The Boys: Good for the Soul

 "You played my butt like jazz. With poise and skill, and willingness to improvise."

Hooray for The Boys having to do the courage to do an episode which so joyously and righteously skewers the evils of fundamentalist Christianity (which, I stress, is a totally different thing from actual Christianity) any hypocrity, cynicism and greed that lies behind the whole thing. It's nice that we get different perspectives, too, from the cheerfully irreverent atheism of Burcher to the honest and simple religiosity of Annie, whose faith may not be dogmatic but is much more real than that of the forces behind fundamentalism.

The beginning is very dark, as Popclaw confesses to A-Train... and he immediately makes her take a fatal heroin overdose. We then learn that he did this at the orders of Homelander, who now controls him even more deeply than before... and views the video of what happened that day. Including Frenchie's face.

Frenchie is in trouble. Yet he seems to be developing a real bond with the girl which is touching to see, and his joy at the end when she seems to heal herself after apparently dying is deeply touching and, indeed, humanising. Hughie, too, impresses MM and, indeed, the viewer hugely as he manages to blackmail Ezekiel successfully, improvising after things go terribly wrong.

Hughie, also, is struggling not only with the conflict between the mission and real feelings for Annie but with the conflict between these feelings and those for the recently departed Robin, whose ghost is ever-present. Annie, meanwhile, struggles with the expectations of the Believe festival, under pressure to pretend beliefs she does not hold, not only for the Seven but her own manipulative, selfish mother.

And then there's Homelander's speech, and the subsequent scene with him and Madelyn, which... let's not go there. It reminds me of Nero and his mother in I, Clavdivs. But quickly moving on... there are other things, too. Rebecca has been missing for eight years yet Butcher won't give up. And Maeve has a bit of a drunken breakdown in front of her ex after last episode's hijack hijinks.

But this is the best ending yet- Compound V is being given to a baby. And Butcher uses the baby as a gun. This is, still, awesome telly.