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: Herogasm

 "Oh Jesus, your stretching powers!"

Yeah, this line reminds me of a hilarious book called How to Be a Superhero,with illustrations by Steve Dillon. If you remember it- the writers clearly did- you MUST say so in the comments.

Anyway, this is a near perfect episode of television. Not because of all the splendidly filthy Herogasm sexy nastiness... but it helps. It's good to see depressingy exploitative and tool-deflatingly stupid porn, and the whole culture surrounding it, being mocked like this. Top marks for that. Porn is stupid, Erotic stories, generally written by women, are where it's at. Er, anyway...

This is wonderful. Soldier Boy is flawed, damaged, reactionary but honestly so, not like these tiresome modern "warriors" on "woke" who try to disguise the tininess of their penises with their love of Donald Trump (Homelander is, of course, said pathetic orange failure as a human being). One can sympathise with him- as well as damaged, human Butcher and his unfortunate acolyte Hughie- while ultimately acknowledging that Annie is wise, right, and the leader we all need asc she stands up to Neuman and records her devastating resignation speech.

Homelander may survive his pummelling, but surely he's doomed. Yet he's super-powered, and uncontrollable.

Then we have the magnificent opening text, the generally brilliant characterisation, the moving love story between Frenche amd Kimiko. This is sumtuous telly, and this blog post does not, cannot, do justice to it.

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: Barbary Coast

 “I. Am. Homelander.”

I realise I could say this about any episode… but where to start?

Let’s start with Grace Mallory’s tale of Soldier Boy and the whole gang in ‘80s Nicaragua, engaged in that all-American pursuit of fighting left-wing movements in Central America in the name of the Monroe Doctrine, and doing so via deals with Khamenei’s Iran and selling cocaine specifically to minority communities. God bless Uncle Sam, Oliver North and Ronald Reagan. 

Anyway, we see the whole team in their, er, heyday, including a Black Noir who speaks(!), and an early example of why supes in any military is such a moronic idea. But the big Soviet supe-killing gun is quite the McGuffin, causing Billy to lose his brown stuff and alienate his son to protect him.

He does this because of his deep desire to kill Homelander, who is increasingly sadistic and out of control, like a cross between Superman and Donald Trump only capable of stringing a sentence together. He brings back the Deep into the team despite the reality TV comprtionion nonsense, just to troll Annie in the worst way possible before announcing that the two of them are an item. He makes the Deep eat an octopus, despite the fact he can hear it begging for its life. Worst of all, he calmly faces down Annie’s threat to release the plane footage by threatening to turn against America. It’s increasingly clear that he’s the big bad.

There’s so much else. The nicely done demonstration of Islamophobia on the reality show. Hughie’s reluctant conversion to fighting dirty. A-Train learning about a supe called Blue Hawk who is responsible for at least one BLM type atrocity. And the, er, revelations about Frenchie’s sexual past. 

Ah, The Boys. You’re dirty. You’re amazing. But I’m not taking you to meet my mother.

The Boys: The Only Man in the Sky

 "A hamburger with a donut for a bun? There really is no God here."

This is a brilliant episode, and one f the reasonds it's brilliant is the sheer complexity of all the stuff that's going on, yet with such perfect character beats, aided by extraordinary performances from the likes of Karl Urban and Antony Starr.

We know that Homelander is a monster, but it gets truly scary when things don't go his way. The scene where he's trying to stop a girl from jumping off a building, then they both change their minds and he makes her jump even though she's changed her mind... yeah, that's dark. As it the fact that his first thought after Stormfront's suicide is that she has to do it on his birthday. But his horribly self-centred monologue at the end is a huge moment. There's so much dramatic tension in wondering what he's going to do.

Meanwhile we get more backstory on Soldier Boy, who seems pretty much the Comedian from Watchmen. All the research done by the gang is fascinating, with Laurie Holden guest-starring as the Crimson Countess, while Gunpowder is a dark, dark character, sexually abused as Soldier Boy's boy wonder as a kid and now grown up into a far-right MAGA gun nut. He dies, of course, but at the hands of a Billy Butcher who has temporary supe powers, the one thing you'd think he'd never do.

The psychology and motivations of Hughie, Billy, MM and Homelander are dwelt upon at length here. This is deep, thoughtful yet deliciously irreverent stuff.

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: Nothing Like It in the World

"Are you gonna tell me what's wrong? Or are you gonna stain my clean sheets with your sweaty despair?"

Another bloody good episode here and, just like the last one, we have asplendidly clever and twisted take on a big theme, this time love. So we have Homelander having an icky assignation with the late Madelyn again, complete with the milk stuff, until it turns out it's just that shapechanger bloke... and Homelander has him killed at an awkward moment.

We also have the cult auditioning various potential wives for the helpless Deep. We have Frenchie's ill-advised kiss. We have Hughie and Annie on a mission together where they are allowed to be fleetingly free, happy and in love... but have to stay apart because happiness is not safe. And, of course, we have Billy desperately planning to get Becca to freedom after their emotional reunion. And yet the seeds of their doomed relationship are cleverly sowed within the dialogue from the start: Billy wil never accept a supe kid so it's him or Ryan. And Becca's comments, while lovingly meant, are devastating: Butcher's dark obsessiveness was there long before her.

We also have MM's OCD pointed out to us, and hear more of his past. And the rivalry between Stormfront and Homelander develops, too. But it seems she's older than she seems, and very racist indeed, which explains the disturbing connotations of her name. Halfway through, and the season is getting very interesting indeed.

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: The Big Ride

 "For an extra grand, I'll let you chop off my dick."

The second series starts not only with a bang but with that uniquely Garth Ennis two-fingered salute. We have a man who uses his regeneration powers to make money on the side by letting blokes dismember bits of his body for fun, which I think is fair to describe as quite a long way down the kinky path. We have characters designed to deconstruct, with delicious bad taste, the archetypes of both the archer as superhero and the blind superhero. There is hilarious footage of Burcher, played by an ersatz actor. We have the head of the deputy director of the CIA's head explode. The Boys is back.

The Seven are very much in their artificial, scripted, cynical world and Homelander s very much the cynical, evil bastard we love to hate- but he may have met his match in Vought executive Mr Edgar, played by the excellent Giancarlo Esposito from The Mandalorian. Meanwhile, the Boys hide in squalour as Hughie wants to press on (with help from a pitying Annie) while all MM wants to do is get home to his wife and little girl.

The Deep, in a tragic place and being un-personed by the Seven, is getting his own sub-plot as he falls prey to a cult that sees therapy as "destructive", which doesn't remind you of any prominent real life cults, right? It's all shaping up nicely.

Oh, and Homelander drinks some breast milk. Eurgh.

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: 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...

The Boys: Get Some

 "Hughie, you just arse-bombed America's sweetheart..."

An awful lot seems to happen in every episode so far, and this is no exception. We're introduced to Mother's Milk(!), another old mate of Butcher's who seems to have reason, like the rest of the gang, to hate the supes. And Frenchie. He's a cool addition, and at this stage a person Hughie can usefully confide in for the benefit of the viewer.

I love the montage as the corpse of Translucent is cleaned up- to Jane's Addiction's "Stop". And the events following from what Translucent let slip- that A-Train is having an affair with Popclaw, a kind of female Wolverine. And then there's a lot of intrigue about Popclaw and A-Train's relationship involving toe-sucking and resentment... and the discovery (after Hughie uses his own superpower of installing electronics in people's houses) that A-Train is using a steroid called Compound V... and was high on it when he killed Robin. All this stuff makes for great viewing, and not only because Popclaw accidentally makes her landlord's head explode while sitting on his face. It's not only in The Sopranos that cunnilingus can be deadly.

Annie's story is also unfolding nicely as her little problem with unauthorised crime-fighting turns out to work unexpectedly in her favour after the victim comes forward. It's all so fickle, and ironic, as she proceeds to be given a new, highly sexualised constume and has a narrative imposed on the whole thing for her... by, yep, a couple of men. The social commentary may not be subtle, but arguably it shouldn't be. And it's very well done indeed.

We also get more of Homelander being an utter douche, Hughie realising who Annie is and getting her phone number- but being expected to plan a bug on her (ouch). And the cliffhanger- of the Seven finding Translucent's body promises "war".This is well-paced, witty, gloriously irreverent yet meaningful telly that reminds me a hell of a lt of reading Garth Ennis' Preacher.