The Boys “Beware The Jabberwock, My Son”

Well, I think I got this episode mostly figured out.  You know, as to what the episode’s theme was overall.

Essentially, I think this episode asks who, on this show, had a good father.  Homelander has had daddy issues pretty much from the pilot episode, and his own parenting skills are severely lacking.  Ryan, for example, wants to do actual good and not staged help, but his biological father’s ideas on how are a bit wanting in their own right.  Butcher, Ryan’s other father, may be a better dad than Homelander, but he’s also a really bad dude as seen here.

Victoria?  Stan was a bad dad, even if he was better than the lab guys that took care of Homelander.  At least her baby-daddy (who looked familiar until I realized he was the cab driver in love with a djinn in American Gods) is concerned about his kid’s getting a dose of V, and he sure didn’t intend to create those V-infused farm animals, but there are other issues, and Victoria has issues with Stan even as she maybe busted him out of jail.

By the by, having Victoria show up with two nameless sidekicks is a good way to demonstrate how indestructible chickens and flying carnivorous sheep might kill a human being without killing a name character.

Is M.M. a good dad?  He’s trying.  And I am not going to talk good moms because it’s pretty clear that Annie’s was terrible.

What I can point out is that Hughie’s dad was great.  We haven’t seen much of this rather mundane guy for a while, probably because Simon Pegg is pretty busy on his own, but here, when the V in his system turns him into an accidental murderer, it’s basically Hughie’s love for the guy that gets him to calm down before he kills his estranged wife, and it’s the heartbreaking final moments when Hughie has to euthanize the older man since, well, he was never going to control those intangibility powers.  As Hughie says to Hugh Sr., his dad was his real hero.

Just as well.  The “heroes” on this show are slinging racist ideas in an attempt to reach out to minorities while openly plotting some kind of takeover, and the show’s heroes include a guy who cut a man’s leg off to fake his death and recreate a virus that can kill supes.  Frenchie turned himself in for murder, Annie’s powers aren’t working, and A-Train blackmailed Ashley into helping him, and she just framed an innocent man as the leak to M.M.  Hughie’s saying goodbye to his dad may be sad, but it is the most genuine moment of any sort of human emotion in this episode if not the season as a whole.

If anything, this episode, and maybe this whole season, has gone a long way to say who the real heroes are.  It’s the people who actually care for you and try to do right.  Much of this episode’s backdrop is a big media presentation, not unlike San Diego Comic Con or Disney’s big D23 thing where Vought is announcing all its new movies and TV shows, all while showing how many of these heroes are pretty awful behind the scenes.  I mean, there are the two “bad guys” from the first season of Gen V to agree with whatever Homelander is proposing, ending with a gang murder of an innocent man who got framed by a not-very-innocent woman.

That said, I have a very hard time believing Sage has fallen for this act right about now.