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 Sopranos: Down Neck

"Meadow was one thing- this is my son."

A particularly good episode this time as we deal with the themes of destiny versus free will in the terms of whether children are fated to repeat the mistakes of their parents- and the corruption of being brought up by the fruits of immoral earnings. This latter point applies not only to Mafia families but to all of us, as Tony implies with his comments on polluters- but don’t we all benefit from slave labour in poor countries, and don’t we all contribute to unsustainable emissions of CO2, something far more acute now than twenty years ago?

Yes. 1999 was twenty years ago. I know, it’s appalling.

We have two parallel storylines of Mafia sons- young Anthony is found bucking and drinking communion wine at school which leads to friction between Carmela and Tony over whether or not he has ADD, a great ‘90s debate to fit alongside, well, Prozac. The two of them eventually unite over the view that it’s all over-medicalised bollocks but, of course, the truth is more subjective as it always will be with any condition where one needs to exhibit a number of subjective indicators. ADHD, like personality disorders, may be artificial constructs, but they can be useful. And Tony learns that Anthony knows, from school, what he does for a living. There’s a lot of angst about the younger generation finding out about “this thing of ours” and how it affects their life chances- but, on the other hand, it’s Mafia money that sends the Soprano kids to private schools.

This is contrasted with fascinating flashbacks first appearing after a superb semi-dreamlike sequence in which Tony wakes up to his wife and son rowing in the background, and takes his Prozac to the splendid sound of Jefferson Airplane’s famous trippy rodent-based classic. This takes him back to 1967, a world of parental authority and casual racism, and the first time he sees his father and uncle beating a bloke up- and seeing his father getting arrested. We also see how disturbing his mother was even back then (“I could stick this fork in your eye!”) and how she gave Johnny so much emasculating drama- stopping them from moving to Reno where, in hindsight, they could have made billions.

We also have Livia finding out about Tony’s psychiatrist and reacting as one would expect. And, of course, we get a mention of South Park’s seminal “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” as a top 1999 pop culture reference. This is bloody good telly.