The third season ofThe Boyshas had a bit of an up and down run as it sets up for what is almost certainly going to be a pretty massive finale. While it’s true that it would be near impossible to follow uplast week’s Herogasmwith the same level of energy. In fact, the argument that the show had to slow things down a bit and kind of reload. However, the penultimate episode does more than just slow things down. It seems to actually waste time. It also seems like a weird time to fill in the backstory of one of the main characters on the show. While one of the backstories does indeed fill in just what happened with Homelander when he was handed over to the Russians, the backstory of Butcher seems like little more than filler.
The Boysalso seems to be paying the piper when it comes to having too many balls in the air. There are too many characters and too many storylines to follow everything all that closely. While this episode does seem to be focusing on wrapping up some of the side stories, there are far too many plots that are wrapped up rather quickly and the way they are wrapped up is by basically hitting the reset button.
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The reset button is especially smashed down when it comes toThe Deepand A-Train. It turns out that Amazon Prime Video’s version of Aquaman had to make a choice between his wife or a squid and he made the wrong choice. It appears that means next season will have him running solo again. Then there’s A-Train who survived his run in with Blue Hawk thanks in part to the fact that he killed the racist Supe and ended up being given his heart. There are obviously questions about just what shape that heart would have been in, being scraped across the pavement for a couple of miles, but the show just ignores that so A-Train can be back for either the finale or next season, or both.
Themeat ofThe Boysis spent filling in the holes in the stories of Black Noir and Butcher and one of those choices worked out quite a bit better than the other. Most of this season, especially since Soldier Boy got out of his Cold War prison in Russia is trying to figure out just what happened in Nicaragua and who exactly handed him to the commies. That particular question was answered in spades and it also led to one hell of a twist that is certainly going to color how things in the season finale.
The Boyscertainly is at its best when it is telling a story in rather unique ways and it did just that again when it comes tofilling in the gaps with Black Noir, who is still on the run from Soldier Boy. The brain-damaged Supe who also happens to be the only one who served with both Soldier Boy and Homelander has taken refuge in this world’s version of Chucky Cheese, where he hallucinates several animated characters that are clearly the show’s spin on Disney adventures.
The episode takes its time explaining just why these animated creatures are going to be important, cutting back and forth to where Noir is holed up to the search that Butcher, Hughie, andSoldier Boyare on for another member of Payback named Mindstorm. Mindstorm is able to put people into comas and lock them into a mind prison as long as he makes eye contact. He does this to Butcher and that’s where the anti-hero goes on a bit of a trip down memory lane that is clearly all about explaining why Billy is the way that he is to people.
Seeing that Butcher had an abusive father and a brother that killed himself does explain why Billy has problems being anything other than a cynical user. Fathers and their kids has actually been a low-key aspect of the show since the very beginning. None of the parents that are depicted are all that great. Even Mother’s Milk - who truly loves his daughter - isn’t what one would call a “good” father. However, it’s long been a reality thatHomelander is the way he isbecause he didn’t have a father or parent at all. He wasn’t loved when he was growing up. Now he’s a psychopath.
Thisepisode ofThe Boysshows that Butcher is the way he is because of the way his father was. The audience saw bits and pieces of that in previous seasons and it’s another reason why this particular part of the story wasn’t actually needed. It becomes even more annoying that the show took this side trip when it appears that it didn’t actually affect Butcher at all. It’s true the moral might be that a leopard can’t change its spots, but it still makes very little sense that so much of the penultimate episode was spent dwelling on that moral.
On the flipside, the animated creatures playing out on a makeshift stage just what went down with Black Noir,Soldier Boy and Voughtreally does push the story forward. The animals end up recreating the scene that saw Soldier Boy get sent away, giving Black Noir some of the most lines of the entire series, even though the version of Black Noir that is speaking is really a sheep in his costume. This also further sets up the end of the episode, which does indeed promise that the final week of The Boys' Season 3 is going to be plenty explosive.
It seems more likely than not that allegiances are going to shift. And that will mean thatThe BoysSeason 4will continue to bounce the audience around between thinking they know what’s going to happen next and getting the rug pulled out from under them. There are some shows that are able to pull off using an entire episode to set up the next week.The Boysis usually good enough that it could do that as well, but it turns out Episode 7 is a bit of a dud.
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