the ending has left me with a feeling of: come on, don't fuck with me! You can't cut the series now
This is a major improvement over the first two episodes!! I FUCKING LOVE THIS SHOW!!
i'll be honest my absolute least favourite thing in the show so far is maeve telling elena she doesn't want homelander to find out about her, then just talking to her on the phone about their relationship right in the vought boardroom. just really dumb and i hate contrived writing choices like that where the characters do dumb things just to lead to drama. unless maeve was lying about that as the reason, idk.
also did they kill shapeshifter because otherwise viewers would constantly be guessing that maybe someone is fake? i spent half the episode worrying that billy's wife was shapeshifter which probably took away from the impact of the scenes. it's kinda better for him to be dead otherwise viewers are probably always speculating. it's too strong of a power.
at that scene where kimiko was gonna fuck up stormfront i both really wanted her to do it (because fuck stormfront) but i also wanted someone to stop her, and tbh im glad frenchie did. it would have been a MASSIVE shitshow. feel a bit sad for him, he got rejected by her (tho why would u kiss a girl u like when she just watched her brother get killed by a racist fuck). i honestly hope they dont get together tho it'd fuck up her healing process/just becoming her own person.
Eww Homlander is creepy yet the most interesting character... wish we could see more of Maeve this season. Deep disgust me
"Scissoring each other raw" actual lol
Poorest episode up to date. Boring.
Am I missing something?
We now know that Liberty was a superhero 40+ years ago, but has Compound V been out there that long? I mean, she was relatively unknown, as if it was a normal thing to have heroes then, but I thought Vought did that in the last 20 something years, Homelander being one of the first huge heroes to get recognition and fame. Did I miss something or does this feel like a bad retcon of sorts?
I get it! Women is smart and men is stupid. Thank you the boys for this valuable lesson.
Hot Damn! What an episode! This show just does not disappoint. Not me, anyway. You can't please everyone, all of the time. Only some of the people, some of the time. Or something like that.
cough
Still the touching bits of bonding and humanity, and fraught relationships due to circumstances. Revelations, both historical and personal, but both with burgeoning and lasting consequences that are both exciting and terrifying to contemplate.
I will say that it's really satisfying watching Homelander's journey. This was exactly the path his character should be taking from a character standpoint, and for its effects on the narrative thread. I'm fucking hyped. And if I were anyone in the show, I'd probably be terrified.
Also, it's really quite daring for the show/(and comic?) to make such direct call-outs in the way that is has. For those that didn't know, "Stormfront" was/is the original homepage for white supremacy online (and looking at the Wikipedia entry, it was apparently birthed from a 1984 Klan-run message board called Liberty Net! <---That's also a spoiler for this episode, I'm not censoring a word.
And The Deep's wife assignment unambiguously marks this as a jab at Scientology. Though, to be honest, that last one would have had me thinking about joining up. Ai chihuahua!
There's also the more subtle jab at a certain blonde, narcissistic ex-politician and failed businessman/foreign asset and his constant need for adoration and inability to function when things don't go his way. Thankfully this is fiction, and we don't have to deal with such a pathetic and uninteresting subject in whole, and can get a more interesting evil at least. C'mon, world! You gave us a bald, American billionaire, and he's just a sweatshop baron instead of trying to kill Superman. Why does real life dystopia have to be so dumb and embarrassing?
Mallory: "It'd be good to have one less person in that audience staring at me."
Woman: "Or you can join me."
A-Train: "Oh fuck!"
MM: "Just... chill. I'm not your goddamn chaperone."
Woman: "Let her grieve."
Annie: "To fathers and sugar."
MM: "To fathers and sugar."
Hughie: "There's three of us, so I guess I'll be, uh... ...bunking with M.M., naturally."
*M.M,: * "Good choice."
[M.M. snoring.]
Homelander: "Always listen to Maeve. She always tells the truth."
M.M.: "He's just a man with a disease. He passed it down to me, and if I'm not too careful, I might end up passing it down to my..."
[Noinse intenfies.]
Homelander: "Who the fuck do you think you are?"
Homelander: "I don't need help connecting with my audience."
Becca: "You're gonna find a way to get rid of him."
Becca: "The truth is, I never knew how to save you."
Becca: "I can't."
**Homelander: "I don't need anyone."
Well, two of my theories that I mentioned in my comment on the previous episode were just merged and proven true. I figured that Liberty was possibly the one who killed Susan. But my main assumption was Stormfront as being the one who did that. And, then, guess what happened? Liberty IS Stormfront. I thought of that twist right before Valerie showed M.M., Annie, and Hughie a picture of Stormfront.
I'm assuming that, in the comics, Stormfront was also known as Liberty, for some reason. It wouldn't make sense for Liberty to have been a different character based on this episode and how Liberty and Stormfront are both the same person. I mean, Liberty could've been something that the show's writers came up with, and there never was someone known by that name in the comics, let alone Stormfront. Or there was a character known by that name, just not Stormfront, and they decided to merge both characters.
Honestly, I was surprised that Operation Rescue Becca almost happened. This is only the fourth episode of the season. I know that Billy had a deal with Grace in which he'd get Becca's location in return, or close to it. I guess I didn't expect that to happen so soon, for there to be an attempt. It felt sudden, like teleporting past the finish line and not simply running the race. It did go better than I thought it would, though. Billy was able to infiltrate the compound, surprisingly. Only Becca ended up not wanting to go with him in the end.
So, A-Train is out, out of The Seven, and replaced with Shockwave. I don't know about you, but I don't think that's going to work out at all. Is Shockwave even fast? Does he even have superpowers? He probably does, but we never saw them. We never saw him run in the first season against A-Train. He lost the race too quickly. Either way, I'm expecting him to be so below average that Homelander will kill him. Or that, despite being a Supe(r)hero, he ends up getting killed too easily, and Homelander will bring A-Train back.
This episode had no plot progression, only the illusion of it with Operation Rescue Becca (almost) happening. Unless you'd consider A-Train getting kicked out of The Seven as plot progression, among other things. Like Stormfront used to be known as Liberty. Or that The Deep is going through this weird selection/audition process of choosing a woman to be his wife.
It was more of an episode of character development, characters moments, or whatever. Characters dealing with themselves and whatnot, that sort of thing. It was an entertaining enough episode, but I don't necessarily "enjoy" stuff like that. Stuff like that isn't bad or anything like that, and I don't "have" a problem with it. It's just that I'm never that interested when it comes to stuff like that in any show. But there were still enough "entertaining" moments in this episode that made the episode, as a whole, entertaining to watch.
Alright, well, the good thing is that I'm starting to feel immersed in this season. All of the episodes, so far, including this one, have all had a sufficient amount of moments that were the highlights of each one, and the episodes themselves, as a whole, were pretty decent, too. The point is, I didn't start to become immersed in the season until now, just a little bit. So, in short, that's a good thing, I think. And I'm looking forward to what the rest of the season has in wait and becoming more immersed in it, hopefully.
The stromfront-plot thickens...
I really enjoy someone one-upping Homelander, but I'm not enjoying it as much as I would have liked when it comes from someone potentially even crazier.
Great dirty talk foreplay between Homelander and the other Homelander
Shout by Reiko LJVIP 6BlockedParentSpoilers2020-09-11T20:24:23Z
Oddly disappointed that he didn't bang himself