The Boys “Department Of Dirty Tricks”

Oh, The Boys, how I missed you so!  Especially after such a disappointing second season of Sweet Home…

Oddly enough, I get the feeling that this is the episode that has the premise of the original comics finally down:  the group works for the CIA to keep tabs on supes under the codename “The Boys,” and that may mean the occasional bit of assassination.  That’s actually how the episode opens:  the Boys are on a mission to replace Victoria Neuman’s Compound V with a strong acid to try to kill her before the inauguration at the request of the CIA and the incoming president Dakota Bob.  There are just a couple problems.  One is Homelander is there despite the fact he’s on trial for murder.  He brought Ryan, a fact that causes Butcher to break cover when he’s supposed to just be keeping watch.  And since Victoria’s daughter Zoe saw Butcher and she has some superpowers of her own, and Frenchie and Kimiko barely get away with their lives.  True, Kimiko has to regrow an arm and reattach her face (a nice bit of irony for anyone who knows about her face removal trick from the comics), but the whole thing is a wash.

Hughie does get a chance to hit Victoria with the acid, but it doesn’t affect her, so it wouldn’t have worked anyway.  She also takes a bullet to the head from Butcher.  Butcher isn’t really wanted on the team anyway:  Hughie is the only one who wants him around, and Hughie has his own distractions in this episode, an understandable one at that.  Annie has a foundation to run, but she is trying to help too.  As for the others, well, Mother’s Milk’s offer to watch out for his ex-wife’s Homerlander-loving ex-boyfriend leads the Boys to a really, really twisted plot.

See, as much as the Boys don’t want Butcher around, and he’s hallucinating that his dead wife is there to encourage him to be a better person, Homelander has the opposite problem:  he hates that his teammates The Deep and A-Train are such spineless kiss-ups that they’ll do anything he says.  Black Noir, a different guy, may or may not.  It’s hard to say.  Homelander wants someone to actually challenge him, maybe, and recruits Sister Sage for the Seven.  Sister Sage, the smartest person on Earth, is not afraid of Homelander, but she does pick out that’s worried about getting older and a few other things just by looking at him, and she does have a plot to put Homelander back on top and discredit Annie at the same time.

Step One:  find three Homelander fans (including the guy MM is watching), have Homelander order Noir, Deep, and A-Train to beat them to death with baseball bats, and then after Homelander is acquitted of all charges despite being caught on video murdering a man, have Sage start a riot between the pro-Annie group and the pro-Homelander group.  A-Train then drops off the corpses in the crowd to make it look like Annie’s people killed them, and only the Boys know the truth.

That’s…that’s a smart move.  Evil, but smart, and Homelander won’t care because he sees ordinary people as something beneath him.

For the record:  Noir jumps into killing first and most enthusiastically.  Deep doesn’t stop right away because he’s too afraid of Homelander.  A-Train doesn’t kill anyone, but he does block the door while still unsure what to do.

Also, Tilda Swinton is voicing the Deep’s octopus girlfriend.

That’s a lot of entertaining crazy.  And I didn’t even mention the show has Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Butcher pal Joe Kessler…