It’s safe to say that I'm obsessed with Arcane.
From countless reaction and analysis/breakdown videos to unhealthy fanart consumption, there aren't many shows in existence that elicit this kind of response from me.
One of my most anticipated shows of 2021 turns out to be absolutely fucking incredible in nearly every way. I imagine some people had concerns or pessimism because of the well-known curse of videogame adaptations, with them being shit or forgettably average most of the time. In my case, I chose to remain cautiously optimistic and it looks like I chose right.
The setting and intoxicating atmosphere are complemented by Arcane's art style, the story is great, the music is wonderful, and the animation is LITERALLY flawless. When people mention "every frame a painting" when describing cinematography, they will now be able to pull any frame from Arcane and hang it on a wall, It’s that beautiful.
There are very few shows I could confidently call a Masterpiece on this planet, especially since most of the things I see rarely score above a 6 or 7, but Arcane is easily a Top 5 tv show nearly but not quite edging out Avatar: The Last Airbender (which is a big deal because that's my #1) and solidifying itself as the best animated anything I've ever had the blessing of seeing.
It will be a herculean task to top anything done in this season and while I pity the staff knowing the pressure they must feel on accomplishing just that, I have every confidence that Riot Games and Fortiche Production will be able to do it and do it well, if not better.
Like oil and water huh. Man this was an amazing episode. First, we got to learn more about Mia Maderda, and how her mother tried instilling the idea into Mia that you need to be able to go to war for some conflicts, beign diplomatic won't always be the solution, but because Mia rejected this idea, she was banished to Pultivor by her own mother, who seems to a warrior and leader in her home country. It makes sense that Mia know no longer wants Jayce to prep weaposn for war, realizing the consequences war can have for both sides, and that Jayce has no idea what he's getting his head into. But Mia's mom on the other hand, is going to do everythign she can to convince Jayce to go to war. Also, looks like Caitlyn and Vi failed their mission, thanks to Jinx stealing the crystal back at the last minute. Man, im surprised how much Silco seems to genuinally care about Jinx, the man was petrified by the fact that Jinx was half dead. And man, the doctor scene was terrfying and painful to watch, the tortorous lengths the doctor went through to save Jinx from near-death was gag-inducing, and watching Jinx's painful response to the treatment, plus the memories of her and Vi getting corrupted as she starts feeling like Vi replaced her with Caitlyn was painful to watch. Also, man the development Caitlyn has gone through has been amazing, Im surprised i'd like a character this much. Going from a person who naively had faith inn Pultivor and there government, to being exposed to the inhumane lif people living in the under city experience on a daily basis, while the people of Pultivor get to live laviouhly in a progressive technological hub, with no care or even acknowledgement of the conditions of everyone down below, and thus wanting change in how things functions, not just accepting that the pultivor governemt can sit back and relax as people are starving below. Man, I'm glad Caitlynn's mom allowed Caitlyn and Vi an audience with the council members, and ofcoruse all the council memebrs gave no solutions for the issues, but they were atleast able to convince (altho admittedly most Vi later on) Jayce to help. Looks like Jayce is now going to be fighting alongside Vi to take out all of Silco's manufacturing facilities for Shimmer so that the people of Zaun will turn on Silco and Silco will be taken down. Man the fighting animation is so good in this show, I loved how dynamic and stylized it was as Jayce and Vi were beating up dudes in robot armor w/there HexTech weapons. Though things didnt feel as fun when the reality of what Jace and Vi have done started setting into Jayce's mind, with Jayce seeing all the death they've caused, including a child who was forced to work for Silco. Also man, looks like Victor succedeed in using the magical orb to enhance his body and heal himself, but then a woman was evaporated by the very orb Viktor used to heal himself, hopefully this moment shows Viktor how serious the magic tech is and he calms down with using it so much. Also, poor professor heimerdinger, the man was completely correct about Viktor and Jayce not messing around with magic tech, and its looking like his fears are playing out into reality, and now that he was fired, there's nothign Prof H can do. Although, now that he met Ekko, maybe they could do soemthign together, unless Ekko just decides to stay back at his hideout and help his people there.Also, its starting to look like there might be an uprising within Zaun, with people like Sevika (who originally betrayed Vander to help Silco) thinkign that Silco's attachment to Jinx is holding him back and some other ppl wanting change in the leadership of Zaun. Also man, did Vi really have to do Ciatlyn like that, say that Caitlyn should just stay with the royals and forget about her, since theyre from two different worlds and as such could never get along, I mean Caitlyn and Vi were so close with eachother. Also, its looking like Caitlyn might be fucked, with a transformed (thanks to the doctors brutal surgery) Jinx whose out for blood right behind her.
Mel: "I don't need your guidance."
Mel's mother: "We'll see."
Jayce: "So thank you for your advice, Mrs Medarda, but I have a city to run."
Mel: "Jayce, you don't know war."
Caitlyn: "What about us?"
Vi: "Oil and water. Wasn't meant to be."
Caitlyn: "You're just saying that."
Vi: "Do yourself a favour, Cupcake. Go back to that big, shiny house of yours and just... forget me, okay?"
Jayce: "Yeah. I want to make Silco pay."
Vi: "I want in."
Jayce: "There is no in. You heard the Council."
Vi: "Fuck the Council."
Vi: "So... we got a deal, pretty boy?"
9.5/10 - Another absolutely great episode <3
That decapitation scene was well cut :D Visually it kinda wasn't really brutal at all (apart from the blood at the end) but it was very clear what happened. I liked that style.
It was quite heartbreaking when Caitlyn's plan didn't work out. "It's gone." "It was all for nothing." That really hit me. I'm just relieved that they got to talk to the council so it wasn't really all for naught.
Speaking of that: It really killed me how Caitlyn's mom kicked the door open and stood there with the gun xDD And it was so lovely that Caitlyn brought Vi to her home. It was quite amazing to see Vi react to everything new. And the two are of course so sweet together! And they fell in love faster than I thought.
If Jinx wasn't insane before the procedure she's probably proper crazy now... :o That final scene was quite scary - I hope Caitlyn will be fine.
At least Ekko is still alive :) I'm so happy that he met Heimerdinger. I was afraid that he'd do something stupid or get into trouble but I expect that it'll work out very well now. It's awesome how he wants to offer his assistance to the people of the undercity (and that scene with the kid was lovely). He's much more grounded than I though (I already really liked him before but that probably makes him the best (smart, kind, etc.) character). I really want to see Ekko and Heimerdinger work together now! :)
It looked like Viktor's plan didn't really go well... :o And IIRC he was even aware that Sky is into him. Quite unfortunate! I guess that won't end well now...
And Vi has her gauntlets - at last :)
LOL I didn't expect to see Echo at all! So cool :)
"Gee, I wonder who I learned that from?" xD And Vi even hugged him. Such a sweet reunion <3
And that place he built looked so amazing/beautiful! And that huge drawing full of the people they lost was stunning.
And I became concerned about Viktor again... :o Not his health but about him becoming a bad person. But I was so wrong: He is a really good person! He has heart, passion, and cares about people. And I love how he still just casually goes to the undercity. He didn't forget and he isn't just glad that he could escape it and never has to return.
At least Jayce has regrets about betraying his mentor. Mel's "Try not to lose your nuts." was fun :D
I'm a bit concerned about Heimerdinger. I wonder what his undercover mission is.
Silco's power move was great. He is one of a kind!
Caitlin and Vi are so sweet together <3
And those firelights looked awesome. Until it was revealed that they're bombs from Jinx. She's crazy but smart. At least she did get that it's just a goodbye hug. Speaking of that: The hug between Vi and Caitlin was so sweet, again <3
And last but not least: Echo was quite the hero at the end! His hoverboard is so cool and his time abilities just made it epic. And how he saw Powder and still cares about her <3
Such an emotional episode. I never thought I'd rate such an episode 10/10 but I feel like this one does deserve it.
Another solid episode of Arcane, fleshing out some characters and more of the story. For one, we learned a it more about Viktor, who was a loner kid obsessed with inventing, and was a young apprentice to this old man who created a new life, but Viktor abandoned that old man after seeing the inhumane lengths he'd go to for the sake of keeping his mutation alive. Also, looks like Viktor is dying soon, just as he and Jayce are on the brim of another magical tech innovation, with them learning that the magical orb they obtained reacts to organic matter, and could potientally be used to save Viktors life. But Prof Heimodegger, the 300yr old professor who founded Pultovir, has seen what happens if magic is used in the wrong hands, and is worried that the magical tech Viktor and Jayce are innovating will bring havoc upon Pultivor and as such, wants it destroyed. Naive and idealistic as always though, Jayce refuses to listen to Prof H, who himself isnt opposed to Jayce's magical tech advancementss, but believs it should be done slowly to ensure the safety of Pultivor. Jayce instead starts and succesfully gets a vote to retire Prof. H as leader of Pultivor, presumably so that Jayce can take over and continue his march towards magic tech innovation for the good of humanity. We also learned some more about Mia, how she was exiled from the Madera name because she didnt live up to the title, that may explain why Mia is so driven to bring innovation to Pultivor, maybe to prove her worth. And, back to the under city affairs, its clear that Marcus is conflicted with working alongside Silco, wanting to stop all of this, but sadly for Marcus, he has a kid that he loves, and Silco is taking full advantage of that. Man Silco is one terrifying villain, without outright saying it Silco basiaclly told Marcus that if he messes up or lies to him again (lying about killing Violet when in reality Marcus saved violet from being killed by putting her in prison), his kid will be killed. And when Silco showed up with his henchman to confront and kill Violet and Caitlyn, man was it terrifying. Also, looks like the fated reunion has occured, with Jinx first realizing through one of Silco's henchmen that Violet is actually alive, then Jinx lighting a flare to contact Violet in the under city (the same flare Vi gave Jinx pre timeskip to alert Violet when shes in trouble) and they hugged it out. Man the reunion between Violet and Jinx was heartwarming, seeing Jinx breakdown and start crying after seeing her sister again, and Violet comforting Jinx saying she understands that Jinx needed to change to survive was heartbreaking. Though things took a turn for the worst when Caitlyn, an enforcer showed up, and Caitlyn realized Jinx is Violet's sister, w/ Jinx almost having another mental breakdown and almost shooting her sister and Caitlyn with a machine gun. And now, not only is the magic orb gone to those animal masked guys, but also Violet has been captured, again being taken away from Jinx's life. Also man, watching Violet's horrified reaction after witnessing what kind of person Jinx had become after the timeskip was painful to watch. Also back to Silco, looks like Marcus succesfully put the blame on the animal masks, and now Marcus and his men, under Jayce's command, have to search everyone who crosses the bridge connecting the underground to Pultovir, hopefully though Caitlyn can come back alive to prove who the real culprit is. Also looks like Viktor is going to his mad scientist for help on how to keep himself from dying with the magical tech him and Jayce are working on, man its starting to look like Viktor might become a villain.
It was quite interesting to see young Viktor. He's an interesting character :) I like him but somehow I'm always afraid that he's on the verge of becoming "evil" without really intending it.
I also liked Heimerdinger's quote: "Those who shine brightest often burn fastest."
It is nice that Jayce still remembers that "Viktor saved my life once" and basically considers him a brother.
It was cool that Timo was in that book :D I wonder if he'll be a character in this show as well.
I'm irritated that Caitlin traded her rifle for the medicine. It must be one of her dearest possessions, right? She must really care about Vi (or at least about the mission). And Caitlin even hugged that person she just met (and that apparently ratted them out later).
Jayce voting Heimerdinger out was heartbreaking. I get why but how could he do that? Their relationship wasn't always easy but didn't he get his seat thanks to Heimerdinger? And he basically was his mentor. Jayce should've searched for a better way... :o I have a bad feeling about this decision!
It was great that Vi apologized to Jinx <3 That was right and necessary. Now I'm fine with whatever happens next. Powder might be too far gone or too crazy but at least Vi tried and basically did everything right. Therefore, it won't be frustrating if Jinx doesn't come back to her. I'm sometimes so frustrated by movies where the apology doesn't even happen...
Anyway, it was unfortunately a short reunion. But nonetheless a sweet one :)
PS: And that poor animal! It looks so cute and had such a bad fate... :o I was quite confused about Viktor at the end (he shouldn't understand that).
Man I am really enjoying the lore and characters of Arcane. I like this new guy Jayce, someone who grew up poor and was trekking through a snowy blizzard with her near-dead mother, untill a cloaked mage showed up and teleoported the two to a sunny, grassy land across the globe, saving the two, and the mange gave Jayce the gem he used to do that magic. After that experience, Jayce had seemed to dedicate his life to researching how to harness magic with technology w/ a rich family sponsering his work, as Jayce research about creating an artifical form of magic, because he's seen the potential of magic to help others and Jayce believes that, if succesful, he could change the world for the better. Though, and seemingly for good reason, people think its too risky to be tampering with magic in Poltir, especially the 300yr old profresser whose seen what could happen when the power of magic falls into the wrong hands. And sadly for Jayyce, he was punished at a court hearing, after being put on trial for experimenting with illegal and dangerous technology to try and create artifical magic, with him beign expelled from his academy and sent back home, w/ even his own mother, who has firsthand experience of how magic can help others, trying to get Jayce to stop. Man luckily Viktor came in time before Jayce tried to kill himself after he has been completelty stripped of the oppurtunity to continue his research, and looks like Viktor, some academic at the university who also judged Jayce, is intrigued in Jayce's research and luckily saved Jayce's book and gem thing. Looks like Viktor and Jayce are going to be working together now to complete the research. Also, not to tangent of anything, but it really feels like Jayce is going to become a villan, the whole air Jayce gives off just makes me worried about him and what he'll do, to accomplish his research or after he succeeds in his research. Also, man the enforcers really are pillaging through the underground slums in search of the 4 kids who blew up the builidng in Poltir, Vancer wasnt lying about the kids needing to stay low. Also, poor Powder, hhaving to deal with everyone in the crew, besides Vi, thinking she's a failure, and Powder herselrf also internalizing these feelings because she cant be a fighter like her older sister. Also man, im glad we got moore of an explanantion about what happened iin the openeing scene of episode 1, it seems like Vancer lead his accross the brdige connecting the underground slums to Poltir to fight against the Enforcers, who were lviing it rich up in Poltir while the people of the underground are poor, starving, and sick, and it seems liek that war ended with a brutal massacre of the underground people, and even lead to Vi and Powder's parents being killed. The war clearly taught Vancer that war is never a good solution, it just leads to death and destruction, and now, even as the Enforcers are brutally searching for the 4 kids, Vancer knows fighting back will just lead to all the underground people being killed, and as such he has no real solution to this issue (other then poteintlly callign that enforcer ally and sending in one of the underground ppl to accept punishemnet for the building assault). And even worse, all of the underground people are wanting to fight back and start a war with the Enforcers (especially Vi), Vancer is completely stuck and needs to do something otherwise theyll all be fucked one way or another. Although, after pressuring Echo to spill about Vancer's ally within the Enforcers, and the ultimatum she gave Vancer, Vi chose to steal Vancer's contact device and turn herself in to save everyone in the slums from the constant brutality the Enforcers are treating them with to film the underground criminals, and to prvent another war as the undergroudn people get more fed up woith being complacent. Man im really enjoying Vi's character, after her life was destroyed thanks to the Enforcers, with her being parentless and stuck in the slums, Vi started to view herself as lesser than the people of Portir, and Vi just wants to do all she can to make sure Powder doesnt go through thtat and instead has a bright future. Vi knows its unfair how the Enforcers treat them, and how society's structured so that only the people of Portir live lavishly while the ppl of the underground starve and live in poverty, and Vi wants to change this with fighting back against them, starting a war. But luckily, thanks to Vancer opening up about how in war there are no winners, and saying how the death of her parents is Vancers fault for going into war, Vi seems less war hungry. Also damn, Silco is one terryfying man, using the beast-fluid on a human to see the poteiintall of the fluid. Also, more on the counicl hearing, that black woman seemed interesting, I can't wait to see more of her.
"Lead them to paradise."
So epic! A proper sequel to the masterpiece that is the first one, Dune: Part Two is everything I wanted and more. The scale and the stakes are much bigger. It really benefits from the world-building and character roots previously established in the first and makes everything bloom. The themes (and at times criticisms) on religion and politics felt so refreshing for a sci-fi movie. It's pretty thought-provoking in that sense. The story had me captivated and invested. It still has it's slow moments but the action sequences are perfectly placed and the payoff in the third act is so worth it.
The biggest praise I could give it is the character arcs and evolution. Paul's evolution here is so fascinating, we basically watch a boy become a man. At the beginning of the movie you fear for his life but by the second half he's the one to fear, emanating confidence. Timothée Chalamet absolutely owned it. Austin Butler is the perfect villain, so unpredictable and violent. I love Jessica's character arc but it felt rushed at times, like she changed too much in between some scenes. The Reverend Mother is so badass, i'm always secretly rooting for her for some reason (the "silence" moment was perfection).
I wasn't expecting the amount of action we got, compared to the first there's a lot. The action and set pieces are so memorable. The worm riding scene was the best moment of the entire movie, I felt so alive with all the special effects and the sound design and the vibrations it's like I was riding it myself. Epic third act battle and hand-to-hand knife scene (although it isn't top tier combat compared to a lot of action movies but the editing and camerawork made it look flawless). They did skip some action in the third act that I wanted to see more of though.
God tier cinematography. I thought there was no way it could look better than the first but they somehow managed to make it look even better in this one. Loved the color grading and the way the sand moves, flawless. The most visually stunning sequence was the black and white one introducing Austin Butler's character. Epic sound design.
I keep trying to pick a favorite between Part One and Part Two and I don't think it's going to happen... they're equal. Overall an excellent sequel. Can't wait to see what's in store for Part Three.
This is an episode that cements something that's been bothering me this entire time. I'm not a fan of all the changes they've made to the relationship dynamics but these things are inevitable. But the thing that really bothered me is that Wednesday comes to this school and three nearly identical dudes are super into her, which in itself is fine. The problem is that contrary to what Xavier says here Wednesday gives absolutely zero indication that she's into any of them. So when the boys get upset that she isn't returning their affection I'm confused like why? She has given you nothing. The real problem is the framing of the show suggests they are right and Wednesday should be recognizing what she's doing to these poor guys. While I never saw Wednesday as an emotionally stunted child like they're clearly making here, Ortega has done a brilliant job of making Wednesday show absolutely zero affection for anyone or anything except the oppressed. She protects her brother. She protects her friends. She protects anyone who needs protection. But she couldn't care less about your romance neither rejecting nor accepting just completely apathetic.
For a show that keeps name checking patriarchy it's kinda weird that the show also wants to basically shame Wednesday for doing absolutely nothing in the deluded fantasies of white dudes that insist she's giving them signals.
Check your brain at the door and let the Ramboian-John-Wick action sweep you away for 120 minutes. Call of Duty on film, Extraction 2 loses some of the tight-knit focus of the first film, but makes up by delivering some absolutely awe-inspiring set pieces that seem to just go and go. Sure the cuts and transitions between shots aren't as clean as the original, but the pure size and scale of these action segments is impressive and more than make up for the lack of shine. As much buzz as the prison escape will get from tabloids and film mags, I thought the train sequence was one of the best end-to-end action sequences I've seen for a long time. I thought the top-down oner from John Wick 4 would hold that title for the foreseeable future but here we are not a few months later, with a Netflix movie taking the crown. While we're comparing to Keanu, I think I prefer Extraction and its sequel now because it knows exactly what it is. There isn't silly lore about the table and consecrated grounds and Bulgarian crime rings that can give you immunity or favours etc etc etc; it's just an over the top action reel with a bit of family drama to tie it all together. Fantastic action movie, I hope they can cap this off with one final entry.
[7.0/10] So I’m torn on this episode. On the one hand, the craft on display is high quality. The show looks good, with interesting choices in lighting and composition, and some extraordinary production design. (Though the editing is notably bad in places, which is odd for something that's otherwise this polished.) There’s clearly talented actors on board, an interesting period setting, and some decent ideas under the hood.
But at the jumping off point here, everything about this opening hour feels so mechanical. All of these characters are pretty standard archetypes. The script is clunky as hell, with various bog standard character introduction scenes where the various players all but announce who they are, how they feel about one another, what their general deal is.
To some extent, that's true of most pilots. You have to establish the basics of the show’s premise and players and animating conflict, which means there’s a lot of heavy narrative machinery that gets wheeled into place at the expense of more natural interactions between characters. But for all the flavor that goes into the aesthetics and glossy production values of Peaky Blinders, the writing and storytelling feels very staid and vanilla in the early going.
It also feels pretty derivative. Aping the style of early 2000s HBO groundbreaking dramas is not the worst idea in the world. But if you’ve seen the likes of Deadwood or The Wire or other prestige series of the era, Peaky Blinders’ general vibe will be familiar, only clumsier.
That's not to say that the construction here isn’t sound. While a bit artless, the show does set up all the major characters, from the crafty young brother of the titular crime family, Tommy; to the hard-nosed inspector Campbell; to the spitfire matriarch of the Peaky Blinders, Polly; to the turgid older brother Arthur; to the agitating communist Freddie; to his “Juliet” in the crime family, Ada; to the tepid turncoat barmaid/love interest, Grace. Overly signposted or not, you won’t walk away without getting a sense for who the pieces on the board are.
Likewise, there’s a dutiful sense of setting up the major conflicts here. Tommy has inadvertently stolen a cache of weapons that has the big guys on his tail. His aunt knows but his brother doesn’t, and by the end, he’ll face the heat rather than pass up the opportunity. Meanwhile, Inspector Campbell is bearing down on the Peaky Blinders, the communists, and the “fenians” in the town to figure out who’s up to what. And along the way, there’s various romantic entanglements that are already in force seem poised to be. Who and how to run the crime family, and who and how to run the coppers, is already primed for consternation and narrative hurdles set to explode when narratively necessary. The show may be ham-handed about it, but it does set up conflicts both personal and “professional” to fuel the series.
I’ll give the series premiere this -- it has something on its mind. The show seems chiefly concerned with what it means to be a soldier come home from war, and the different ways veterans of World War I cope with what life hands them once their service has ended. Some become bookies, some become political activists, others just struggle with PTSD. Some do all three! The reflection on where their choices have led them, what sympathies and cynicism they harbort, and how the shadow of what happened during the Great War lingers for all of them is the most interesting thing here, even if it’s not subtle. Many of the show’s figures may be criminal, but you get the sense that they’re taking back a measure of what they feel the state owes them after their mental and physical sacrifices.
The peak of that is Tommy, and I appreciate the idea that he is both someone clever, who can play the long game and get crafty in ways his confederates can't, but that he’s also, as his aunt puts it, a bit devilish and reckless, to where he might fly too close to the sun at times. That dynamic is hardly unprecedented, but you can see the appeal of it.
My hope is that the characters get more distinctive shading as the show goes on and the table-setting and throat-clearing is done. My biggest problem in the early going is that it’s hard to latch onto any of these characters. They’re by and large stock and generic, without a ton of charm to them. The exception is Polly, who has some real personality as a firebrand and an interesting angle as someone who came to the forefront while the men were off to war but has to hang back now. But again, maybe that gets fixed down the line as we play less of the introduction game, and more of the “just being a show game.”
Overall, this is a glossy, well-made, creditably-constructed first hour of the show, that nonetheless left me cold in how mechanical and conspicuous so much of its setup and introductions felt. Hopefully with the game board set up, the show will be more compelling when all it has to do is move the pieces around the board.
[7.3/10] I watched this one with subtitles first before I read that the consensus is the dubbed version, so I rewatched it that way, and it was an interesting exercise! I definitely feel like I got more of the character and texture coming through with the dubbed version, and helped me to immerse myself in the world a little more. That said, there’s something about hearing the lines spoken in the native language of the author that has power too. I will probably stick with the dubbed version given the consensus, but it made for an interesting double introduction to Cowboy Bebop.
I mostly appreciate the style here. The loose jazz, the extreme character designs and alternatingly halting and fluid motion, the jarring yet poignant use of silence, the blood a neo-noir trappings, the western scène à faire mixed with a science-fiction setting. It has a sense of place and a distinctive flavor, which is a good start for any series.
I’m less enamored with the characters so far. Spike is a pretty generic rogue, a little too reckless for his own good but cunning enough to get by despite that. Jet is a fairly standard tough guy second, with a little more charm. The other hangers on here like the Indigenous fortune teller or the horny barflies are vaguely uncomfortable. And the tastefully-named, drug-using gangster, Asimov, is a pretty standard archetype.
Only the gangster’s girlfriend, Kartina, has a little more distinctive about her. Even she conforms to some standard noir tropes, with a certain sad femme fatale quality and a doomed dream. But her “pregnant belly” full of contraband, her willingness to kill her accomplice when she realizes he has no will to see their dream through, and the tragic poetic imagery of the vial spilling out from her dress like blood as she dies in space, gives her a memorable debut no one else can match.
Still, this one has potential in style alone, and hopefully there’s time to develop Spike, Jet, and what I assume will be other members of the cast better over time. Setting out a pair of bounty hunters to hop across the galaxy and encounter cases of the week is a good premise, and the jazzy rhythms of this one give enough reason to keep coming back to see who’ll they’ll trade blows and bullets with next time.
Watching through Buffy for the first time recently. I missed it the first go-round as i would've been too hardcore goth for such bubblegummy fare when it was first coming out. It's good timing, actually, i feel like the ensuing 2 decades have put me in a place to appreciate Joss Whedon's campy vision.
I feel like Teacher's Pet is the episode where the series starts to hit its stride. The main characters seem to be establishing their chemistry, which is excellent and worth watching for that alone. Secondarily, it's good, goofy late 90s fun. While this show could easily veer towards the obnoxious, somehow it toes the line and is charming instead. I feel like if this came out even 3 years later, it wouldn't have worked, as i imagine they'd have been tempted to use CGI instead of practical effects and the whole thing would've been rendered dated and cheap. Instead, Buffy has kind of a timeless quality, in lines with weird, goofy teen horror romps, from Eerie, Indiana to The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina.
I also like to imagine a world where teenagers go out and watch live music almost every day. Makes me miss going to shows.
[7.5/10] “The Harvest” takes a number of pages out of the George Romero zombie playbook, and it’s an appropriate tack for the second installment of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its progeny were nominally amount the creeping monsters who used to be your friends and loved ones and the boilerplate horror of them attacking, but they were also stand-ins for any number of real life issues. Racism, consumerism, militarism, and much more were addressed through those reanimated corpses. It fits, then, that BtVS embraces its cinematic forebear in doing the same with its own set of undead villains.
To the point, the Real Life Problem™ this week is Buffy having to sneak out of school and then her house because of parents and school adminstrators alike worrying about her falling back into trouble. In lieu of genuine bad behavior, the actions that get Buffy crosswise with her assorted authority figures, whether it’s the principal or her mom, are her slaying duties. But it still has the tone of the rebellious teen surreptitiously getting out of the house to go down the local hangout.
That “supernatural as a stand-in for the real issue” setup works with the more literal call outs to Night of the Living Dead as well. The sequence in the sewers pays direct homage, with Buffy and Xander trying to hold the door up against grasping hands, and a mob of lurching creatures emerging around every corner to flush them out. It allows Whedon & company to create an appropriately tense atmosphere and action set piece in the show’s early going, with the vampire creating the same creeping sense of dread while they advance on our heroes that their zombie counterparts do.
But “The Harvest” also addresses one of the oldest and yet most salient tropes in the zombie genre – the notion of something you have to kill that still resembles someone you care about. Xander’s struggles when facing Jesse, and Giles’s warning that the scoobies are not fighting their friend, but rather “the thing that killed him” play in the emotional difficulty of having to take out a creature that, however much you rationally tell yourself is evil, still looks and sounds like your old buddy. The episode wrings a bit of power out of that, and it sets up something important for Xander.
As the painfully written and acted scene where the newly-dubbed Angel gives Buffy some tips portends, BtVS will play around with the idea of “good vampires,” or at least less-bad vampires running around. But Xander is always the slowest to adjust, the most likely to resist accepting them or helping them. While there’s rational reasons for that – even the best vampires in the show’s universe have killed and can be unpredictable – in retrospect it feels like an emotional response to this first killing. Xander is pained and upset that these creatures took his friend; he’s angry that they not only turned someone he cared about into another monster but that they made it so that he was a snack to his old buddy and had to kill him himself. Xander harbors a resentment for that which rarely, if ever, seems to leave him.
Jesse’s turn in the episode also plays in that “real issues brought to life with monsters” space. His transition is a dark-edged version of the Teen Wolf movie (which, in hindsight, seemed to represent the tone the director of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie was going for, over Whedon’s objections). Jesse suddenly has the confidence to go after Cordelia in earnest after being consistently rebuffed by her, and despite some pushback, she actually seems receptive to the new him. There’s some semi-uncomfortable commentary there, draped in nice guy vs. alpha male rhetoric, but maybe it’s just a critique of Cordelia who’s not exactly put up as a laudable person to woo here.
His turn also plays on one of the things “The Harvest” and BtVS does best, which would quickly set the show apart from its brethren – subversion and surprise. It’s easy to forget it when you know how the episode goes, but the twist that Buffy and Xander think they’ve rescued Jesse, only to discover that he’s been turned and leading them to a trap, is a nice little reversal that catches the audience off guard.
By the same token, Buffy’s confrontation with Luke at the bronze uses some generic genre action beats. The villain takes over, monologues for a little bit, only to be upended by a quip from the good guy, and a scuffle ensues. But it’s the shape that scuffle takes that makes it novel and interesting. Buffy faking out Luke by exposing him to “sunlight,” only to distract him enough with the ruse to take him out the old fashioned way, is a clever way to end the fight, and shows the inventive bent Whedon & Co. take to classics and clichés.
The nuts and bolts of the episode are a microcosm of the things the show had figured out and the things it was still nailing down. It’s impressive how well-formed the dynamic among Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles is already. Their banter in the library is, perhaps, off a half-step or so, but very recognizable and amusing. The world-building and description of the hellmouth are a little rote, but offer a solid enough setup for The Master and the events to come, which fit into a “here’s the ancient problem, now let’s find a solution” blueprint the show would return to repeatedly.
On the other hand, the show can’t always escape the orbit of its clichés and sillier bits. The scene with Cordelia and Willow in the computer lab is pure 80s teen comedy material. The same goes for most scenes featuring Cordelia and Angel, the former sounding a little too stereotypical in her takedowns of Buffy (to Harmony!) and the latter still generally unable to act his way out of a paper bag. And The Master is a mixed bag himself. Sometimes his friendly malevolence suggests the show laying the groundwork for a certain big bad yet to come, but sometimes he hams it up with bad puns that recall a maligned scene from the recent Rogue One film.
Still, in just its second outing, BtVS is much more assured and confident than in the pilot. Borrowing from the greats like Romero, whether its in direct references, familiar tropes, or the general spirit of genre-as-subtext, helps boost the episode and give it more focus and potency. There’s still growing pains, but “The Harvest” is a good introduction to what the show could do well, if not the best realization of its potential.
[5.9/10] Mrs. Bloom and I rewatched the pilot to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in honor of the 20th anniversary of the show’s debut, and boy do you feel the fact that it’s 1997 when revisiting “Welcome to Helmouth.” BtVS is one of those foundational shows for me. I didn’t really grow up with it, but it still made such an impact on me when I first watched the series that it’s colored almost every show I’ve watched since. Serialization, maturity, dialogue, character arcs, balancing drama and comedy – there’s nothing this show couldn’t and didn’t pull off. But the pilot is a reminder that even an all-timer like Buffy took a little while to find its voice.
Though, oddly enough, that’s one of the few things in “Hellmouth” that feels pretty well-formed right from the beginning. Joss Whedon’s trademark patter is out in full force and though the cast hasn’t quite acclimated to spitting it out yet, the lines themselves are as recognizable in Season 1 as they are in Season 7. Sure, there’s some awkward bits, like the two random girls in the lockerroom exchanging stilted slang, but for the most part, it’s clear that in the show’s early-going, the playful back-and-forth between all the characters is what set the show apart.
Particular kudos are owed to Anthony Stewart Head, the actor who plays Giles, who has probably the most thankless task and yet who pulls it off with seeming ease. More than anyone else in “Hellmouth,” Giles has to deliver the exposition, the premise, the infodumps that set all of this slaying up, and he does it with a sense of urgency, concern, and a hint of creepiness that helps the medicine go down.
Sarah Michelle Gellar and the rest of the young cast does an admirable job for a first outing, but they seem much more clunky and mannered rattling off the teenspeak. Gellar in particular doesn’t quite seem comfortable yet, leaning a bit too far into the valley girl patois and not really nailing the emotions from moment to moment. Still, she’s serviceable at worst, which is more than can be said for the likes of David Boreanaz’s Angel in his opening frame.
While the show would gain notoriety for the way it took the heightened reality of a genre show and played the consequences of it straight, here BtVS pretty well embraces the camp of it all. The Master has the tone of a B-movie villain to begin with (in keeping with series’s cinematic roots), and the candles and blood and nightmares all point in the same Saturday afternoon movie feel of this episode.
The same goes for the teens, who replicate the usual dynamic of popular kids and nerds and less-than-smooth dudes trying to get the girl. Cordelia is a total archetype in the early going. Xander gets some good lines, but also fills a typical role (one essentially duplicated by Jesse, which should have been a clue). Really only Willow jumps the gun by seeming like more than the sum of her clichés. Sure, she’s still clearly the nerd, but the exchanges with Buffy give her an earnest flavor all her own, and the fact that she rolls with Buffy’s “seize the moment” speech already gives her a malleability and room for growth missing in most of her compatriots in the show’s first hour.
Still, there are signs of things to come. Whedon opens the show with a subversion. The nervous little blonde girl asks the dark-clad bad boy if what they’re doing is okay, and seems scared at the shadows around every corner, only to reveal that she’s the thing that goes bump in the night. It’s not the best-acted scene ever put on film, but it’s a sign right from the jump that this was going to be a show that defies your expectations.
By the same token, “Hellmouth” introduces a theme that will be with BtVS until the very end – the burden of being the chosen one. Whedon wisely chooses to dispense with an origin story, instead giving of just enough detail of the broad strokes backstory from the movie to let us know that this isn’t Buffy’s first rodeo but that she’s trying to put the whole vampire slaying thing behind her.
Of course, if she managed that, there wouldn’t really be a show, so naturally there’s rumblings of a big danger coming, and ominous warning, and foreboding dreams to suggest that she can’t just put away her stakes and focus on making friends just yet. Still, the fact that she wants to, that she’s feeling pressure from her mother and the awkwardness of being new and just wants to try to have a life immediately gives the show a bit of depth despite its “office Halloween party” soundtrack and mood lighting.
It also introduces the show’s early central conceit – the notion of teenage fears and anxieties manifested as supernatural threats. It’s not quite as one-to-one as later plots like a girl who feels invisible turning invisible, but there’s the sense that Buffy is feeling the nudge from her mother on the one hand, urging her to straighten up and fly right, and the nudge from her surrogate father on the other, urging her to fulfill her mystical responsibilities. All the while, she just wants to try to live her life and make friends and be normal.
It mirrors the sense in which teenager feel overwhelmed, pulled in different directions by the adults in their life, and want to set aside responsibilities to just try to fit in. Sure, most of us don’t have to go stalking in the night to try to slay vampires at the same time we’re trying to meet up with new pals at a very 90s club, but it’s representative of the sorts of pressures that almost all young adults face.
That’s what recommends this show and helps cut through the eye-roll-worthy cheese that permeates this opening salvo. It’s easier to look back on this pilot having watched the full run of the show and see it laying the foundation for where the series would eventually go. Seeing this episode for the first time, I understand my original reaction to it, one of bewilderment that this was the beginning of something so hallowed when it was mired in teen tropes and generic figures. But watching it now, I notice all the little ways it laid the groundwork for who Buffy was, for where everyone fit into her world, and for the unique challenges she faced, challenges that would be with her from the beginning to the end.
Oh boy, they went with way more explicit judgement of characters, their nature and their actions... I love it!
I think Mappa or maybe Isayama felt that manga wasn't explicit enough before (thanks to Yeagerists) or maybe crazy world outside my window that heading to WWIII forced them to be blunt first and character accurate a bit later.
That ending is why I will never stop recommending people to at least read Uprising arc (ch. 51 - 70).
Season 3 part 1 went for action and cut out so many important for the themes and characters moments.
If you were caught of guard by Armin's confession about being tempted by selfish, simple solutions, it's probably because you didn't hear his throwaway plan where he justified lose of civilian lives for the cause and more importantly it's pretty much Armin's idea to cause mayhem and pose as a savior of humanity at the end so... yeah.
As a nihilist manga reader, who kinda got confirmation on the read of all subtle (in the manga) implied motives, solutions or even lack of it during Eren and Armin final conversation. I kinda prefer manga approach, but dear lord if you only knew amount of mental gymnastics in support of "the final solution" or finding "prove" that the author is clearly imperialistic fаscist... that went around after the final chapter. Oh, boy. So at the same time, I also appreciate the option to point in the direction of (hopefully, with Isayama approved changes) final episode of the saga.
As an adaptation, final episode improved most of the scenes that didn't have enough breathing room in the manga, it didn't felt like action got in the way of the story... probably because you saw it within an hour and not as 6 months final stretch of the story.
There are a couple of scene directions that didn't sit right with me and I can't even put my finger on why, yet. Also faces for some reason were a struggle or poor animators didn't have the strength/time to fix them. Would prefer seeing the scene after credits at the same ratio the whole time. But it's a small stuff in a grand scheme of things.
TL;DR
Thank you, Mappa. You did wonders to endless season 4. After what was done to season 3 part 1, WIT dropping AoT, was a blessing in disguise. People will appreciate preserved story, themes and characters even more if their read the whole manga after Uprising Arc.
As we can see, people will never freaking learn. And I doubt anyone has any solution. We gonna walk in that Forest until the end of our days.
I'm autistic. Attack on Titan has been my hyperfixation more often than any other piece of media in my life. I started watching a little late, entering in when the first part of the final season was out. But Attack on Titan is one of the most masterful, well-plotted, intricate pieces of fiction that I've ever seen. Analyzing it's mysteries and story, it's characters and world, it's message and symbolism. Nothing even comes close to Attack on Titan for me in that regard.
I unfortunately have been spoiled on many parts of the ending, because manga readers are the most insufferable people ever. But even still, it is an excellent conclusion, and I think it's so interesting how it decides to leave it's ending open to interpretation. It reflects how the entire series has been a series of questions and mysteries, so leaving with some questions left unanswered allows for discussion to be continued long after Eren's story is over.
I will forever love Attack on Titan, and the absolute joy it gave me for years, and it will be sad to see this legendary series go. But all good things must come to an end, and I think this ending is satisfying enough for something so special.
RWBY is so delightful.
Today I finally managed to watch the last four episodes of Volume 4. This volume wasn't my favourite, I don't think it can be compared to the action of Volumes 2 and 3 (the latter in particular, as it took the series to such heights), but there were many remarkable things I would like to remark on.
First of all, there is a huge change in style - it was a surprise for me when I saw it in the character trailer before the volume premiered, as I didn't follow a lot of news about the show to avoid any sorts of spoilers. While it was a bit distracting early on until I got used to it, I think the show gains a lot from it, not only because of the more professional/artsy look I think it has, but also because I think this allowed them to go deeper with the characters when it comes to displaying personality and feelings. I also love the fact that rather than have this style from the beginning, the show started really simple and evolved with each volume, it makes me appreciate how much Monty Oum and the production team cared about the story and these characters before everything else, and now the production is far more valuable because of it.
As for the story, there was a dramatic change of pace compared to the previous volume, as we dealt mostly with the consequences of everything that happened before. I liked the idea of this and loved the "calm and simple" feel it generally had, though some of the episodes took this really slow, in particular the first half. However, and this is what I think is the real high point of this volume: there was such an enormous expansion of everything. We were introduced to new characters (many family members!), locations, mythos, backstory... if anything, I like RWBY even more now, seeing how gigantic it's really meant to be. I do believe there could have been a bit more content related with the evil group, Salem in particular, who remains a mystery... but well.
It's an interesting dynamic to see team RWBY scattered all over the world. The stories of Weiss, Blake and Yang felt more like a "teaser" of what's to come compared to Ruby's journey with Jaune, Ren, Nora and Qrow, which was a joy to watch. Another real highlight of this volume was Ren's backstory, it was so enjoyable to watch. It is tragic to see what happened to the village, but beautiful to see how his friendship with Nora began in the middle of that chaos and they've been together ever since. I thought it was an interesting choice dealing with his story towards the end of the volume, including the defeat of that dreadful Grimm.
I look forward to watching all these episodes again already and of course to watching Volume 5 when it comes out next fall. Also, I wish RWBY had some sort of spin-off while we wait (other than RWBY Chibi) - I feel like the world of the show is big enough to allow for it and it would be the perfect opportunity to keep expanding everything.
Not a bad little tribute to the original game, but PLEASE do yourself a favour and play the game first. When cramming a 20-30 hour game into a 4-5 hour show, there's bound to be some rushed pacing and a ton of cut content. Big twists and revelations become side notes as the discovery and analysis of evidence is replaced with them pulling evidence out of their ass, so the joy that comes from putting all of the puzzle pieces together is almost entirely gone. The free time spent hanging out with and getting to know the characters is also lost, so the deaths of characters are much less meaningful. Most of the key story beats are hit successfully, and the animation quality is fantastic and more than does the game's stylish aesthetic justice, but with so much of it's guts removed, the primary narrative will likely fail to captivate newcomers to the Danganronpa franchise. A recommended watch, but ONLY if you've played and beaten the original game first. If you don't have a Vita or PSP, the game was ported to PC and released on Steam just days before this post, so it is now easily and readily available.
[7.3/10] I like the fact that we get Mallory’s origin story, so to speak, and with it, the early chapters of both Stan Edgar and Black Noir. Making it so that Mallory was basically running part of the Iran-Contra affair, only to have her spot literally and figuratively blown up by Payback explains her distaste for Supes and preexisting willingness to color outside the lines in a satisfying fashion. The action sequences we get are solid, and it’s nice to see that the heroes were as much childish pricks in the 1980s as they are today.
That said, it still feels like this whole thing is tacked on and retconned backstory that doesn’t fit neatly with what the audience already knows. The show at least addresses the fact that Mallory never told this to Butcher or MM despite the fact that it’s pertinent information for both of them. But it does seem odd that she never mentioned anything about it until now, and that we’ve never heard the name Soldier Boy until season 3, when suddenly, it turns out he’s a big deal and has been a big deal for a long time.
I am also just dog tired of love triangles. There’s an interesting kernel to the Hughie/Annie/Supersonic romantic entanglement, at least. Hughie is putting the mission over Starlight, asking her to stay in harm’s way to keep Homelander occupied while The Boys hunt down the superweapon. Supersonic, on the other hand, refuses to extricate himself from harm’s way, so that he can look after Annie in a difficult situation. The contrast there isn’t lost on me, even if it feels a little too soapy and convenient for my tastes, and I just get really tired of third wheel romantic drama.
But as with Soldier Boy, it also requires Supersonic to be a significant part of Starlight’s life despite the fact that he’s never been mentioned or even alluded to until now. The nice thing about the first two seasons of The Boys is that, for the most part, it felt like we were gradually shown parts of the world we hadn't seen before, which just made the universe of the show seem larger and more connected. Now, it seems like the series is trying to jam new stuff into what we already know, which makes the developments, both narratively and emotionally, feel somewhat unearned.
I’m also pretty mild on Frenchie’s story. Here, at least, we already know that he and his old flame were involved in some rough stuff. But him getting cornered by Russian gangsters and then forcibly interrogated by his former drug-running boss who is also his former dominatrix comes off as a cheesy, broad sidequest that only serves as a convenient way for The Boys to have an in with the Ruskies once they find out Soldier Boy was kidnapped by them.
Butcher is the most compelling part of the episode, though. Him struggling physically with the aftereffects of the temporary Compound V treatment leads to a compelling physical performance that sees him at less than his best. He continues to be adorable with Ryan, particularly in Ryan’s concern about Butcher being sick and them both reminiscing about Becca’s saltine cracker treatment.
Unfortunately, that just makes it extra devastating when he unleashes a horrifying sentence on the poor kid, telling him he’ll never see Butcher again and that Butcher doesn’t want to even look at him after he killed Becca. It’s a ghastly thing to say to a child, and whatever sympathies you might have for Butcher in finding out that Mallory kept something important from him that could have saved lies, the fact that he takes it out on poor Ryan is abominable.
You feel extra for Ryan here. His conversation with Kimiko is outstanding, as the two have a lot in common and can commiserate in a way few can. The two of them talking about how they hate their powers and fear hurting people is full of pathos, and it leads nicely to Ryan having to control himself when Butcher says something hurtful.
Hughie’s also gone off the deep end. Butcher was once told that Hughie is his “canary.” The fact that, after everything, Hughie thinks now they have to fight dirty, that he’s tired of losing, that he wants to do things Butcher’s way, is an indictment on how far Hughie, and the rest of these knuckleheads have fallen.
That just leaves Homelander, who is as terrifying as ever once he finds out that his unvarnished megalomania is something the public (or at least some of it) rewards rather than recoils from. The Supe comparing himself to MLK, threatening to destroy the world if Starlight releases the flight video, and otherwise imposing his will, puts him in a frightening new phase. The way he throws his weight around: forcing Ashley to tell him good news while he’s in the nude, making The Deep eat a living sea creature, and claiming Starlight as his “love” are all chilling signs that he doesn’t have the slightest restraints on him anymore, something that’s been teased but never fully triggered, and yet seems closer and closer to fruition.
We get a little snippet of A-Train, finding out that he wants to drape himself in “the cause” of the black community, but refuses to actually stick his neck out or take a stand on anything meaningful. I appreciate his family calling him on his B.S., and exposing the way this is a mercenary move on his part.
We also get to see Annie’s struggle in all of this. The juxtaposition between her having to mask her pain and smile for the good of the show as part of a creepy child beauty pageant in the past, and having to do the same for the show as part of being in The Seven now is not subtle, but it’s still effective to show what she’s been going through since she was a child, and how despite trying to take ownership of her own life and seize the agency that’s rightfully hers, she keeps getting crammed into this same rough situation. The fact that it’s Hughie who’s stepped in for her mom makes it extra sad, and the threat of a superpowered psychopath forcing it and him on her makes it that much worse.
Overall, some interesting ideas and good acting in this one, but after a strong start, the plot choices here seem more and more shaky to me.
[7.4/10] The common theme in the episode seems to be, “There’s something wrong with me, and the only way I know how to fix it is something bad.” That’s not a bad theme for a show with so many folks with various hang-ups and outright personality disorders.
The one that’s the most frightening, and the most telegraphed, is Homelander, of course. He’s used to being the center of attention, the guy who always gets his way, because of who he is and what he is. Now his birthday celebration is being marginalized. He takes Stormfront’s pained suffering to be ignoring his special day. He’s still being criticized for associating with Nazis. He’s being upstaged and power-moved by his “co-captain” Starlight. Everything he knew is being undermined and sidelined.
So it’s finally time for mask off. He finally stops repeating the shtick, and instead says what he really believes. To put it in MJF terms, he’s “better than you, and you know it.” It’s frightening to have him basically demanding to be worshiped, stop playing the part of magnanimous paragon of virtue and start asserting himself as above the “dirt people” and not subject to their whims or their laws. He legitimately thinks of himself as persecuted, as messianic, and him not even trying to keep up the facade is concerning. The only thing scarier than his little manifesto is the boyfriend of MM’s wife sitting on the couch enraptured and cheering it on, a reflection of the real life sick puppies who buy into that type of rhetoric.
What’s interesting is Stan Edgar’s ace in the hole. Candidly, I’ve wondered for a while why he felt so comfortable talking so harshly and firmly with someone who everyone else is afraid of. Frankly, I kept waiting for him to take out some kryptonite. Instead, it turns out, he’s a surrogate father to Victoria Newman, who’s ready and capable to take care of business for him should things go wrong. (Which, incidentally, is my theory for what happened to Soldier Boy.) I’ll admit, like a lot in this episode, it feels like a plot detail that’s tacked on kind of out of nowhere, a bit too conveniently, but it at least made me raise an eyebrow, which is something.
I’m also interested in Hughie pursuing Newman’s story out of a sense that he can’t do anything right, or is starting to feel a certain inferiority complex for not being a Supe, especially when he’s worried that Alex is going to move in on Starlight. Him feeling less than when opening a jar of mustard, prompting him to try to bluff his way through a group home or awkward exchange with Newman over what he saw is at least something rooted in character. It’s never seemed to bother Hughie before, so it feels a little out of nowhere. But he’s already destabilized a little from the Newman reveal and the fact that the past year where he thought he was making progress was founded on a lie, so maybe you can account for it in that way? I don’t love the trouble in paradise between him and Annie, though. Feels a little forced even though the actors do a good job with it.
What I am intrigued by is the reveal that Vought has been running a group home for child Supes, including those whose powers resulted in “parental fatality.” The fact that Stilwell’s son is there is quietly heartbreaking. Stan Edgar using the group home to turn Newman into his own manipulated attack dog plays like another layer sunk to by Vought and its officials, more craven acts to feather their nests.
Still, the toughest parental relationship here is the one between MM and his daughter, and again, I don’t love it. The thesis here is that MM needs to keep hunting Supes, needs to find out the real deal with Soldier Boy, because it’s a physical or psychological compulsion that, if he doesn’t satisfy, he loses control of himself.
Again, I don’t care for it. MM seemed fine being out of the game when we met him. We’d never heard of Soldier Boy until this season, so it’s another apparently uber-important detail that scans as tacked on. Once more, Laz Alonso is a hell of an actor so he’s able to sell it remarkably well, but it doesn’t necessarily feel in line with what we know about the character or the details of the world to date.
Otherwise, I’m intrigued by the idea of A-Train wanting a new identity now that he’s not the fastest man in the world anymore, and so trying to reframe his public image as being about his blackness, when it’s not something that’s ever really mattered to him until it was lucrative. The idea of a middle passage video game is just...yeesh. On the other side of things, Starlight “making waves” and standing up for herself despite being new to the leadership role is...what I was expecting from her in season 2, where she just reverted back to who she was before? So I’m glad to see it, even if it feels a little late.
That just leaves Butcher. I like his shtick here too. He’s trying to hold it together for Ryan, to not give into his worst impulses. He wants to find out what happened to Solider Boy and do it the right way. But he too starts to feel powerless, like so many other people in this episode, and so makes bad choices.
Except, it’s so hard for me to buy him taking compound V. We’ve seen him face impossible odds and supes before and come out undaunted. What is so special about Gunpowder that makes him give in here? You can come up with reasons. He obviously didn’t have the option to become a Supe before, and that was pre-Becca when he had finding her as his animation motivation. Even so, it feels out of step with the violently anti-Supe man we’ve known to date to see him give in. Granted, that too is scary, and one more time, Karl Urban has the acting chops to deliver it. Ut it feels like the show is taking more outlandish and less plausible swings in terms of character development to fuel the story du jour rather than rooting it in established details and character traits. Frankly, everything related to Payback feels that way right now.
Overall, I don’t mind the stories we’re getting this episode in a vacuum. There’s interesting concepts at play, particularly a host of characters making bad personal choices because they feel put upon or alienated from the lives they used to know and felt comfortable with. But I don't know how well it fits with these specific characters or the world the show already established.
[7.8/10] At the end of season 2 of The Boys, I wondered where they would go from here. It worked as, if not a full and final ending, then certainly more of a period at the end of a sentence than the figurative ellipses at the end of season 1. But I’m impressed with what the show has set up for almost all of its characters going into season 3, with challenging new places for everyone in the roster to go.
Poor Hughie. The guy isn’t perfect (see: him being a jerk toward Starlight due to jealousy over her ex-boyfriend from when she was a teenager). And yet, the episode starts out with everything going his way for once.. He and Annie are public. They can come over and hangout and schtup together at their leisure. He’s a person of renown at a government agency that’s making a difference to the amount of harm Supes cause and giving them some accountability. He even gets to boss Butcher around, in a marked change of pace. The needle drop of “Uptown Girl” is a bouncy way to highlight the way this “downtown man” has come up in the world.
By the end of the episode though, he’s ticked off his girlfriend, seen Butcher screw things up despite going to bat for him, and realized that his boss is another Supe with a big secret tht leaves him covered in blood and guts once more. The more things change for Hughie, the more they stay the same, and that’s sad.
I’m perhaps most intrigued by Annie’s story though. Her being offered the position as co-captain of The Seven, with the chance to direct real power toward her causes, to brig in her people, to mess with Vought from a place of pride, is tantalizing. I suspect we’re heading toward a lesson that good people are coopted by these corrupt organizations, rather than agents of change within them. Nonetheless, it’s intriguing to see Starlight mull what it could mean to wield that sort of power for good, even if she remains a little naive as to how Vought can use that position of power to manipulate her.
While Annie’s star is rising, Homelander’s is inking, and it’s the last thing in the world he can stand. I love the idea that the most important thing to Homelander is being adored, worshiped like the god he thinks he is. The fact that Annie is receiving the adulation that he believes is rightfully his, the fact that he has to march to the beat of someone else's drum because people have blackmail over him, drives him mad. The Stormfront revelation has dinged him in the public, and that’s the great sin to a thin-skinned person like him. Watching him slowly go crazy behind his sociopathic smile is chilling. The only thing scarier than Homelander with absolute power is Homelander with nothing to lose, and it seems like we’re getting closer and closer to that state of affairs.
Not if Maeve can help it though. I’m intrigued with the fact that she’s Butcher's source, giving him not only intel on an Avengers pastiche who lost their own headlining supe, but providing him with a new 24-hour version of Compound V. In that, she challenges what Butcher stands for, to see if he’s willing to become what he’s long hated, even temporarily, for the greater good. Especially if that greater good is getting a weapon that could kill Homelander. As practicalities go, I’m compelled by the idea of Butcher and The boys hunting for a weapon that could take out their adversary, and the mystery of just what happened with the Avengers knockoffs.
For his part, Butcher is in one of the most interesting places we’ve ever seen him. I like the idea that, despite everything, or maybe because of everything, he’s a different man. He doesn’t like taking orders from Hughie, but he’s willing to work within the system, and even spare a Supe when he could easily kill one instead. Most of all, he’s a surrogate father to Ryan, getting a big hug from the little munchkin and bonding over their shared love for Becca. He’s still a prick and thinks he’s too toxic to be around the youngin’ much thanks to his own spiky upbringing, but it’s the most well-adjusted we’ve ever seen him, and I kind of love him as a wholesome, rough-around-the-edges weekend dad who doesn’t know how good he is for the kid. Knowing The Boys, it’ll all end tragically, but I’ll take this for now!
I’ll also take him playing Homelander a bit (I think?). Homelander’s ready to go scorched Earth from his perceived slights at Vought, feeling like a tool rather than the captain of his own ship. Butcher can relate, being ordered around by Hughie and restricted in what he can do much like Homelander is. But I don’t buy that he’d actually work with his mortal enemy, even if the show seems to want to tease that. That said, his attempt to manipulate Homelander to his advantage is an intriguing development.
The other bits and pieces we get here are solid. I love the sequence where Kimiko imagines herself singing. MM trying to get out of the game, but having lost his wife in the past year due to him getting back in, is sad given how positively the show left things with him last season, though she has a point since he’s still on the Supe mystery-solving bandwagon. A-Train isn’t running because of his heart condition, which people are starting to notice. The Deep is now on the “I escaped from not-Scientology” media circus. Mallory is a surrogate grandmother to Ryan, which is a sweet place to take things for her. Stormfront survives but is in miserable shape and is likely being abandoned by Homelander. Even Jim Beaver’s character (!!!) is running for President.
Hell, whatever The Boys accomplishes in terms of story and character, it hasn’t ost it s ability to utterly disgust and shock me between seasons. Just hwen I think the show has set the high score for gross, jaw-dropping depravity, it has an Ant-Man-esque hero crawl into his partner’s penis, sneeze his way into killing the dude by growing big by accident, trying to murder Frenchie as a witness by crawling into his rear end Thanos-style, and getting caught and subdued in a giant bag of cocaine. I’ll admit, much of it seems gratuitous to me, but it’s part of the show’s brand, and by god, I cannot deny that they are good at achieving what they set out to do in these sorts of sequences, whether or not the goals are good.
But the most intriguing plot development of all is the reveal that Stan Edgar wants to be out of the superhero business and in the pharma/defense business. The prospect of a twenty-four hour version of Compound V is machiavellian perfection. It means Stan and Vought can still sell the formula and make their ill-gotten gains, without having to deal with the egos or PR insanity of having to stage manage superheroes. It’s cruelly brilliant.
I’ll admit, I’m less intrigued by the Victoria Neuman business, since it feels tacked on to everything else that’s going on. But hopefully we’ll dig deeper into the character and get to know more about what makes her tick and why she’s on this path. And whatever her reasons, the fact that it drags Hughey back into the muck despite him thinking he’s gotten clean makes for a rough ending.
Overall, though, I’m excited to see where season 3 takes all these ideas. This is something of a second pilot, or a new storytelling cycle that puts the characters in markedly new places versus their pretty similar positions from season 1 to season 2. A year passing, and a set of new challenges for hero and villain alike provides promise as we embark on the latest batch of episodes.
[8.3/10] I didn’t expect something close to a happy ending, or at least as happy as you can get in the gray and black world of The Boys. “What I Know” is a rejoinder to that sort of thinking, one that seems directly meant to oppose Maeve’s “Nothing ever changes; nothing ever gets better, and I’m tired,” mentality. It’s an easy sentiment to feel these days, especially in the throes of the real word malign forces this series addresses through abstraction and metaphor. But this finale uses the same tools to suggest that, with the right motivations and the right actions, things can get better, and it’s an unexpectedly wholesome note to land on for such a dark show.
The peak of that is Billy Butcher. When Becca comes to him asking for his help to find Ryan, he cuts a deal with Stan Edgar, who only cares about money, to recover the kid as Vought’s contingency plan against Homelander. His price, though, is that Vought takes Ryan away, so that Billy and Becca can reconcile. His ultimatum is despicable, but true to character. Billy loves Becca, and hates supes, so this gives him what he wants without what he despises. The choice isn’t good, but it’s on brand.
And yet, Becca makes him promise on his dead brother’s soul to reunite her and Ryan, and in the moment of truth, Billy can’t go through with his original scheme. He not only delivers the mother and child to their safe spot and tries to get MM to drive them to Mallory, but he comes clean about the whole thing. He’s willing to sacrifice his own happiness for theirs, not wanting to pull Becca away from a child he loathed for what he represents, and even having the self-awareness to not want to go with them lest he pass on the same anhedonic tough guy bullshit his dad passed down to him. It’s the most decent, selfless thing we’ve ever seen Billy do, and whether it’s from Hughie’s influence, or the wake-up call from seeing his dad, or just his love for and promise to Rebecca, he breaks good in the most profound way he ever has.
Oh yeah, and Stormfront goes down! (For now at least -- it seems like she survived worse from her and Homelander’s S&M sessions, but she’s at least worse for wear.) In the public eye, A-Train pilfers some files from the not-Scientology people, turns them over to Hughie and Annie, and the revelations of her Nazi past make her pesona non grata to the public. In truth, that feels a little pollyanna. It’s a grim truth that Stormfront isn’t wrong when she says that a lot of people like what she’s saying; they just don’t like the word Nazi. It seems plausible that a lot of folks would write it off as fake. But I’ll still take the win of the public turning on her once they find out who she really is, especially when her downfall comes thanks to a person she’d think of as lesser.
But she also gets her frickin’ ass kicked! I’m not sure there’s been a more fistpump-worthy moment in the series than Starlight blasting her, Kimiko getting some licks in for revenge, and Maeve jumping in to get the Big Damn Hero moment. The legitimate “girls get it done” moment is outstanding, not just because it represents the righteous justice delivered to the most deserving person imaginable, but because it features all three heroes choosing to make things better, to right wrongs visited upon them, when they could have chosen not to.
She doesn’t fall at their hands, though. Instead, she falls at Ryan’s. His story is interesting here, someone who tells his father that he’s not like him, but whose powers emerge when his mother is threatened. It is tragic, to say the least, that Ryan inadvertently kills his mother when trying to stop Stormfront from choking her to death. The bitter irony of his attempts to save the person he loves most from pure evil personified, only to lose her in the process, stings, and in an episode with more than one reflection on absent moms, makes you wonder how it’s going to affect the poor boy.
The tragedy certainly affects Billy. His quiet sobs, after Becca asks him to promise that he’ll tell Ryan this wasn’t his fault, are some of Karl Urban’s best acting in the whole show. And for a moment, you believe that he’ll take out his rage on poor Ryan, that his prejudices will catch up to him, that his projected anger at Homelander will result in a confrontation with his overwhelmed kid. That is, until, Homelander himself shows up.
Despite him arguably not being the focus here, this is a great, revealing Homelander episode. I am continually impressed at how The Boys manages to make Homelander a total, irredeemable monster, whose selfish and cruel actions hurt nearly everyone, while also making him a pitiable and pathetic figure, who’s been abused and emotionally scarred until he became this person, with glimmers of humanity beneath the psychopathology.
When Ryan gets overwhelmed by the crowd at a Planet Vought restaurant, Homelander empathizes with his son, talking about how he had a similar experience and felt lonely since the people who raised him were terrified of him. When Stormfront tells him that with Compound V being widespread distributed to where there’s more Supes, he won’t have to go in front of crowds and do the “dancing monkey crap,” it’s the opposite of what he wants to hear. Homelander needs to be in front of crowds, needs to bathe in their adulation, because it’s a hollow replacement for the genuine, intimate, person-to-person love he never had, from a partner or a parent.
And when relating to Ryan, he admits that he used to cry, though hasn’t in a long time, when he went through something similar. As fucked up as his relationship with his son is, Homelander genuinely cares about Ryan, in his own twisted way. He’s trying to replace the relationship he never had with a real father and mother by being on the other side of it, hoping to have family that really loves him. When Ryan chooses to go with Butcher instead, when Maeve shows up to cow him into submission with the video from the plane that threatens to take away the public’s love as well, it renders him alone and unloved again. That bond, fractious though it may be, is severed, and he cries again. Homelander is still a terrifying, twisted psychopath, but for a moment at least, he’s a human being whose lost something precious, and there is genuine pathos in that.
By god, though, the good guys win! The Nazi revelations scuttle Vought’s plans to sell Compound V to the public and the Pentagon. Starlight is cleared of suspicion and returns to the fold. Butcher and the boys are absolved of their crimes. MM reunites with his daughter. Frenchie and Kimiko are relieved of their moral burdens and have the time and space to go dancing. Billy offers kind words and a token of Becca’s perspective to Ryan, finally mentally separating him from his father and being able to see him as a reflection of his mother, before sending him to safety with Mallory.
Victoria Nueman gets put in charge of the Department of Supe Affairs to monitor the metahumans. Mallory gets an off-the-books crew and funding to help that mission. A-Train’s act of decency gets him back in The Seven. Homelander is reduced to jerking off on rooftops from being penned in by everyone else. Hughie and Annie reunite as a couple. Hughie even confronts his inability to stop clinging on to whatever’s around him given his abandonment complex with his own mother, choosing to stand on his own two feet instead. This is as clean and clear a victory as you’re likely to get in the world of The Boys.
Granted, there’s plenty of cliffhangers and hints of potentially grim things to come. It turns out that Neuman is a Supe and the one responsible for all the heads popping, including the head of not-Scientology. The Deep’s deserved but pitiable tale of woe continues, as his return to The Seven goes the way of the dodo when A-Train’s act leaves the speedster taking his place. Hughie going to work for Neuman is as ominous as it is empowering for the kid. Homelander’s dead eyes suggest there’s worse evil that lies within him. And whatever Homelander’s renewed spiritual impotence, A-Train’s efforts to stop a genuine evil, or Maeve and Starlight’s heroics, they’re all part of the Vought machine again.
Yet, as Annie tells Hughie, as hard as it is to rejoin such a collection of schmucks and craven assholes, she views it as her responsibility to keep fighting, keep trying to steer things in the right direction from that place of power, to stay in the fray rather than abandon it to the worst people. At a time when it’s easy to throw up your hands and believe the problems that plague the world are an unwinnable battle, this bleak, cynical show becomes an unlikely source of inspiration -- that if you keep working, keep fighting, keep expanding the franchise of people you care about, then such measured yet momentous victories remain possible.
[7.8/10] It’s being somebody’s child in the world of The Boys. Pretty much everybody in the show has parental issues, and that’s the central theme of this episode.
The biggest of those is Butcher, whose dad (John Noble!) we meet for the first time. When Becca spoke about some hate in him that predated her, we didn’t know that this is where it came from. Butcher’s dad reportedly beat the hell out of his sons, pushed out Billy’s brother to “sink or swim,” and was hard on his boys in a misguided effort to make them tough. It succeeded with Billy, but also turned him into an anhedonic, miserable bastard. Billy obviously still has a ton of issues, one which a confrontation with his father doesn't solve despite his mom’s best intentions, and it helps put Billy’s problems into focus.
Of course, the other big one is poor Ryan, Homelander’s son. Homelander himself has all kinds of parental issues. His mommy complex has been well on display, but it’s also plain that he has issues with his own surrogate father, Dr. Vogelbaum. The “good” doctor tells Billy himself that Homelander was once a sweet kid, one who liked stories of grand adventures and even cuddled up with his would-be dad, until Vogelbaum cracked down on him to make the “greatest hero in the world.” It’s then that Billy realizes he and Homelander suffer from the same pathology, and that maybe they’re equally fucked up, albeit in different ways.
But Homelander’s chief bugaboo is lying, the sense of the world having been kept from him. So when he flies back to Becca’s house, with Stormfront in tow, he’s there to steal his child away and, worse yet, turn him against Becca. In a strange way, he’s a grim reflection of Batman, who tried to form his own crime-fighting family to replace the one he’d lost. Homelander wants to form his own fucked up family, with he and Stormfront as ma and pa, and Ryan as a surrogate self he can turn into his own junior ubermensch.
In a strange way, it comes from a good place, as both he and Becca are trying to avoid the fake, sheltered life Homelander had growing up that turned him into this monster. But it’s devastating, terrifying, gut-wrenching when Homelander exposes the fakeness of their neighborhood, spurs Ryan to hate his mom, and nabs him away from her.
The other big event is a Congressional hearing on Vought, one that has Mallory trying to marshal witnesses to expose the evil corporation. They already have Lamplighter, who’s assigned to be babysat by Hughie. But they’re trying to get Vogelbaum to testify as well. His reasons for refusing are because he doesn’t want to put his family at risk, as a father and grandparent. Mallory knows better than anyone that he’s right, and basically tells MM to give this up so that he can go be with his family.
There’s a grim but strangely sentimental fatalism in The Boys. Annie tells her own mother that everything she believed in is a lie, that the work they do doesn’t matter, that the bad guys profit and prosper. Mallory all but repeats the same line, and the closing bloodbath seems to confirm it. But at the same time, she basically tells MM that if the fight is a losing one anyway, then treasure the time with the people you love instead of waging a losing battle. Hers is a cynical perspective, but also one that comes with the experience of losing something innocent and precious in the name of a fight that couldn’t be won.
Unfortunately for Annie, whether her mom’s in on it or not, their meeting exposes her and burns her with Vought. I still want to know Black Noir’s deal, but him emerging out of nowhere to knockout and kidnap her is utterly terrifying. It gives Hughie and Lamplighter the chance to stop sitting on the sidelines and go become the person who takes action, in an effort to rescue her. The porn and verbiage that motivates the two of them is strange as all get out, but their adventure together is a thrill for a time.
And then things get brutal. Lamplighter self-immolates in a sad scene, uttering that he just wanted to make his dad proud to connect with the larger motif of the episode. He never wanted to rescue Starlight, just find a poetic spot for his suicide. Nevertheless, it manages to free Starlight, who’s trapped in an unilluminated steel cage, by sparking on the emergency lights that allow her to escape. An injured Hughie coming to rescue her, as the two of them meet in the hall with Annie’s mother in tow, shows Starlight that despite her lament earlier, she is not alone. There is at least one person who cares about her more than anything in the world.
Otherwise, Maeve suffers terribly when Elena sees the “real her” after the airplane video and can’t take it. But she has an incredible Big Damn Hero moment when rescuing Annie from Black Noir, with the perfectly ironic solution of jamming an almond joy down his throat for his tree nut allergy. Frenchie and Kimiko have a small but sweet moment of reconciliation after everything, as she begins to teach him her sign language (after he talks about the rougher parts of his own childhood). And even Ashley, amid all of his PR and management, acts like a “real human being” with Maeve, which is subtly uplifting with everything that’s happening.
The other big thing is the way that Homelander and Stormfront’s propaganda is whipping up bigoted elements into a frenzy. We see it at their rallies and the vitriol aimed at the show’s AOC analogue. But we also see it in the chilling opening vignette, where a montage featuring Community’s Real Neil becoming an anti-Supe shooter shows how insidious this rhetoric and instigation can be.
Still, it looks like the (comparatively) good guys have the edge, when despite Lamplighter’s absence, Billy manages to convince Vogelbaum to testify. Then, in one of those scenes that disturbs in the way only The Boys can, everyone in the hearing’s heads start popping. Vogelbaum, the chair, a host of bystanders’ noggins burst like water baloons, and the panic and terror that follows is stomach-churning. Whoever’s doing this (the Eleven-like figure from the last episode?) hasn’t been stopped, and every attempt to rein in Vought or its agents just results in more bloodshed. After a host of parental reunions, the violence still reigns, and none of the children seem better for it. It’s a grim note to end on, but one appropriate to the collection of moms and dads and kids who still seem to carry the scars of their mistakes.
[7.7/10] I appreciate the poetry of Frenchie’s backstory and reveal here. For years, he’s been blaming himself for the death of Mallory’s grandchildren. We find out he was in an impossible position, having to choose between monitoring his target and looking after his friend (and presumable throuple companion) in the midst of an O.D. His choices pleases no one, not even himself. His brief dereliction of duty results in children dying, and his leaving his friends in a moment of crisis to return to his job leaves his friends not trusting him anymore. No wonder he’s so desperate for a measure of redemption.
The twist is that Lamplighter feels the same way. He wasn’t trying to kill those kids; he was trying to kill Mallory. The other fascinating reveal here is that Lamplighter was an asset being blackmailed into helping Mallory’s crew infiltrate the Seven. He was, presumably, trying to get out of that trap, not trying to hurt anybody. The fact that he is as tortured by that night as Frenchie is, and would welcome the release of death and the sense of Mallory getting some justice, gives Frenchie some peace and understanding. When he talks about how much living is the greater torture, he’s not simply encouragig Mallory to spare Lamplighter’s life; he’s talking about his own suffering.
Plus, thank goodness, he apologizes to Kimiko for trying to save her as a way to try to save himself, without contemplating whether she asked to be saved or whether he was overriding her will with his own. I still don’t want them to be romantic. It feels too creepy to me. But I do hope they can reconcile now that he’s made a breakthrough in what his damage is.
Their misadventure with MM and Lamplighter in the Supe testing hospital is a trip. The effort to sneak in goes predictably awry, but the fact that they have to team with Lamplighter leads nicely to all those important reveals. The terror of an Eleven-esque telekinetic young woman, and the absurdity of a Supe with a prehensile dong, make it a thrill when they have to evade a group of jailbroken, tortured metahumans.
Along the way, The Boys gives us another big reveal in terms of the season arc. Vought is not just using Compound V on babies. It’s experimenting to try to get it to work on adults too without side effects. This facility is a testing center, and some of the grown-ups who get the formula become powered individuals, some become sick or deformed, and some just explode. It’s enough in and of itself, but then we get the big twist at the end of the episode.
Stormfront isn’t just a snarky superhero for today. She’s not just Liberty the racist Supe from the past. She is patient zero for Compound V, the wife of Mr. Vought, and as another superhero once put it, “a big fat friggin’ Nazi.” Mr. Vought wasn’t simply trying to make superheroes to protect the world. He was a Nazi leader, trying to construct an army of ubermensches to “defend the culture.” That’s the motivation behind the “hospital” -- to develop a fighting force of Supes that can do their bidding.
It’s a hell of a deconstruction of the power fantasy that superheroes represent. Tying them to the Third Reich idea of genetic superiority and a need to “purify” the world is chilling. It does raise some questions -- like how a racist like Stormfront feels about someone with the complexion of Mr. Edgar running her husband’s company. But it makes the turn that much more terrifying.
So does the prospect of the resolutely Aryan Homelander being groomed by her to lead this army. Homelander is such a child, being unable to wait twenty minutes for Stormfront to get back and see the flowers he bought her -- the rare kind gesture for another soul from the self-centered jerk. Their relationship is profoundly messed up, as their foreplay while crushing a perp’s skull indicates. But it reaches newer, deeper levels of screwed up (if that were possible) with Stormfront coaxing Homelander toward not just a romantic relationship, but leadership of a bigoted, Nazi-fueled race war.
That just leaves Butcher and Starlight. It’s interesting to put the two major figures in Hughie’s life opposite one another. The show lays it on a little thick, but they couldn’t be more different. One reviles Supes; one is a Supe. One is profoundly decent and still believes in doing good, and the other is, if not amoral, then certainly brutally pragmatic in his willingness to use force and imperil civilians. They are not the same, even as the needs of the moment and the influence of one dopey young man seem to be causing them to drift together.
But that’s what they have in common -- despite everything, they both care about Hughie. It brings them together when they’re forced to get him to a hospital after a bad run-in with one of the jailbreakers. Annie laments the loss of life of a bystander whose car they have to take to get Hughie where he needs to go, especially when the kill stems from Butcher reaching for his piece. But at the end of the day, despite their friction, they poke fun at Hughie’s innocence, but acknowledge that he’s too good for either of them, and implicitly, that they're bound by caring for this same, sweet, sad little schlub.
The other developments are interesting enough, if a tad abbreviated. A-Train getting roped into not-Scientology by the organization collecting info and knowing he’s in deep debt and has secrets makes them seem appropriately malevolent. Maeve using The Deep to recover footage from the airplane to try to blackmail Homelander is intriguing, especially with the personal angle that Elena sees it and realizes Maeve’s involvement. These seem more like side stories, but we’ll see where they lead.
Overall, this is a momentous episode, one driven by Frenchie’s reveals and epiphany, that gives him a measure of peace and self-understanding. I’m glad to see it.
If The Boys is usually chock full of superhero films parody, then this episode feels like a love letter to Logan (2017) and (the trailer version of) The New Mutants (2020). This is even more so with the casting of Shawn Ashmore, who played Iceman on X-Men, as Lamplighter.
It opens up with Homelander being sexually aroused by Stormfront while crushing the head of a thief in an alley. It recalls the scene back in Season 1 when Homelander casually rips through a gunman's chest for a show, but this time it's even more vulgar. As Homelander gets more aroused, his grip on the thief's head gets firmer, until it eventually crushes him into pieces. Then, fast forward to the end of the episode, we see Homelander confronting Stormfront, and her opening up to Homelander about her past, while she preaches of the importance of purity of their "race". They then continued to make out. There is something to be said here about indulgence in sexual and power fantasy.
This episode also starts to recenter the orientation. If in the first season we get to see the story progresses from the eyes of Hughie - the only seemingly sane person among the ragtag group of rebels - this episode shows how others see Hughie. Butcher, always an efficient, ruthless killer he is, is contrasted to Annie/Starlight who believes she retains her compassion even though she's a supe. Annie relentlessly tries to stop Butcher from senseless killing; though for Butcher she still inhibits the one thing he hate the most. "What you can't stand is in my blood, I'm a subhuman to you," Annie confronts Butcher. Yet when situation forced her to take extra measures, Annie sees herself doing something that only Butcher would do. "I'm not like you," she insists. However they then find what really makes them similar, but different at the same time: their attraction to Hughie.
Last, The Boys never stops to take a jab to corporatization of superhero. '"'A-Train' is a trademark. You're just another nobody from the South Side of Chicago" reminds me of the very early episodes in S1, when Homelander thought they were still bound by corporate rules (something that he seems to try to break free in this season).
[7.4/10] More of a grab bag episode than anything else. I’m interested in the plot and the twists, but the show seems less focused this season, which makes it harder to invest in what’s happening.
Homelander just gets more and more messed up though, huh? I like what they do to bring him and Stormfront together. His bad viral video gets out; she finds a way to neutralize it using her meme army, and it brings them together. He’s got a problem; she’s got a solution, and it makes him let his guard down. I still don’t know exactly what Stormfront’s game is, but I’m intrigued to find out, and the way she’s able to blackmail or manipulate or otherwise hide in plain site with everyone makes her an interesting villain.
But good lord, I did not need superheroic S&M between them. I will say this for The Boys -- I can’t recall a time when a show made me so uncomfortable on such a consistent basis. It’s provoking a reaction with this stuff, and I don’t know whether to write these scenes off as edgelord nonsense or the unvarnished screwed up lives of powerful people, but it’s effective in getting a response.
The business with the other superheroes is good too. Filming their Justice League/Avengers-style movie is quality fodder for humor. A-Train being strong-armed into retiring and saying his lines makes a terrible person mildly sympathetic. Starlight and Stormfront’s standoff is tense amid the mutual threats, especially when Starlight’s mom gets involved. And I like that Maeve is concerned enough about Homelander that she’s now plotting to take him down to protect Elena, who’s been wrapped up in her new “loud and proud” image makeover.
The Deep’s stuff is less engaging to me at this point. Him doing the Tom Cruise routine is quickly starting to hit diminishing returns, but I suppose it still has some oomph of a takedown of public rehabilitation tours.
Kimiko feels a little directionless, with her turning into a hitman for reasons that are unclear. Maybe she’s trying to lure Stormfront to try to come stop her or something? Who knows. But her telling a bedraggled Frenchie to stop trying to save her is good. Here too, the show seems to be spinning its wheels a bit.
That just leaves the business with Billy, Hughie, and MM holing up in Billy’s aunt’s house. I like seeing how Billy’s changed by being rejected by Becca a bit. He’s ready to call it quits, whether by retirement or death. Having Billy try to remind him what he’s fighting for is a good beat, and I like that we learn a little bit more about him in the process. Finding out that Billy had and lost a little brother who held him in check, much like Hughie, is intriguing. And his deal with Edgar gives the story some extra oomph.
(Random prediction: Maybe Billy’s brother turns out to be Black Noir? That seems like a twist just wild and shocking and unnecessary enough to be true.)
Otherwise, MM continues to be a great and likable character in all of this, chastening Billy and protecting Hughie where he needs to. Billy’s arc is a tad jumbled here, but I like that they take at least an episode to have him grappling with his rejection from Becca before returning to the usual path. And the scene where Homelander blasts a crowd of protestors was shocking, but felt like a cop out when it turned out to just be a fantasy.
Overall, a solid interstitial episode, but one that plays a bit jumbled.
The Boys does its job best when they jab at mockery of how the show biz operates. The first thing Vought does then they know that Queen Maeve is bi is to capitalize it: make her sexuality as a performance in their newest movie. But not only that; they need to make Maeve not just a bi, but a lesbian, and her partner - Elena - has to be made to wear men's fashion. Because "lesbian is a bit more easy to sell" and "Americans are more accepting of gay when they are in clear-cut gender role relationship". Companies like Vought, like its real-life counterpart (Disney), cares much more about how something sells than the nuance behind it. This parody is even funnier considering that they have a Jon Favreau look-a-like and a guy named Joss (Whedon?) who handle the Dawn of Seven movie production.
Aside from that, the episode continues the tense relationship between Starlight and Stormfront, and we start to see how Stormfront attempts to pull strings to maintain her position in The Seven.
Two things I notice though: the part where Homelander murdered a bunch of civilian in the public, that turns out to be an imagination feels a bit like cop-out, however it is interesting that it parallels Hughie's frustration when he lost Robin back in the first eps. of Season 1. The way Noir and Butcher confrontation is handled also feels a bit too easy, especially after the big build up about them being Vought most wanted in earlier episode.
[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.
