The Boys “Proper Preparation And Planning”

I really don’t care what happens to the Deep since he more or less earned whatever happens to him, but the fact that he got high, his gills spoke to him, and they had the voice of prominent geek comedian Patton Oswalt does make for a spot o’ fun.

Now let us never speak of such horrors again.

So, here’s a good question:  where has Butcher been all this time?

And…short answer is even he doesn’t know.  Frenchie called him back.  He came back.  Hughie challenged him.  And he…brushed it aside for now.  You’d half expect Butcher, violent, angry man that he is, to pop Hughie one for all that.  And he will…at the end of the episode.  See, Butcher now is a man with a mission:  he must get back to his wife.  He knows Becca is alive.  He knows she’s stashed away somewhere.  He knows Homelander took him to see her and the son she had with Homelander.  And then…Butcher woke up in the middle of nowhere with no idea where he is (initially), where he was (still), or how to get back there (for now).  This is Billy Butcher.  He is a ruthless, determined near force-of-nature.  And even if he doesn’t know how to get back to Becca, he does know someone who might know where she is.

That would be his former boss, Colonel Grace Mallory.  And Mallory, well, she like everyone else heard Butcher blew someone up.  Heck, the other Boys believe that.  Butcher didn’t kill Stillwell.  But if he and the Boys can catch that supe terrorist before anything goes wrong, Mallory will tell Butcher where Becca is.

Meanwhile, Homelander is trying to be a good father to a superhuman son.

Eep.

Then again, Homelander scares everyone.  Maeve didn’t tell anyone about her girlfriend out of fear of what Homelander would do to her.  Starlight did get a sample of V, and she didn’t want anyone to know, but the threat of telling Homelander is enough to get her to resort to emotional blackmail of her own against the wide-awake A-Train.  No one wants to cross paths with Homelander.

Except Billy Butcher, who will do anything to get back to his wife and heaven help you if you stand in his way.

So, that means finding a terrorist.  And it turns out to Kimiko’s kid brother.

Now, the Female in the source material is mostly there for extreme violence that may or may not be funny.  She doesn’t even have a name unlike here, so seeing the still-silent Kimiko use sign language to chat with her brother and try to talk him down is more than any of the comics ever did with her.  Then again, the comics mostly used the Deep as the butt of various other jokes, so draw your own conclusions about whether or not that’s a good thing.  In the case of the Female, it is.

Plus, it gets M.M., Frenchie, and Hughie to hold off on attacking Kenji because, well, Kimiko is one of them and it is her brother.  Butcher, he just sees another supe, so that doesn’t work, and the mortal humans are tossed around rather easily.  Eventually, Kimiko does subdue her own brother, alive, and all is well.  That would be when Butcher pops Hughie one since Hughie was holding Butcher back in his quest to get his wife back.  Of course, Butcher didn’t tell anyone that until after Kenji and Kimiko briefly slipped off on their own, but that’s beside the point when you have a self-righteous madman like Billy Butcher leading your group.

It’s also a lousy way to build team unity, but that’s a problem for another episode.