The Boys (TV Show)

The worst people you will ever meet. Literally. Except you Black Noir.

THE BOYS
Season One
Format: Amazon Prime
Genre: Superhero fiction, dark comedy

Rating: 10 out of 10. You must watch this show.

SPOILERS.
This show is the new "show to watch". Ever since Game of Thrones ended, I've been looking for a show that I'm tracking down the days to the next season and trying to find every single fan theory and re-cap after every episode. I thought that was American Gods, and while that is also a stupendous show. It ain't got nothing on the Boys. THIS IS THE NEW SHOW TO WATCH. You have to. Let me sum it up why you got though. It'll make 10 billion percent more sense (another reference for a show I'm trying to finish watching for you all.)

Hughie Campbell. A bitch. A madman. Complex.

Hughie Campbell is out with his girlfriend Robin. They are talking about potentially moving out of Hughie's dad's house, but Hughie, who is pretty much, a giant bitch, is totally not having it in a passive bitch way. (aka why I'm calling him one.) Him and Robin are holding hands when she explodes to pieces in front of him and he's left holding the only remaining part of her, her hands. I actually thought it looked cool as fuck when I saw this. What happened was, she was killed in a high-velocity impact with the celebrity superhero A-Train (whose also a monster douche.) Vought International, the company who the superheroes work for, steps in and offers a $45,000 lawsuit settlement. Hughie is more distressed than that and the money seems like a cheap offer to him. Not cheap like more money, cheap like A-Train isn't offering an apology and everyone is trying to sweep her death under the rug. Enter in the savior to Hughie, a man by the name of Billy Butcher. He's like the butcher of Supes. He comes in and gives Hughie a sweet deal. Expose the Supes and their corruption. He takes Hughie to a secret cub for Supes and shows him the Christian Supes with men and more importantly...A-Train laughing about Robin dying. Butcher tells Hughie to take the settlement money and to plant a bug to listen in at the Seven Tower, a mocking of the Justice League meeting tower area. Hughie, in more bitch fashion, runs away. He meets a girl named Annie (more on her later cause she's super important) in Central Park. They tell the other to stand up for themselves and face their challenges...so Hughie then agrees to plant the bug. Another Supe, named Translucent, which is stupid because he goes invisible not semi,  finds it and Butcher incapacitates him. This is almost the first episode only. Lots to take in.... Oh, except for Annie. You remember when I said she's important? That's cause she's a Supe on the Seven. LOLS. Her name is Annie January and her Supe name is Starlight. She's just a sweet girl from the mid-west until on the new team, her co-worker, The Deep, blackmails her into giving him a blowjob. He's pretty much scum. Which is funny cause he's the Aquaman type... you know...scum, water...I'll let myself out.

Translucent finding out he's got a bomb up his ass. Literally. HAHAHA

Butcher and Hughie take the captured Translucent to a guy named Frenchie, one of The Boys. He keeps trying to kill the guy, but his skin is like diamonds. HARD AF. So they decide to stick C-4  up his ass, lierally, and blow him to shreds, not before finding out that A-Train was visiting his girlfiend, Popclaw before he killed Robin. Hughie was about to let him go, but decided, fuck it, they already came this far and he blows him up to the song Cherry Bomb by the Runaways.

Meanwhile, Homelander (the Captain American type) blew up a plane and his buddy the Deep is trying to incriminate him. As the largest profit cash cow, his boss Madelyn Stillwell, protects him. Good thing to because she blackmails Oklahoma Senator Calhoun into allowing a vote in the Senate for Supes in the military. These guys are already fucking AWFUL. I can only imagine how much more of a shit show this would be.

Annie January, aka Starlight. Don't piss her off.

Starlight, who feels like a fish out of water at this point in the story, wants to go back to the rescuing of people like she thinks society deserves. She stops a potential date-rape and is all the rage now and super trending on Twitter. Sucks to suck though and they are trying to force the girl in a revealing costume compared to her Christian down-to-Earth one. Poor girl. 

At this point, Butcher starts recruiting more of The Boys. He brings in his homie, Mother's Milk, to run surveillance. I can only assume he got the name because the dude is goddamn big when people asked, he said something smart like "Mother's Milk" and it stuck. Anyways, they find out that the day that A-Train blew Robin to shreds, he was at his girl's taking a Supe drug called Compound-V. Butcher wants to expose them before they get put in the military, however, that can't happen until he has proof or at least some of the drug. A-Train takes a vial, wins a race and lies to Popclaw about them going public. Which sends her heartbroken, high having ass in a weird AF hyped-up sex murder scene. Seriously. Weird AF. This leads them to blackmail Popclaw and they find a Triad hangout that has a Japanese woman under their surveillance. Which they just call her the Female. 

Probably this first time we see how really fucked up these guys are.

Meanwhile, Stillwell sends Homelander and Queen Maeve (the Wonder Woman type) to go save a hijacked airliner. Homelander decides to just abandon the plane when their plan falls through. Maeve, who is like...the only one besides Starlight and the only one out of the old batch who has any humanity, chooses. Her only options that Homelander gives her coming with him and surviving and fuck those guys, or go down with him. Homelander pleases Stillwell by using the airplane crash to push the agenda for militarized Supes and brings the crowd to tears with his speech, while Maeve is literally grieving about those she let die.

Homelander. Probably thinks he's a god or some shit.

Starlight and Homelander get paid to show up at Believe Expo. A Christian expo that Starlight actually went to as a child. There is an Expo Host there named Ezekiel (you know the Christian guy at the club earlier who was with 2 guys...) Well Hughie and Annie, who Hughie found out was a Supe, are at the Expo. Hughie asks for passes to Believe Expo behind the scenes and extorts info about Compound-V from Ezekiel saying they got it on at the club.

Starlight in the meantime, whose had enough with the bullshit, breaks from her script and says fuck it. She opens up about how she feels about her Christian beliefs for realsies and that she was sexually assaulted. Hughie comforts her, even though she shrugged him off because she thought he was using her. He explains Robin's death and needing to cope. Just while the info from Ezekiel lets Butcher and Mother's Milk track down the Compound-V. Turns out Supes are only super because they pump Compound-V into babies. They literally manufacture them. 

Trying to have Big Dick Vibes but failing

So now The Boys know that Vought has been making babies super since 1971 disguising it as polio vaccines. Awesome.

Annie finds out Stillwell's assistant Ashley is fired because Starlight is trying to just be a good person. Awesome. Stillwell tells her she needs to comform or else. Starlight laughs it off, really holding all the cards now because she said if they fire her after her making a sexual assault public, that is would hurt Bought. Which it will. So they decide to make the Deep apologize and then send him to Sandusky, Ohio for a sabbatical. He gets to spend his time on the Great Lakes and I guess to go Cedar Point a lot. Which, could be worse. 

At this time, Butcher brings Hughie to a collateral damage survivors support group for those impacted by the Supes. He gets pissed off at everyone for not doing anything to fix it and he leaves all pissed off wanting justice. Butcher then explains to Hughie why he hates Supes. Homelander raped his wife and then she went missing afterwards.  Then we also find out that Frenchie and Mother's Milk track down a telepath named Mesmer and find out that the Female was kidnapped with her brother by the Shining Light Liberation Army terrorist group and she is named Kimiko. Turns out that Vought is making Compound-V terrorists as well to get militarized Supes. 

Whole new meaning to the term baby ray gun.

This is where the season starts wrapping up so lots of fast scenes here. Be prepared. Hughie and Annie hook up. The Deep actually gets sexually assaulted by a fan who sticks her fingers in his gills. A-Train is a junkie who can't recover without Compound-V and Homelander holds a meeting with the Seven about Hughie killing Translucent, extorting Ezekiel, A-Train killing Robin all with Starlight having the fingers pointed at. Hughie gets tracked down by A-Train but luckily Kimiko breaks his fucking legs. Homelander is starting to connect the dots now about Butcher. Why he is so after him. It seems like he is sacrificing everyone to get towards him. So he digs into it. Find out that he raped Butcher's wife Becca. and Dr. Vogelbaum presided over her. She was pregnant with his kid and it killed her on the table. He tells him he's sorry he raised Homelander in a lab and because of that, he created a monster.

RIP Stillwell.

The season ends with the Pentagon classifying Compound-V, the Boys are fugitives and Annie gets face to face with mommy dearest after learning that they make super babies. The Deep is denied coming back which makes him spiral out of control and he saves his head in true "Brittany" fashion. 

Homelander then confesses that it was him behind the terrorists to make Stillwell happy and give her what she wanted. They then get jiggy with it. At a Black Site, the Boys are all in custody. Luckily, Frenchie is pretty much a giant fucking criminal and breaks them all out of jail with a retainer. LOLS. They get rescued by Starlight, but not before A-Train's dumb ass shows up. Luckily, he has a heart attack because of all that Compound-V. And stupidly, Hughie tries to give him CPR. Starlight takes over and Hughie and The Boys escape. 

THIS IS WHERE THE CRAZY TRAIN GOES OFF THE RAILS. Butcher takes Stillwell hostage thinking that it's Homelander's weakness. What he doesn't count on, is that Homelander is a psychopath. Or a sociopath. He's probably both. Homelander, reveals that he tortured Vogelbaum for the truth about Butcher's wife and then proceeds to laser eye melt Stillwell. See picture above. Homelander saves Butcher from the suicide vest and takes him to the home in which Becca has been raising Homelander's son in secret, both to the shock and awe of Butcher and Becca.

What started as a simple superhero show, turned out to show that power corrupts and that those with the best starting intentions can turn out wildly off base. This show is a good way to show the temperate and collective mindset of humanity. This show displays how we can potentially start off with good intentions, like Queen Maeve, and fall to being less. It can show that you can stand up for what you believe in amindst nay-sayers, like Starlight. It can show that some people just want to see the world burn, like Homelander. And it can show what love and vengeance can drive a person do to just to seek revenge, like Butcher and Hughie. Really, all facets of humanity can be seen in the variety and complexity of characters. Except Black Noir. Haven't seen much from him yet. Hopefully, we will.