The Boys: Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men   Show Only 
September 9, 2020 7:18 PM - Season 2, Episode 3 - Subscribe

The Boys take to the high seas to safeguard their prisoner. Homelander plays house, then pushes Ryan over the edge. Starlight is forced to make an impossible choice. Stormfront reveals her true character.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (13 comments total)
 
Notes:

* More forced plot to get the characters where they need to be.

* It's absolutely painful to see how bad off The Deep is. Please let the sub-plot die, unless it goes somewhere really good.

* Looking forward to the future dad and son fight

* Ah, STORMFRONT, duh.

* Black Noir is the real MVP

* But finally, the group has a really sharp focus, in terms of killing Stormfront. Not so much with the destroying Vought, just raw, straight up killing of Stormfront. It's taken 3 episodes, but we've arrived.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:19 PM on September 9, 2020


I read a preview of S2 somewhere that described Stormfront as "a closet racist" and was like "closet"? She's CALLED STORMFRONT.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:05 AM on September 10, 2020 [7 favorites]


I am utterly baffled by the shows continued insistence on following the Deep. The show seems to want to present at least some of what Deep feels as tragic: he is repelled by his own body, and every day can hear the wailing of aquatic creatures being killed. Yet it also repeatedly uses him as a punchline; he is deeply incompetent, to the point where it's not really clear how he ever got to join the Seven in the first place. He also was introduced to us committing an act of sexual assault, which makes him deeply unsympathetic. I honestly don't understand what the show even wants me to think about him at this point, but it keeps insisting on showing me scenes following him despite pretty much every other character on the show being more interesting than him.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 3:40 AM on September 10, 2020 [6 favorites]


This is where I admit to being old and forgetting that Stormfront is the name of a blatantly racist and real life group.

I'm guessing Stormfront doesn't exist in The Boys universe? Which is honestly some real good scifi.

RE: The Deep, his continue presence is definitely odd and tiring, which reflects my feelings about this season, aka what's the point. Obviously Butcher wants to rescue Becca, but we haven't been shown how she feels about knowing that Billy knows she's alive, even though she's had several scenes. There's still the matter of Homelander supposedly raped her and I say supposedly because it's not clear that actually happened, and if so, I'm hoping for consequences from that.

I'm really enjoying Maeve and her scenes with her former girlfriend. I can't imagine that Homelander won't find out about her though and yeah, no.

Similar to The Deep, not sure what they're doing with Starlight. It's clear she hates the sexed up look, but is doing it go undercover, but the show is still parading the character around in the sexed up look, and then Stormfront's victim blaming comment. Sometimes it sounds like the show wants to have it's cake by pointing out problematic power structures and eat it also by still showing said structures.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:24 AM on September 10, 2020 [2 favorites]


The Deep is a good example of why I stopped reading comics by Garth Ennis before this series came out. He loves including significant characters that are pure shock value or one note jokes.

He'll probably end up doing something important eventually. In the meantime we get Aquaman Is A Loser ad nauseum.
posted by InfidelZombie at 4:58 PM on September 10, 2020


I read the Deep as being tragic-comic. Homelander is superhero as psychopath. Maeve is reluctant superhero. Starlight is the disillusioned innocent. They're all parodies of superhero tropes as well as just normal people archetypes. And the Deep is that loser who just manages to fuck everything up, every time. Plus I guess the writers wants to do their own "Hey Aquaman" bit. I suppose more seriously he's the lead-in to whatever their crazy superhero scientology cult is.
posted by GuyZero at 6:13 PM on September 10, 2020 [1 favorite]


Also when introduced Stormfront as being from Portland, that felt a little much. Yes, she's a white supremacist, we get it.
posted by GuyZero at 6:14 PM on September 10, 2020 [1 favorite]


If the show is going for the "ha ha, Aquaman, what a loser, he talks to fish" angle, then that may be the major misstep in what has otherwise been a pretty deft and relevant reimagining of the source material. In our world, Aquaman is played by Jason Momoa and is the star of the only film in the DCEU that has joined the billion-dollar club. That doesn't mean that The Deep has to be the big star or anything, but the contrast does show up about the only thing that I don't like about the show: they still have to have at least one character be the butt monkey [TVTropes]; Garth Ennis' compulsion to have at least one in just about every comic series that he's ever written is one of the things that led me to drop his books entirely. (Hughie was often this character in the comic of The Boys.) If they do go ahead with the super-cult angle, and put some teeth into it, it would work.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:22 PM on September 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


"The day the shoot, you would have seen a massive whale, in three giant pieces, shipped out on the back of a flatbed out to the beach, and then assembled. The boat was on a ramp so that it could slide back and forth in and out of the whale for whatever takes we needed. There were blood cannons, which are exactly what you think they would be. Those were inside the whale, and it all had to be timed to go off properly. And then there were stunt guys who had to dive out of the boat."

Yeah, they built a whale set.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:31 PM on September 11, 2020 [3 favorites]


The whale wasn't as funny as the dolphin in S1, but it was pretty funny.
posted by biffa at 2:09 PM on September 12, 2020


That website has been around for a long time, long as the comic and David Duke. The name of the character is the same in the comic, but it s a he and he s just a straight Nazi, and a riff on the ubermench stuff superheroes were always a reaction to. The show just has a much better take on the same concept, actually, all the concepts. Anyway, you Don t need to need the comic, or wonder about it, just know that that website is not new.
posted by eustatic at 12:15 AM on September 13, 2020


My thoughts during the opening scene on the boat: Nobody should ever remake Jaws, but if anybody did, they’d be fools not to cast Karl Urban as Quint. They should never do that though.
posted by wabbittwax at 2:36 PM on September 14, 2020 [2 favorites]


I suppose more seriously he's the lead-in to whatever their crazy superhero scientology cult is.

Yeah, just from Ennis's other work I'm assuming that this Church of the Collective are going to be major players in the near future, which is why we're spending time with The Deep. Ennis is not exactly reticent when it comes to portraying religious organizations as greedy, power-hungry, and corrupt, that exist primarily to enrich their leaders and provide cover for their perversions.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:52 AM on October 7, 2020


« Older Podcast: The Missing Cryptoque...   |  The X-Files: Improbable... Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments

poster