The Boys S2E1 Review: Lie Like You Mean It
Warning! Super Spoilers Ahead!
The long wait is over at last and season two of The Boys is finally upon us! I discovered the show back in July, so mercifully for me, the long wait was only about two months. Those few weeks still felt like years since I was essentially watching a pot come to a boil from the moment I finished binging the first season until Amazon rolled out new episodes. Time feels longer and longer the shorter we need to wait.
This dichotomy—what feels real versus what actually is real—lies at the heart of “The Big Ride,” the first episode of this season. I’ve waited longer for a doctor’s appointment than I did for The Boys to return, yet my hunger for more supe-antics distorted my perception until I thought I’d been holding my breath since the Obama administration. “The Big Ride” takes great pains to reveal how truth is just a reflection of what we choose to accept, either because it’s what we’re told or because it’s what we need to believe in order to get through the day.
No character embodies the contrast between image and reality quite like Homelander. Our first glimpse of him comes at the memorial service for Translucent, where he eulogizes the invisible goner and treats his glass casket like a soapbox to espouse the need for superheroes. It’s a made-for-TV moment designed to reinforce the mythology of the supes, but it’s made for TV; there’s nothing real about it. For example, although we know the glass casket must be empty, Vought plays it off like Translucent rests invisibly in peace within it. The truth, like Translucent, is a trick of the light, another product for Vought to tweak and bring to market.
Homelander then gets to work throwing his weight around. He rehires PR exec Ashley Barrett to serve as his corporate spy. He brutally incapacitates Ashley’s candidate to join The Seven because he’s the one who gets to make decisions about who joins his team. It’s a lot of work to illustrate he’s the new sheriff in town now that Madelyn Stillwell is out of the picture.
Meanwhile, Hughie, Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, and Kimiko have been living underground to keep Vought off their scent. Their endgame is simple enough—escape Vought’s clutches with their lives—but Hughie can’t stay out of the fight and secretly meets with Starlight to plot the corporation’s downfall. He points Annie toward a supe named Gecko, a lab rat at Vought whose limbs regrow when removed, as a target who can get them Compound V. Annie blackmails Gecko using footage from his side hustle as a mutant hooker, who tries to deflect saying that he doesn’t know what she’s talking about and pointing out that they used to go to Bible camp together. “It’s all lies,” she says, perfectly setting up the next scene.
Homelander and Queen Maeve are shooting a commercial promoting supe involvement in the military alongside Marines at a desert base. Except, they’re not. They’re on a set somewhere beside actors posing as servicemen. Once again, Vought is engineering a lie to look, walk, and quack like the truth to advance their agenda, and they’re confident the public will eat it up since it aligns with the feel-good myth about supes they already believe. And who helps us see through the lie? Stormfront, a hero who bursts onto set livestreaming the news she’s been named the newest member of The Seven by Vought CEO Stan Edgar. This threatens Homelander on two levels: First, he’s made it clear that he wants final say on who joins The Seven, and second, Stormfront’s livestream pierces the carefully constructed lies surrounding Homelander’s image.
Unable to take such a challenge to his authority lying down, Homelander strolls into Edgar’s office and confronts him about the new hire without first getting the caped crusader’s blessing. Edgar, however, takes Homelander to school and points out that he’s just another product in the Vought lineup before sending the supe to bed with no supper. Spectacularly deflated, Homelander flies off to visit Becca and his son.
The sparring match between Homelander and Edgar is my favorite scene of the episode because it includes a key history lesson. Edgar reveals that Frederick Vought, the company’s founder, was a Nazi scientist who developed Compound V by experimenting on human subjects at Dachau; he defected to the US during World War II and “became as Wonder Bread American as Disney and Edison.” In a series filled with mind-bending twists, perhaps the most chilling is the revelation that the secret sauce responsible for superheroes has its roots in eugenics. Alan Moore, the writer behind the iconic graphic novel Watchmen, said in an interview that “[Superheroes] are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race.” It’s hard to imagine a clearer representation of supes’ Aryan implications than a literal Übermensch with blonde hair and blue eyes who owes his existence to a Nazi supergenius.
In Ohio, after a booze-soaked bender, The Deep winds up in jail. He’s bailed out by local supe Eagle the Archer and introduced to Carol, a woman who Eagle says helped him overcome a period of doubt after he botched a hostage situation. “Archery isn’t irrelevant,” Eagle says, as Carol silently mouths the same phrase, “It’s timeless. It’s a pure and ancient art.” Carol’s power seems to be suggesting the truth to vulnerable people to get them to see a certain light. The Deep senses a red flag and tries to leave, but Carol declares that she can get him back into the seven and hands him a book about something called The Church of the Collective. It’s cult time!
Things keep geting worse for Hughie and friends as they discover their criminal hosts smuggled a supe-terrorist into the country. For MM and Frenchie, this is just more reason to bail, but Hughie wants to do something about it. “Now all I have is this,” the lad says.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this line came straight from Butcher’s lips. Hughie has grown to resent Butcher over the way he manipulated others into taking up his personal vendettas, yet now we see Hughie taking the same risky behaviors and dragging his comrades into his own crusade for revenge. It’ll be interesting to watch if the thirst for vengeance leads Hughie down the same path as the man he now seems to hate or if he can find his own way.
Anyway, Hughie convinces MM and Frenchie to meet with CIA Deputy Director Susan Raynor. Their info leads her to have an epiphany about Vought’s plan in their game of 4D nuclear chess, but before she can explain, her head explodes. By the time the boys retreat to their gangland lair and clean the brains out of their hair, who should walk in but Billy Butcher. “Don’t worry,” he tells the group, “Daddy’s home.”
Notes from the Peanut Gallery:
I love it when real-world media figures cameo or appear as themselves in shows and movies; in “The Big Ride,” we get Seth Rogen discussing the Translucent film franchise and Chris Hansen hosting a true crime show profiling how Butcher apparently murdered Stilwell. It’s funny, first of all, but it makes the world of The Boys feel even more familiar and nods to the media’s role in the creation of truth.
If FDR pardoned and recruited Vought to secure his work on Compound V for America, then why were the CIA and FDA unaware of its existence? Wouldn’t the government have held onto that research? Does the government have its own secret battalion of supes? I wonder if this is just a plot hole or if we’ll come back to it in the future.
Butcher’s return, especially his line that “Daddy’s home,” felt eerily similar to Homelander’s sudden arrival at Becca’s doorstep. I think the show does a great job juxtaposing characters to show how similar they really are.