WARNING: SPOILERS
I am a huge Marvel fan. And over the years, I’ve immersed myself in the many films and TV series of the MCU. They are total escapism most of the time, but also do not shy away from important themes, such as grief, rage, race, sexism, good vs evil, responsibilty and collateral damage.
If I had to pick a favourite scene from any of the MCU movies, it would have to be the Sokovia Accords debate in Captain America Civil War. In the film, the Avengers, while chasing down bad guys, cause an explosion in Lagos that kills several civilians. The United Nations then decide to impose a sanction on the super-heroes by making them sign the Sokovia Accords – a paper that signals where and when they should go to work. Lagos is the latest in their casualties, Sokovia (in Avengers Age of Ultron) being the worst. But not all of them are in agreement, thus creating a “civil war” after Captain America’s friend Bucky is once again brainwashed into doing nasty deeds.
This was the first time a super-hero movie properly addressed collateral damage to both civilians and buildings full of people. And the danger that super-heroes could impose in the real world.
Civil War only scratched the surface of that idea.
Amazon’s The Boys dives into it full throttle.
Litterarly.
The series opens with two super-heroes, Queen Maeve and Homelander stopping a group of robbers, before taking selfies with fans. Then it cuts to one of our main protagonists, Hughie Campell, being surprised by his girlfriend Robin at the store where he works. They have a loving conversation outside, with him holding her hands.
That’s when his world his completely shattered and torn apart, when a super fast hero, A-Train (parodying The Flash) runs into Robin at his full speed.
And she explodes into blood, bone and gore, leaving poor Hughie completely traumatized and still holding the dismembered hands of his girlfriend.
And that is the inciting incident of The Boys.
Hughie is soon recruited by a man called Billy Butcher, a shady, vengeful Englishman hell bent on taking down the “supes”, people with super-human abilities, namely the ones at the very top.
A, Train, Homelander and Queen Maeve are part of a team of “Supes” called The Seven, and they are owned by a massive corporation called Vaught, run by cold, self-serving sycophanths whose goal is to boost the Supe’s ego, make merchandise, movies and eventually move them into the military. The top Supe is Homelander, a sociopathic, sadistic narcasist who will do any thing to keep his image of the perfect poster boy for America – including letting a plane full of civilians die and threatening anyone closest to him with death when they overstep their “boundries”.
He is also the one Billy Butcher is after, since years earlier, Homelander raped his wife Becca and caused her to flee, never to be seen again.
Starlight, the newest recruit to the team, is delighted when she gets to be a part of the Seven’s world and save people. But those hopes are woefully shattered when she is sexually assaulted by The Deep (a parody of Aquaman) and that the Seven’s image is more important than actually saving lives.
Pretty much everyone except for Starlight in the Seven is a terrible human being in some way or another. But Homelander is the worst since he is the leader of the Seven and pretty much runs the whole show.
Despite this, the rest of the Supes have relatable qualities. A Train is a reckless drug addict who brags about killing Robin to another supe, but he is like this because of his obsession with winning and his crippling addiction to Compound V – a drug that gives people their super powers. As for The Deep, you start off by hating him and then end up pitying him – since he is both a pathetic joke as a human being, and as a super hero who cares deeply for the ocean, but fails miserably to save its creatures. This is due to his disgust for his body – he has large gills on his stomach (in one hilarious scene, after taking LSD, he talks and sings with the gills).
Vaught represents the ultimate massive pharmaceutical company that expands beyond just kissing the ass of super-heroes and spoon feeding everyone bullshit about how brilliant they are. They have secretly been administrating compound V to infants in order to give them super powers, with the consent of their parents through bribes. But they go even further by administrating it to adults – namely terrorists – in order to get super-heroes in the military.
And if that wasn’t already deeply corrupt – the founder of the company, Fredirick Vaught, was a Nazi, who, back in the late 1930s, invented Compound V and was going to use it to create the ultimate army of super humans in order to take over the world and create a global fascist regime.
The second season involves a new recruit to the team called Stormfront, a sassy, if slightly insensitive woman. The Seven try to track down a super-terrorist, that just happens to be Kimiko's, the mute, female member of the Boys, brother.
And in the third episode, while chasing down Kimiko's brother, Stormfront shockingly shows her true colours. She mercilessly murders many innocent people of colour, before torturing and killing the terrorist, calling him racial slurs. She then blames the murders on the terrorist.
Homelander is angry about this. But not because she ruthlessly murdered black people, but because she robbed him of his opportunity to kill the terrorist himself.
It turns out Stormfront is 100 year old nazi and the wife of Frederick Vaught. She was once known as Liberty in the 1970s, but disappeared after she was linked to a brutal hate crime.
Highly sadistic, powerful and horribly evil, adding to her being a literal nazi makes her truly one of the most despicable villains on a show already teeming with rotten, bad people.
And her beatdown by all of the super-powered heroines and defeat at the hands of a boy she wanted to turn into white supremacist in the last episode of season was intensely satisfying to watch.
"Girls do get it done." ;)
Aya Cash plays the character exeptionally well. So well in fact, that several people sent her hate mail for playing such a deeply awful character. I think this was out of line, especially considering the fact that Cash is Jewish herself, and portraying this character must have been incredibly difficult.
The comics, which were written in the mid-2000s, are far more violent, unflinching and cynical. But I think what this adaptation does is not only bring the characters and the story more down to earth and three dimensional, but the changes made to the series feel relevant to things going on in the world. The #MeToo movement, racism and white supremacy, attitudes towards refugees, and bad behaviour normalised by powerful companies in order to keep their image and their money.
All in all, if you're looking for a superhero series that is something different, edgy, thematically powerful and R rated as hell, this is the one for you.
Oh, and there is also a reference to the Spice Girls which is absolute gold.
