The Boys: The Instant White-Hot Wild

 "My cake hole will remain open!"

This is such a The Boys season finale. There's lots of fighting. There's lots of characters, and lots of character development. So much happens. Deep breath.

Homelander wins, the bastard. He has his son, and ends up as pretty much openly fascist. Billy Burcher loses, with a yrest to live after using Temp V, and having turned against Soldier Boy to save the son who isn't even his son by blood but by love- the opposite of Soldier Boy and Homelander, both products of a cycle of abuse, that seems to be spreading to Ryan. The look on his face at the Trump-Nazi rally is chilling.

Incidentally, any Americans reading this who support Trump, or the Republican party, you're not conservatives, you're Nazis, ok? Kindly *** yourselves. Thank you.

Maevew, the only supe (Annie aside, and yes; they're both women) not to be corrupted by her powers, gets a heroic death and gets to live, sans powers if sadly also sans eye, but her ex is back with her. I think, overall, she has her well-deserved happiness.

The Deep is... ever more tragic and pathetic. MM is a decent man worthy of respect, who loves his daughter and shows the dad he can be, a shining ecxample to all of us who love our little girls so much it hurts. Kimiko and Frenchie are the cutest couple ever. And Annie gets a supremely satisfying ending, loved and worshipped by Hughie and discarding her costume to join the Boys.

And yeah, Black Noir. His death. As Oscar Wilde said of Little Nell, you'd need a heart of stone not to laugh.

The Boys: Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed

 "Frenchie, are you high?"

"Well, that goes without saying!"

Well- SPOILER alert- that's quite the ending; Homelander, fast on the way to being discredited by Annie's media-savvy exp.loitation of the right-wing extremist killer's incredible thickness, learns that Soldier Boy- who never, in fact, fought in the Second World War; it was all propaganda- is the Darth to his Luke. Dumf dumf dumf. Well then.

Then we have the beautiful, beautiful romance between Kimiko, newly empowered out of love for him, and Frenchie. Yeah, he's going to die next episode, isn't he? It is the finale, after all.

There's so much more, though. Billy's past, and his demons surrounding Lennie, and a character whose powers are to make you have horrible nightmares until you die of dehydration. Urrrgh. This shows us his guilt about Lennie (his suicide...damn!), about Becca, about surrogate son Hughie... who he is prepare4d to allow to die of Compound V lesions for the sake of killing Homelander (will he die?). Wow.

Then there's the delicious, er, threesome scene between the Deep, his wife and an octopus. A-Train waking up with the transplanted heart of a racist wanker. There's the revelation of what has happened to poor, vengeful Maeve. There's poor MM, cuckolded by an absolute wanker.  

Most of all, threre's Black Noir, the cartoon animals, and the revelations of what happened to psycho stoner poser Soldier Boy.

This programme is one of the best things on telly. Sod it; Stranger Things isn't on any more. It's THE best thing on telly.

The Boys: Last Time to Look upon This World of Lies

 "With great power comes the certainty that you'll turn into a right ****!"

Wow. The Boys does it again. We have the Legend, a coke-snorting retired celebrity monger who may actually be based on Stan Lee. We have Ashley as CEO of Vought, but Homelander, like Trump, finds himself in power (the superpowers are, of course, a metaphor of that), but far too thick to exercise it effectively.

We have the loving but awkward relationship between Annie and Hughie. He, being male, feels he should protect her, hence his increasing addiction to Temp V. Yet he's wrong. She's a supe.She needs not his protection, but his love. And so the gender roles are reversed. Can Hughie be a real man and be the loving man the superhero Starlight needs? The signs are not good.

Homelander, who has always been the villain, takes shape even more as the big bad. His aggressive assault on Maeve- what happens to her? Is she dead?- is a shocking as Maeve herself who, in giving an increasingly unhinged Billy Butcher some more Temp V, and being told that supes like her shoild be destroyed... kisses him. Well then.

And Soldier Boy is loose, in the USA. His relationship with OnlyFans star Crimson Countess has disturbing parallels with that of Maeve and Homelander. Crimson Countess ends up dead. Does Maeve?

This is superb telly, outrageous and nuanced. A-Train's subplot, in which he gets to realise, at last, the true nature of a "supe lives matter" racist supe wanker wjho deserves a good kicking, is perhaps the most interesting. This is bloody brilliant.

The Boys: Glorious Five Year Plan

 "Let's just say that Maeve can bend a steel pipe without using her hands."

Wow. So much happens in this episode... and Homelander is even more out of control. Can anybody stop him? He nonchalantly outmaneovres pretty much everybody who tries to stop him, all while acting as much of a dick as he possibly can, from getting Victoria Neumann to destroy Stan Edgar's career in disgrace, seemingly- although Edgar is not without a parting shot- to killing Annie's ex as a chilling warning.

And yet... this isn't four dimensional chess. Homelander pulls the strings through fear, not cleverness. And, of course, there's a weapon in Russia than may be able to kill him.

Scenes in Russia are as shocking as any featuring Homelander or, indeed, the hints of Ashley's sex life. Kimiko is forced against her will to go on a mission, involving death by dildo to some oligarch, that profoundly shocks her to the point that she and Frenchie agree to leave Butcher. So. naturally- and shockingly- she is killed. That's two deaths this episode.

Oh, and it turns out the Russians'weapon is- Soldier Boy himself, somehow, to MM's disgust.

And Billy is as out of control as Homelander, even dragging Hughie along with him in his addiction to temp V and the powers it brings, very visibly coded as a Class A drug. It's war between the two of them. And neither seems to care about collateral damage...

Superb and shocking in equal measure. It always is.

The Boys: Payback

 "He's trying to get in my ass!"

I'm not sure there's much I can say about THAT particular CGI-heavy scene that is a twisted parody of Fantastic Voyage with added sexual bizarreness and gore, but... yeah. It pretty much epitomises The Boys. There's no point thinking "don't go there"; it will. That's why we love it.

Although I will now never think of the Atom or Ant Man  in the same way again. Ahem.

Anyway, as a season opener this is a masterpiece. It introduces and develops an impressive number of characters and threads with wit and aplomb. It's all logically developed, too, in ways that work perfectly with the characters. So Billy chafes at having Hughie as his boss, while Hughie seems happy and contented reducing supe killings by 60% working for Congresswoman Victoria Neumann... until he discovers, at the end, that she has a past, and incidentally that she makes heads explode.

There's so much going on, though. The animosity between Homelander and the gone-to-seed A-Train, who no longer runs. The fact that Edgar wants Starlight to be co-boss of the Seven with Homelander, pissing off the infantile superman and poisoning the rather good sexual dynamic between Annie and Hughie. It's the temptation of power: will she be corrupted? Will she use it for good? Hughie certainly could have reacted better, particuarly as the ex (from a reality show to audition the next member of the Seven, a delicious concept) is so wet.

Fascinatingly, though, we have Homelander trying to connect with Billy of all people- going clean for his son- after visiting a hospitalised and permanently disabled Stormfront who unrequitedly worships (and, er, hand jobs!) him as an ubermensch ("No one suffers like you do" uttered by a paraplegic half-blind Nazi). We also have a director who gets off sexually on being humiliated on how shit a director he is, and... yeah. Welcome to a new series of The Boys, ladies and gentlemen.

The Boys: What I Know

 "People love what I have to day. They believe in it. They just don't like the word "Nazi", that's all."

Wow. That was even more eventful than last season's crammed finale, and bloody good bit of telly. Where to start?

Of course, it was clear Stormfront was going down. She's the season Big Bad who can be defeated in the end while still leaving Vought and Homelander to do theit nefarious stuff- this time without any of that Nazi baggage, which isn't good for business. But her exposure, and how it's Ryan who permanently disables her as she tries to kill his mum, is dramatic and cathartic. Rebecca's death is shocking (it's not Ryan's fault; she would still have died if he hadn't have lashed out), but she dies reconciled with Butcher after he couldn't bring himself to betray her- and Billy Butcher, the ultimate supe hater, now seems to have a stepson of sorts, even if Ryan is in the hands of the CIA.

Maeve gets redemption, finally using her blackmail footage for good. The Deep's hilarious journey with the not-Scientologits ends hilariously as it's A-Train, not him, who ends up back in the Seven, rewarded for his "initiative" in exposing Stormfront, the new convenient scapegoat for everything. There's a reset button of sorts, at least supeficially, with Annie and Maeve back in the fold, while the Boys are now legal- and official? None of this feels like a stable status quo, though, especially with the shocking reveal as to who exactly was blowing up all them heads.

This was damn good. How long till the next season...?

The Boys: Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker

 "You're the cuck fluffer!"

It'd the penultimate episode, and it's... explosive. After last episode's revelations we get plenty of rallies from Homelander and Stormfront in which, being Nazis, they cheerfully use the dog whistling slang of Nazi-loving MAGA types today "snowflake", "SJW", etc. Just to drive the point home, we begin with one of Stormfront's online zealots being slowly radicalised online until the point he murders someone, of course from an ethnic minority. It's clear what the subtext is here. And this series was released in October 2020, shortly before, thankfully, Trump was humiliated.

Yet the very final scene has uncomfortable echoes. The Boys, Mallory etc have done their best- including Billy Butcher being quite the unhinged psychotic- to expose Vaught by democratic means... and the congressional hearing is brought to a bloody end by those exploding heads. Is it Stormfront? Homelander? Either way, this ends-justify-the-means assault on democracy very much echoes the terrorist attack on the US Capitol.

Other stuff happens too, of course. Homelander and Stormfront turn Ryan against Rebecca. Butcher meets his dad, played by a fellow cast member from Lord of the Rings. A-Train is having doubts about the cult as that Archer bloke is fair gamed.

Also, Lamplighter self-immolates and so allows Hughie to rescue the now exposed Annie by means of Lamplighter's severed hand. Yep, only on The Boys.

This is gloriously evil telly. And it' actually about something to boot. I love it.

The Boys: The Bloody Doors Off

 "A bigot and a bully..."

Wow. This episode is full of revelations and superb character moments. I mean, scenes such as a bloke dissolving his own face with his own acidic vomit, or MM getting strangled by a bloke's enormous penis- yes, I just wrote that- don't even register.

The bulk of the episode consists of the Boys and Annie following up a lead to a mental hospital in Pennsylvania. Here we learn of the incident, years before, where Colonel Grace Mallory employed Butcher, MM and Frenche to get at Vought via Lamplighter. Her children died horribly, Frenchie had conflicting loyalties, and Lamploghter turns out to be played by Iceman from the X-Men films.

Oh, and Stormfront seems to be behind the facility, which is all about trying to stabilise Compound V. And Annie and Butcher seem to bond a bit courtest of Hughie being badly hurt, and some stupid wanker who pulled a gun on them whinging that "this is a Stand Your Ground state". I've got no sympathy from the psycho whatsoever. 

Also, the Deep and his puppetmasters seem to be doing quite well in getting A-train into the cult. And a shocked Elena sees how Maeve was planning to blackmail Homelander with footage from the plane.

All this is dramatic enough, but we end with a bombshell... Stormfront was born in 1919, is Frederick Vought's widow and the firt person ever infected wirh Compound V. And she's a full-on, hob-nobbing with Himmler and Goebells, Nazi, who worships Homelander as the perfect Aryan ubermensch. Well then,

The Boys: We Gotta Go Now

 "Expecting a happy ending, were we? Sorry, Hughie. It ain't that kind of massage parlour."

This is, I suppose, a midseason episode which, more than most episodes, is quite clearly geared towards exposition and moving the pieces about to advance the season arc. But it's still bloody awesome. And it ends with possibly the kinkiest sex scene in all of screen history, between two uber-powerful and nigh-indestructible beings. "I don't break easily", says Stotmfront. Indeed. It's a pity she's such a white supremacist bitch. The confrontation between her and Annie is awesome, but my money's on Annie.

We also learn a lot about Billy Butcher, not least his bloody awesome aunt, and more of a focus on his self-destructive streak. It's fascinating that Hughie- his canary- is a kind of surrogate younger brother. The scenes of Maeve's sexual orientation being exploited for publicity are horrible, but it's interesting to see that she plans to bring down Homelander, just as Stormfron is using him.

Ah, Stormfront. By now it's clear she's the big bad. I really want to know where this is going...

The Boys: Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men

 "You are my real family."

This is an episode all about family, of various sorts- Kimiko and her doomed brother; Homelander and his rejection by his son (ha!) versus his family in the Seven; the Deep's relationship with the cult he's fallen for. But its also pivota;. The Compound V secret is out- well done, Annie- and the relationship between prospective alpha males Hughie and Burcher is getting complicated.

Yet, as ever, it's about the little things. Annie's humiliation of the Deep after the incident with the bloodied CGI whale, and Homelander's comment that "Your gill is showing. Cover it up. It's disgusting." MM as the grown-up amongst the Boys, and Frenchie's compassion for Kimiko. Edgar's smooth corporate evil. Oh, and one big thing- Stormfront seems to be competing with Homelander and briefly shows herself to be a murdering racist bitch. Bit of a shock, that.

This is bloody good telly, yet again. I have no idea where this is going.

The Boys: Proper Preparation and Planning

 "What does it matter whether heroes have a dick or a vag?"

Two episodes in and the various establishing plotlines have a bit of time to breathe.On the one hand we have the creepiness of Homelander insisting on beng involved in the life of his son Ryan, with Becca being understandably really rather freaked out. But, on the other side of the coin, in's becoming increasingly clear to Hughie- and the other Boys- just how unhinged Butcher is becoming.

Also, the Deep is getting further unto this dodgy cult, this time listening to his gills psychoanalyse him in the voice of Patton Oswalt, courtesy of some psychedelic mushrooms and some truly terrible music from the awful Goo Goo Dolls. Stormfront is mysterious- seemingly given licence to be cynical and not cooperate with all the media stuff. I'm sure she has secrets, a hinterland, and an agenda that will be revealed. We also have a nice bit of mutually assured destruction bvia blackmail between Annie and A-Train. And, er, Homelander being pervy about milk again.

But most interestingly, the Boys go after this mysterious Supe terrorist- and it's Kimiko's brother, who turns out to have a rather different agenda. It's all looking very complicated and very unstable, with Homelander at the centre of it all: as a dangerous, sociopathis Superman who can do anything he wants. I'm loving the darkness of this world.

The Boys: You Found Me

 "I was just like you. And then I started givng pieces of myself away, and I guess I gave away everything."

This was an... eventful season finale. Highly satisfying, full of shocks, and very Garth Ennis indeed. It also contains the most disturbng sex scene since Nero and Agripinilla in I, Clavdivs, but that's The Boys for you.

There are of course shocks galore. Homelander kills Madelyn at the end like a bastard, shortly after she gets promoted by the mysterious Mr Edgar whom we will certainly be seeing again as he's played by Giancarlo Esposito. We meet the mysterious Grace. These terrorist supes were deliberately created by Homelander so Vought can make more money. And, of course, we learn the truth at the end- Becca is alive, in suburbia and raising her son with Homelander. Boom.

But it's not just shocks, it's masterful resolution of character arcs. Hence Madelyn's own petard hoisting her. Hence A-train getting back on the Compound V and having a heart attack. Hence Hughie slowly seeing how unhinged Butcher is and returning to his true friends. Hence Annie, knowing the truth about Compound V, confronting her manipulating, gaslighting mother. Hence her deciding to be a real hero after all following an unexpected pep talk, of sorts. from Queen Maeve. Hence the Deep's Britney Spears moment. Hence Annie and Hughie maybe having a future togeher after all.

This is a finale that delivers on the shocks and surprises while still having time for character, humour andsubtext. Its magnificent. 

Season Two to follow within days...

The Boys: The Self-Preservation Society

 "There's always a choice!"

This is an extraordinary- and unusually serious- episode where lots of threads come together and we realise just how damned elegant the plotting is as Homelander reveals the Boys to the surviving Seven- and greatly enjoys doing so, right bastard that he is.

Poor Annie is shot by both sides, as Howard Devoto would have said: suspected initially by Homelander of being in league with Hughie while Butcher remains convinced she's a fully invested member of the supe conspiracy. We also get origin stories, sort of, for both Homelander and Butcher, the damaged indivuiduals at opposite poles. Homelander was raised as a lab rat, while we learn that Becca, after being raped, became pregnant with Homelander's child and died horribly in childbirth.

Parallels abound. After being fugitives the Boys finally accept Fed protection after MM persuades Butcher, and suddenly the Feds have leverage to kep supes and the US military separate. And then... suddenly emerges a terrorist supe in Damascus. Oh dear. Then we have the only comic relief with the Deep in Nowheresville, Ohio... except, on what I suppose could be a kind of poetic justice, a girl hes invited to his room, well, rapes him. In the gills.

There's a lot of pain here. MM's wfe seems to dump him. Annie feels understandably betrayed by the man she trusted. Everthing is very dark. It's all quite masterfully done, and here comes the finale...

The Boys: The Innocents

 "It snapped off..."

They cast Haley Joel Osment as an ex-child star who is now all washed up. That is simply the most meta thing ever. And it's brilliant.

And so is the episode. We see the fakeness of life in the Seven clearly, with manufactured documentary footage showing very clearly how curated are their lives, their histories, even their feeling. Starlight's cry of genuine rage last episode is gradually altered to fit a pre-conceived narrative, with the Deep uttering a carefully crafted apology. Yet the Boys are discovering the truth, piece by piece. All superheroes are manufactured in childhood with the possible exception of Homelander- where did he come from, then?

This is the episode where we learn what's motivating Butcher- his wife was raped eight years ago by Homelander and then vanished, which is horrible, and one of many example of how the untouchable supes ruin lives. Yet Butcher is very blsck and white about the supes. He doesn't trust Mesmer (quite rightly!), and won't believe that Annie is genuine. He's very big on the truth... yet he lies to the team at the end having turned down official status from the Feds. There's a strong theme throughout of truth versus lies. And Homelander is the still, evil centre of all that is wrong.

And poor Hughie is going to have to betray somebody...

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.

The Boys: The Female of the Species

 "How do you know so much about the Spice Girls?"

Butcher's monologue about the Spice Girls alone would make this a bloody excellent hour of telly. But there's more. So much more I'm really enjoyng The Boys. Every episode advances the arc in various wool ways with lots of character development, world building, and the kind of dark humour that can only have come from the brain of Garth Ennis.

We begin with an intriguing flashback to Butcher's wife or girlfriend Rebecca who is no longer around- presumably dead? I'm sure we will be drip fed much more of this backstory over the coming episodes. We aso learn more about the Compound V den- A-Train has been running it, and V has been fed to a mysterious and now missing girl who speaks no English and has fearsome powers.

But there's much more. Horrifyingly, Homelander and Queen Maeve (mainly that cynical, self-centred bastard Homelander) arrogantly swan around while trying to stop a hijacking... and end up having to leave all 123 passengers to die as the plane crashes, deliberately not even saving a few people so there can be no witnesses to their incompetence. It's a magnificent sequence that reveals so much about these characters and this world. And worse, Homelander manages to turn it to the supes' advantage.

Interestingly, though, Maeve is clearly having a quiet attack of conscience. This whole sequence, if anything, overshadows the "Boys" and their search for the mysterious girl as they struggle to trust each other. But this is yet another episode of incredibly good telly. And next episode Hughie is expected to blackmail Ezekiel, a kind of closeted, Chrstian fundamentalist Mr Fantastic...

Moon (2009)

"I want to go home..."

Well, it's the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landing so I'm blogging this splendid film- what else?

It’s a wonderful film, of course. Bowie’s lad done good; it can’t be easy being the offspring of a genius, and Duncan Jones did well to eschew music, where expectations would have been impossible, in favour of another art form. He chose directing and, whatever happens in his career from now on (his career since 2009 seems to have been variable), he has this splendid achievement to his name.

Sam Rockwell is also superb and, indeed, has to be; he’s the only actor to have more than a cameo here, amusing and disorienting though it is to see Matt Berry as his boss. But the other character is the ship computer, Gerry, whom I shall try not to compare to HAL- oops- and who is creepily voiced by a pre-scandal Kevin Spacey. Gerty is creepy; not least because of those smileys.

These are all just surface things, though; what makes this film sing is its ideas and themes, of corporate ethics in a world where private corporations mine Helium-3 from the Lunar surface, yes, but mainly about- how shall I put it- themes of self and consciousness. This is serious science fiction with a twist, a Tharg’s Future Shock, if you will, or an rxtended episode of Black Mirror. And it’s wonderful.