The Boys Recap: Bread and Circuses

Well, the dark season continues! But “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son” is an improvement on last week’s dour hour, anchored by a fun Boys mission that ties into multiple ongoing character arcs. It’s always fun to see unlikely alliances on this show, so the prospect of Butcher, Starlight, and Mother’s Milk working with Victoria Neuman and Stan Edgar is pretty exciting.

The focus this week is the supe-killing virus developed at Godolkin University (and introduced in Gen V), a weapon that Butcher has kept secret from the rest of the group until now. Neuman is in possession of all the remaining doses — and she’d make a great test subject herself, being extremely powerful but not Homelander powerful.

So, Butcher and MM secure a presidential pardon for Neuman’s adopted father, Stan Edgar, in exchange for his help locating the virus. It’s great to see Giancarlo Esposito return, especially with such an emphasis on the character’s comedic side; sure, Edgar’s neat-freak tendencies and general villainy put him squarely in Esposito’s wheelhouse, but it’s also fun to see him in a smug, snotty mode, calling out Neuman’s hypocrisy (“Are you upset that I betrayed you?” is the line read of the episode) and referring to the Boys as “cannon fodder.”

Edgar leads the group to his country home, where Neuman has set up a lab to test the virus on animals dosed with Compound V. But the virus is all gone, along with top Vought scientist (and, it’s revealed, the father of Neuman’s daughter, Zoe) Sameer Shah. When Neuman and her team intercept everyone at the farm, it becomes clear they’re all after the same thing, so they reach a tenuous cease-fire.

That allows the story some breathing room: For at least a little bit, everyone gets to work through their interpersonal conflicts without worrying about the drama escalating to murder. Edgar and Neuman argue about their complex history, especially when it comes to their respective decisions to dose a child with Compound V; Neuman taunts Annie about her inability to understand her own identity without the Starlight persona; Frenchie and Kimiko continue to refuse to open up about their violent pasts, even though it’s clear they’d both react empathetically if they did. Neuman also brings to light the deal she and Butcher made back in the season premiere, although he’s honestly right to point out that he didn’t go through with it.

From here, this story pivots to a gnarly little B-movie thriller about demonic juiced-up farm animals, including a chicken that shoots through people’s chests and several flying sheep with the ability to pluck a bull off the ground and rip it apart midair in seconds. When the group finds Sameer hiding out in a barn, they learn what happened: Compound V leaked into the groundwater after the escape of a superpowered hamster, and now there’s only one dose of the virus left. In the end, they manage to save themselves from these freaky creations by injecting one dead guy with the virus and feeding him to the animals, though Sameer disappears in the madness, leaving behind a leg.

I think it’s for the best that Eric Kripke plans to leave this series at five seasons, but we’ve gotten occasional glimpses at a version that could work as a longer ongoing series. That’s something I thought about a lot throughout “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son,” especially during these sequences at the farm. Yes, there’s plenty of plot movement: In the final scene, we learn that Butcher and Kessler secreted Sameer away to make more of the virus, chopping off his leg so everybody assumes he died. But the isolated setting and episodic nature of it all makes me imagine a more procedural version of this show, shuffling characters around into new sitcomlike groupings and sending them out on missions each week while offering political satire suited to shifting real-world American politics. That version wouldn’t be the tight, purposeful narrative that The Boys is at its best, but an episode like this one shows me that it could work.

Of course, whatever joy the show gained from this fun story, it loses it with the depressing culmination of the Hugh Sr. arc. I don’t mean that in a negative way, actually; this is grim stuff, but also a moving and pretty uniquely disturbing angle on superpowers in this universe, especially with Simon Pegg’s impressive work conveying panic, confusion, sadness, and violent anger all at once. While the Compound V does save Hugh’s life, it doesn’t fix brain failure; in fact, being a supe is a lot more dangerous when you aren’t in control of your faculties, as we see when Hugh ends up killing at least three different innocent bystanders at the hospital. He’s not consciously choosing to phase his hand through someone’s chest to rip their heart from their body; it’s something happening to him.

It’s clear from the beginning where this must end, because it involves the same lesson Hughie has been learning for weeks now: He’s gotta let his dad go. That’s something he struggles with, historically speaking, as shown by Hugh’s anecdote about their old cat, Jar-Jar. Nine-year-old Hughie refused to let his dad put Jar-Jar down after he got leukemia, and his quality of life declined severely. Hugh Sr. doesn’t want the same fate for himself, which is why he gave Daphne medical power of attorney instead of his son. But last week proved that Hughie has grown in this regard, perhaps due to years of trauma and desensitization in his battle with Vought. Euthanizing his dad by administering the drug himself is only a more intense and active way of proving that he knows what needs to be done.

This is a very Boys-heavy episode of The Boys, and that’s a little refreshing after a string of episodes dominated by Homelander’s presence. He’s in this episode, but in a supporting role, and his attitude is different from how we typically see him, even if the end goals are the same. When Ryan embraced Homelander as a father figure and turned his back on Butcher at the end of season three, I imagined something like this subplot: Homelander subtly, gently instilling Ryan with a belief in his own superiority, leading to a sense of entitlement and, eventually, evil. It makes sense that we’ve seen so much of the unpleasant side of life at Vought Tower with Ryan’s awful, murderous birth father, but it’s helpful to get a reminder of its occasional attractive qualities.

Who wouldn’t want the power to put the slimiest men in Hollywood in their place? When Ryan expresses his desire to genuinely help people rather than participating in staged saves, Homelander doesn’t sneer derisively like you might expect. He gives Ryan a target: director and sexual harasser Adam Bourke, who has been flirting with one PA nonstop and, almost as offensively, wants Ryan to star in a crappy teen show called Super School. With Homelander’s encouragement, Ryan turns down the gig and punishes Bourke for the harassment, ordering the PA to slap him around. She doesn’t need to be told twice.

This darkly funny father-son bonding time fits with the rest of the V52 Expo segments, which are chock-full of details poking fun at Marvel announcements, along with performative diversity measures at otherwise unprogressive corporations. We see a timeline of the planned “Phases 7 through 19”; Firecracker’s Christian-film debut at the new Vought Faith division; A-Train’s notoriously expensive biopic; and the deeply cynical “Black at It” initiative, which refers to the Black Seven members as “articulate heroes” and streams different versions of movies based on the race of the viewer. There are also appearances from Gen V’s Guardians of Godolkin, Cate Dunlap and Sam Riordan, who are more in Homelander’s thrall than ever.

If there’s any real hope in this bleak collection of stories, it can be found in the growing dissent from longtime Vought fixtures like A-Train and Ashley, who solidify their alliance in this episode by throwing Cameron Coleman under the bus and getting him killed by framing him as the leak — an extra-satisfying resolution after he has the gall to dump Ashley following her big demotion. If the Boys want to fight whatever coup Homelander is planning, they’ll need allies. With one of their own grieving, one in jail, and their leader dying while carrying out his own unsanctioned operations, they could certainly use the help.

Extra Frames

• Just when Kimiko reaches out to start a dialogue with Frenchie, he’s turning himself in at the police station and confessing to murder. And we heard him sum up his reasoning to Annie earlier in the episode: In his view, being forgiven is a luxury nobody can afford, and some sins deserve eternal damnation.

• Edgar is sent back to prison since they didn’t get their virus, but we do see Neuman head-pop his driver. Very curious what role he’ll play moving forward.

• Apparently, Jeanine has been learning the wrong lessons from her dad, who unintentionally taught her that fighting solves problems. But MM still doesn’t have the time to sit her down for a talk in this episode.

• Sage must know A-Train is the leak, right? She looks pretty suspicious.

• Would someone like Cameron Coleman really talk about elevating BIPOC voices? I’m not sure. Sometimes I think the show mixes up far-right grifters with fake liberal institutions, and the analogies get a little jumbled.

• “Noah Baumbach pulled me from his latest slice-of-life drama.”

• Butcher seems disturbed by the tentacles exploding from the dying Temp-V-affected rabbit he released … which, yeah, it’s objectively disturbing, but methinks it connects to his own affliction and that blackout.

• “It’s an absolute wonder to me that you all managed to live this long.” Same, Stan.

• Nice comics shout-out to hear Hugh call his son “my wee Hughie” in his final moments.

• Where exactly does Hughie’s mom fit into the story at this point? Is Hughie’s seasonlong arc essentially over now?