The Boys S2E6 Review: One Supe Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Warning! Super Spoilers Ahead!
Read Steve’s review of the previous episode here.
The Boys spends this week serving up blasts from the past as the season begins its initial descent towards the finale. It isn’t totally fair to label the backstory that emerges in “The Bloody Doors Off” as yesterday’s news because the characters who drag skeletons out of their closets are still haunted by them. The episode—which, like the two preceding ones, leans heavier on exposition than advancing the plot—suggests our past is our destiny. Frenchie wants absolution for his sins. Stormfront wants to finish the genocidal project her late husband started. The past isn’t in the past for either of them or any of us; it’s happening, right now, beneath our feet.
Frenchie comes face-to-face with his past when he confronts the man responsible for the tremendous guilt he carries. Last week, Annie did a little snooping on Stormfront’s laptop and learned Vought is up to no good at the Sage Grove Medical Center. She joins the Boys’ investigation of the psychiatric hospital and discovers it’s actually a front for Vought to test Compound V on adults. Lamplighter, the supe who killed Mallory’s grandchildren on Frenchie’s watch, runs the facility on Stormfront’s orders and torches any patient who outlives their usefulness. Frenchie’s guilt ignites into rage. He misses his chance to mete out justice when the patients escape and go on a rampage, forcing him, Mother’s Milk, and Kimiko to work with Lamplighter in order to escape.
Sage Grove creates another set of strange bedfellows when an escaped patient flips the Boys’ van with Hughie still inside. He’s severely wounded, so Butcher and Annie need to swallow their grievances with each other to save their shared sidekick. Annie winds up killing a civilian who won’t surrender his car, and she’s surprisingly numb toward the outcome. Annie, who wants to believe in heroes more than anyone else, just created the same kind of collateral damage that radicalized Hughie. Is she still a hero? Does that word even mean anything? These questions shape her character like a glacier over the earth. Eventually, she and Butcher bond by sharing their love for Hughie once he’s safe and sound.
Back in the asylum, Frenchie and Lamplighter interrogate each other over the night they both regret. A series of flashbacks reveal Frenchie abandoned his pursuit of Lamplighter for thirty minutes to save a friend from overdosing. Since that friend fatally overdosed months later, Frenchie feels like he failed three people that night. Similarly, Lamplighter confesses he meant to kill Mallory and didn’t realize he opened fire on her grandchildren until it was too late. This crash course in group therapy gives Frenchie catharsis, and when Mallory arrives to exact revenge against Lamplighter, he pleads for her to spare the supe. Death “would only end his torment,” he tells her. We can’t fight in the present to make peace with the past; these futile efforts do nothing but keep our wounds open. All we can do is be honest with ourselves and find a way to move on.
This adventure also offers powerful moments for Frenchie and Kimiko. His outburst in the hospital is the first time (that we know of) where Kimiko learns about Frenchie’s trauma. She recognizes the same guilt, shame, and loss that she feels over her brother’s death, and it gives her a new appreciation of Frenchie’s behavior. He ends the episode apologizing to Kimiko for his attempts to control her, and I actually thought she was going to say something to him in response.
Maeve wrestles with the past when she recruits The Deep to bring her footage from the flight she and Homelander left to die in the last season. She wants to use the evidence to blackmail her way out from under her teammate’s thumb, but Elena finds it first. She’s traumatized. Will Maeve’s efforts to win her freedom cost her Elena? The Deep, meanwhile, uses his visit to Maeve as an opportunity to lure A-Train into the Church of the Collective, where its leader Alastair Adana offers to help The Seven’s newest former member.
Lastly, Homelander spends his time throwing tantrums when Stormfront won’t give him attention. She pacifies him with personal details in lieu of milk: She was born in 1919 and received the first successful injection of Compound V from her husband, Frederick Vought. Stormfront is literally a Nazi. After generations in hiding, she’s returned to wage a superpowered race war. Throughout this season, I’ve discussed how The Boys explores Alan Moore’s interpretation of superheroes as “white supremacist dreams of the master race,” and Stormfront acknowledges that’s exactly the point. “You are everything that we dreamed of,” she tells Homelander. If God created man in his own image, then this superman was created in a white supremacist’s image of God.
Homelander doesn’t buy into Stormfront’s talk about Vought’s true destiny and racial superiority until she offers him a place at the head of the supe-stormtrooper army that will purify the world. Prior to that moment, Stormfront is a liability. A Nazi in The Seven? As if he didn’t have enough PR headaches. But if Homelander were king of the new master race? He wouldn’t just be loved. He’d be idolized, worshipped. It’s easy for Homelander to embrace the blood magic of white supremacy since he’s already in love with his own supremacy. He kisses Stormfront because he senses how she adores him, and he doesn’t object to her methods as long as she can deliver more of that feeling. The lives of a few nobodies are a small price to pay if it means the people—the right people—will love him for it.
Notes from the Peanut Gallery:
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The riot scenes inside Sage Grove are the kind of over-the-top, “Did you see that?” sequences of blood and gore that are a hallmark for The Boys, and I definitely wanted more. One of the more memorable inmates to lash out is known as Love Sausage: The actor’s name is Andrew Jackson, but the character’s Andrew Johnson is what you need to watch out for.
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When Edgar introduces Compound V’s Nazi origins in the season opener, he says that Frederick Vought tested the formula on subjects at Dachau. If Stormfront received the first successful injection, does that mean she was one of the Jews or “undesirables” interned there? If so, why is she so committed to white supremacy? Curious.
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Once again, I find it hard to believe Annie and the Boys can just have their merry adventures without being spotted. They can just walk into a hospital and nobody realizes their new patient and his friends are some of the most wanted fugitives in America? And Hughie gets treatment without insurance? That’s just too unrealistic!