*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*
Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. As you probably know by now, The Boys has come to an end. I have special guest Ocean back here. Ocean, you can hear on a whole bunch of the TruStory FM podcasts, including often the Film Board. He came to join me to talk about Generation V when it finished its second season.
And now that The Boys is here, we’re going to start the first of what may be a couple of conversations about what we thought of the show, what we thought of the ending, and what do we think of the ethical questions that got raised both within the show and around the writing of the show. So Ocean, I’m always so glad to have you back.
Ocean
Thank you, Matthew. It is a pleasure to be back. And it seems that we talk about The Boys universe when the series are ending, because the Gen V end was canceled after season two. And now that The Boys is wrapped up, I guess we will wait to talk about Vought Rising maybe after season two or three when they cancel that one.
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. Hopefully we’re not the kiss of death for it. So first let’s just start with kind of general impressions. There’s a lot of stuff that gives the TV review out there, but just as a person who likes the kind of questions we talk about, how do you feel overall about how the show ended?
Ocean
I felt that the ending, while it provided the appropriate amount of violence and brutality that we’ve expected from The Boys given the track record, ended — I think the way I felt about it was — it ended the way it had to end.
They wanted to build a happy ending, so they had to come up with a way to stop Homelander. You could make an argument for how maybe it should have ended, especially given the way the show deviated from the comics, in a way that you could argue it should have ended with Homelander winning. That would have been a more dystopian ending, like, you know, you can try all you want to, but you still can’t beat the man. But I think that somewhere along the line it felt like they decided, okay, we want to have some type of a happy ending and be able to stop Homelander, even though we’ve made him into this unstoppable force. They came up with a way to do it and then just gave people the happy ending they wanted.
Matthew
Right. Well, I think it’s interesting that you phrased it like that in terms of it could have been the dystopian ending, because in some ways I think it was — in that Homelander dies, but Vought is back, and Stan Edgar is back there. We’ll talk about that more in a second. And to me, one of the biggest questions is, I don’t know if the writers realized that they were giving us a dystopian ending. That’s one of the questions I have for all of this.
But in terms of overall, yeah, I think I’d agree with you. I think Homelander clearly had to die. I think Butcher had to die. I don’t think there was any real question of that.
I think Huey and Butcher had to have one more final confrontation around this question of who is the canary and what does that mean. I wasn’t wild about how that happened, and it felt kind of paint-by-numbers — it felt like it hit the beats it had to hit. But there was so much else that I thought we were building to that I was kind of surprised we didn’t get into. To me, the two biggest ones were: one, it kind of left me wondering why we’d had Generation V, because we’d had so much build up around those characters and who they are and what they can do, and Marie being at almost a Homelander level of power, and then she really just gets shunted to the side — as well as Jordan and some of the others. And also the story of Homelander’s people breaking away from him. I mean, from the time that — oh gosh, Red, White and Firecracker, that’s her name, right?
Ocean
Yes. Yeah, the one who was the propagandist for everything.
Matthew
Yes, exactly. The Megyn Kelly of the Boys universe, except without turning on him in the end. It’s like, I was really looking forward to some stories about those people starting to turn on him and starting to wrestle with what have they done and things like that. And instead, Homelander killed them the minute he had any kind of leverage. I would never have had that.
Ocean
Yeah, but their loyalty was based on fear. It wasn’t that they actually believed Homelander was as great as he was. They just knew he could kill them, and that’s what it was. So I never felt that they were really turning on him from a loyalty standpoint. And I honestly don’t think Firecracker turned on him at all. I think she just had a little bit of doubt — she did have a problem with him being God — but outside of that she was on board with everything. She never really wavered from him openly in any real, significant way.
So I don’t feel that Homelander had any people. When he was being managed by Edgar, and even before that by Madelyn — Stillwell’s character — he at least had people that were looking out for him, trying to guide him in a way that he could still maintain his power but not go so overboard that people would rally against him. But he never really had people. He didn’t have friends. Nobody actually liked him. He was a complicated guy with a lot of childhood trauma that was expressing itself in a way where he could never be happy or satisfied with what he had. And as a result, while I don’t feel that he had anyone who really turned on him, I do feel they had to figure out a way to make him so bad that nobody would root for him — so that it would be okay to kill him.
Matthew
Well, I think you’re mostly right there. What I’m saying is that Firecracker is the interesting exception, because it seems like she did not operate out of fear. She was a true believer. She had that moment where her pastor approached her and kind of said, hey, look, we’re in trouble. And then she throws the pastor under the bus. She’s obviously troubled by the “Is he God?” thing. I just would have liked to spend more time with that — or more time with the people in the audience who’ve been Homelander true believers, and for whom him becoming God is starting to be too much. You’re right that he never really had those people, but he always thought he did.
And I kind of felt like so much of the interesting part of the story was him coming to terms with realizing that his entire life has been trying to get people to love him, and he hasn’t managed it. We’d always been promised this idea that one day he will fully accept that no one loves him, no one will ever love him, he’s not a God, and if he is a God he’s an evil one — and he’s just going to go fully destructive. And I don’t know if it was lack of budget or lack of inspiration, but the fact that we didn’t deal with any of that just made the ending feel very small, like there’s a lot it didn’t cover that we could have gotten into.
Ocean
Well, I do agree with a lot of that. I think the part I felt differently about was the impression you have of Homelander. I don’t have the impression that he wants everyone to love him. I view him as really conflicted in two fashions when it comes to love. One, he does want the world to worship him and adore him — he says that outwardly. But throughout all five seasons, at any point when anyone showed genuine affection towards him — Madelyn did show some genuine affection, more like an aunt or a mother-son type of thing — when Stormfront showed genuine affection towards him, and even when Firecracker showed genuine affection towards him, he always rejected it. I felt that not only did he want people to love him, but he also never felt that he deserved love. Because any time it was actually presented to him, he rejected it — potentially killed them. He didn’t actually kill Stormfront, but might as well have. And so he was complicated in that way — not only did he want the adoration of everybody, but was unable to accept it even when he got it. That conflicting duality makes Homelander someone who can only be dangerous, because he’s always striving for a thing he can’t really get, and if he gets it, he wants to destroy it.
Matthew
I mean, I think that’s right. I’m trying to remember — I don’t really feel like he pushed Stormfront away as much. I think he certainly never wanted the connection and responsibility that so often goes along with love. But I also agree that he didn’t feel like he deserved it. And I guess I just felt like there would be some resolution to that — with the rejection of his son, the rejection of the people, the rejection of everyone around him — that moment where he finally accepts, okay, no one’s going to love me, so I will just make them fear me.
Ocean
Somewhat. I think the rejection of the son is multifaceted. There’s one part about how the son was raised, so of course that was never going to materialize that way. But also, I never felt that Homelander had any real affection towards Ryan — he really just wanted Ryan to be a platform to show more about how great he was. There were a few episodes early on where Ryan was getting a lot more publicity; they were trying to get him into movies, trying to do things with him. And Homelander saw the extra attention Ryan was getting and thought, no, this is attention I should be getting, because it should always be about me.
He didn’t really love Ryan, didn’t really care about Ryan. It was just more of a means to an end. And I don’t know necessarily what that end was, because of the conflicting nature of him wanting power but then not knowing what to do with it.
Also, I think one part we’re leaving out is that Homelander wasn’t right — he’s not strategic, he really wasn’t even that good of a tactical thinker. He was so much more powerful than anybody else in the room that he got to be in the room, but he never really deserved to be there when decisions were made, because he was effectively a dumb brute.
Matthew
No, I think that’s totally correct. And there’s an extent to which it feels like he never understood love because he was never shown it. He had no idea what love was. As I see all the people he wanted to love him — he kind of thought of them as NPCs. He didn’t have an understanding of what that emotionally meant. He just wanted their devotion, really, much more than their love.
And let’s go on with the Ryan part a little more, because one of the things I thought was so good about the show from the beginning — and that it really held to — is this idea that on some level there’s a real similarity between Homelander and Butcher, in that both of them are so focused on the end goal that they’re willing to hurt anyone else, destroy anyone else, throw aside all their other relationships. And in many ways their dual connections with Ryan felt like a lot of how that was being played out.
And I really loved — and I felt like it was a lot of the show’s overall thesis — that Ryan in the end winds up rejecting both of them. I don’t understand why he winds up with M.M., because they didn’t have a single scene together.
Ocean
I didn’t even think they knew each other until I see him at the end.
Matthew
And M.M. is paternal — we know he’s got a daughter, so okay, fine. But yeah, how did you feel about Ryan rejecting both Homelander and Butcher and then kind of coming at the end to be part of that great fight, but then also rejecting Butcher?
Ocean
Well, I feel that was actually warranted. I think with Ryan, the rejecting of Homelander was baked into the cake of how he was raised. And I think he always rejected Butcher. He just understood — he was young at the time, and Butcher took him over to Grace to make it where he could be safe and raised. In that part of it, it was good. But he was never going to be part of things with Butcher. And I never felt that Butcher really cared that much for Ryan either.
I thought he kind of cared for the idea of Ryan. He was like, look, I loved your mom, but you’re not my child, and all you’re ever going to do is remind me of what I hate. So I don’t really love you. I just more or less don’t want you to become Homelander and then have to kill you too.
And so even when it was over, and Ryan’s a normal human again without his powers, and Butcher puts out the olive branch of, hey, maybe we should just go off and try to build a life together — I think the bridge was already burned. Ryan was never going to sign on for that because he could understand that Butcher didn’t actually care for him — he just cared for his mom. And even then he would always see Ryan as, you know, you’re not my child and your mother is the one woman I love and why I did all of this. So it was never going to work. I think Ryan made the right decision to get away from Butcher. I don’t know why he ended up with M.M. and didn’t just try to find the rest of the Generation V kids and hang out there.
Well, actually — now that I think about it, the M.M. thing might make more sense because he doesn’t have his powers anymore. So he needs to figure out how to live as a normal human being. He can’t run around with the superheroes anymore. So yeah.
And I think that with Ryan rejecting Butcher, that was also part of the last nail in the coffin for Butcher no longer wanting to live. But I think it couldn’t have gone any other way, because if Ryan had accepted Butcher, you’d think about that and be asking — how long until Butcher kills him?
Matthew
No, I totally agree with you. And I think it was Ryan leaving him, and then as much as that — Terror dying, his dog dying, which I thought was very out of left field but fair enough — that kind of drove him to just be like, I’m done. I’m going to go do this thing. And the extent to which he ever really intended to do it, or was basically thinking he was going to commit suicide by Huey — I think you’re right, he just was not wanting to live anymore. Yeah, 100% suicide by Huey.
I think the thing with Ryan is that you really hit the nail on the head with what you’re saying about his connection to Becca, because remember, Becca makes Butcher make that promise — keep him safe, don’t let him think this is his fault. And I think for Butcher, yeah, it was always just, I can’t abandon this kid because doing it is abandoning Becca and abandoning my promise to Becca. It’s kind of a final betrayal of her. And the one time he was the cruelest to Ryan to make him go away, it wasn’t genuine — he needed Ryan to be safe and Ryan couldn’t be with him. So I get that there’s some mixed feelings there.
But I really liked that the show did this, because I think one of the tropes you often get is: grumpy adult and really traumatized child are forced together, the grumpy adult doesn’t want to be a parent to this child, but eventually the child melts their heart and they ride off into the sunset. Like The Professional — there’s a lot of movies with that trope. And I kind of feel like it’s fitting for The Boys to not have had that. Butcher never really had that moment where the kid melted his heart. And the kid never felt, oh well, you’re the closest connection I have to my mom. He recognized this guy is way too messed up. He’s only obsessed with my mother and his memory of her, and he’s not seeing me as I am — he’s just seeing me through a lens of all that. And I want to go do my own thing. And I think that really makes a lot of sense for him.
Ocean
Oh, absolutely. Again, I don’t think Butcher ever cared for Ryan. And I don’t know that Ryan would ever have had the attachment either. When I think about these characters, I have to separate my own POV from what their actual interaction was. And really, for Ryan, Butcher is this guy who just shows up. His mom does say, yeah, I was married to him before you, and everything — but he just shows up, and when he shows up it’s always conflict and always violence and always a problem. So I don’t think Ryan would have any warm thoughts about Butcher, even via mom, because he never saw the good version of Butcher that would have been associated with their life together.
So I think it makes a lot of sense. And I do like that they didn’t fall into the trope you described. But I also think there were some pieces — and this may be part of my critique of how it ended — where things were just kind of, well, we’ve got to do something, so we’ll just do this. Because they had to resolve the Ryan problem. If Ryan is still out there, then Butcher can’t die, because Butcher has to kill Ryan. But by removing his powers, it lets Ryan live.
Because, really, even thinking about why he committed suicide by Huey — all the other things, Terror dying, Ryan rejecting him — I really think of it as: Butcher had a single-mindedness to kill Homelander and never had a thought about what the next day would look like. He always thought he would die doing it, and that would be it. There was no thought of the next day. So when he kills Homelander and there is a next day, he has no idea what to do. He has no plan, he has no identity. He recognizes that all of the friendships he built were all in service of that goal. And now that goal is gone, they’re going to go off and do their own lives. And he doesn’t have anything to hold on to for what is next. So he needs to end it, because he recognizes he turned himself into effectively a weapon — and the only other good thing he could do is kill more supes.
Matthew
Yeah, no, I think that’s really true. He’s out of the revenge business, and he can’t become the Dread Pirate Roberts. And kind of on that, in a more serious way — I’m not trying to get political, I’m just using this as an example of how he can feel — I am very active in anti-death-penalty work. And a lot of people who are active in that are parents of people who were killed, where then the killer was executed. I’ve heard numerous of these folks give speeches about how they always felt like they would feel complete, resolved, like the pain would come to closure when they saw the death of the person who killed their loved one. And of course it never does. And they were just like, I woke up the next morning and my son or my wife or whoever was still dead. And to me, that’s exactly what Butcher is going through. And I hadn’t even made that connection until now. That’s a big part of why, without Terror, without his son, without this driving goal that has driven him his whole life — he’s got nothing.
And I think that’s where honestly the show most fell down for me. There have been two major conflicts between Butcher and Huey, and in some ways it’s kind of the same conflict on both a smaller and a larger level. And I feel like with both, the show didn’t really wrestle with it the way I thought it would.
The first one is really just this idea of: do you have to take the extreme step? All show long it’s felt like Huey has never wanted to kill someone. He has, at times, when he had to — including his own father. But he never wants to kill. He always wants to find some other alternative, and often he’s able to. And so pushing Huey into a situation where Huey has to kill Butcher felt to me like, on some level, that part of the discussion ended with Butcher being right. Did you get any of that? Am I reading too much into this?
Ocean
I never thought of Huey as trying to avoid killing people. While I hear you saying it out loud and realize you’re right, because his body count is so high — I mean, the first episode he kills the invisible man guy, right? And while yeah, that was accidental and funny. The first couple of seasons, all he wants to do is kill A-Train, because of what happened with his girlfriend in the beginning. And then all the various ways he’s killed people along the way. I never thought of him as someone trying to avoid it.
I think the only time I thought he was trying to avoid it was the mass genocide with the virus. That was the one where he was like, okay, let’s not do that. But other than that, I just felt that, you know, while he was trying to find other ways to make it work with superheroes and humankind, I never viewed him as having a problem with killing. So I don’t see that same conflict around killing. I think it was just the scale.
Matthew
I think that’s probably fair. It’s probably more about what I saw as a larger issue. And that’s kind of what you pivot to — although maybe you’ll talk me out of that one just as quickly. It felt like the other element of the conflict between Huey and Butcher — and really at the heart of a lot of the show — was: are there good supes and bad supes, and should we deal with just the bad ones, or is the whole concept of supes bad and has to end?
A lot of the show seemed to be the journey of Huey believing for a long time that you could have, you know, government oversight of the supes and things like that. But always holding on to this idea that obviously Starlight is a good supe, Kimiko is a good supe, A-Train becomes a good supe. He doesn’t want to genocide them, and he doesn’t have to.
But Butcher’s argument for genocide is: if you don’t wipe out all the supes, there’s going to be another Homelander. There are going to be others with incredible powers who want to take over, and we can’t stop them. And a lot of it seemed in the middle seasons to be about — it’s not Homelander, it’s Stan Edgar. It’s the guys who created Homelander. It’s Vought that is the real enemy. So I kept waiting for the show to have Huey and Starlight spend the entire show trying to find a way to say: here’s how humans and supes can coexist, but in a different way where humans are not being horribly treated. And that’s the argument against genocide. And we never got there. Instead we just end with Stan Edgar back in control of Vought, and there’s a government agency to control them, but we have no reason to think it’s going to be any more powerful than it was last time. And it did always seem like it was going to be more of a Starlight thing — some kind of supe training program or whatever they’re trying to do.
Ocean
Another Godolkin Academy.
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. But for good, or whatever. And it’s just an AV shop. I’m a big believer of like — you do your time for the cause, you fight the fight and you step back and let someone else step up. I have no problem with her wanting to run an AV show. But it felt like this show was kind of sidestepping the question it’s been setting up the whole time: is there a way that humans and supes can coexist without the genocide that Butcher was pushing for?
Ocean
Well, I think they just ended up resetting back to the mean of before. They kill Homelander, but the world that is left behind is basically the same world you started with — just without a Homelander. I don’t know if you still have the Seven. Maybe they would rebuild. But I do agree that was the general conflict. I think it arose after Huey started seeing Starlight — or Annie, as she liked to be called later on. When they got together, then he started thinking, okay, is there a way we can coexist with supes?
But before that, I think he was on board with Butcher’s position — hey, let’s kill them all. Butcher was always unwavering: we need to kill them all. But really what he had was, I want to kill them all, but the main one I want to make sure I get is Homelander. And in order to get powerful enough to kill Homelander, you have to kill them all. That was the world he wanted to have — one where there are no more superheroes, just back to regular people being mean to people without super-powered beings doing it.
And from the other side, as far as the coexistence question — here’s where I think the show problematically could not really get to a resolution. Because realistically, what Homelander was doing was far and away beyond everybody else. Most of the other abuses you saw from superheroes towards humans were vices — taking advantage of people, mostly, or wild parties, things like that. They did not regularly kill people. Now, if they did kill someone, they didn’t care and moved on, but it wasn’t their reason for being, it wasn’t what they were doing all the time.
And so for the show to really attack that, you’d need another season to say, okay, now we need to talk about what happens after. Because Homelander is such a massive presence — his ability and willingness to kill everyone — he has to be dealt with. Even with someone like Marie Moreau — her powers, being able to use someone’s blood to blow their head off — she could cause a lot of damage. She’s not as invulnerable as Homelander was, but that power is outsized. But because they focused everything into Homelander, which they should, to build a big bad — and I applaud the show for doing that — to try to figure out how everyone else would coexist, really all they could do was: okay, we’ve removed Homelander, let’s return to what they were before, and hopefully superheroes are mostly just actors in movies who have some abilities and that’s it.
But I don’t think the show had enough runway, without continuing past that, to really grapple with that question. Because it is a very interesting question. How would that work? Do you have them register of some kind? Do you segregate? Do you say, if you’re superpowered, you go to this island — you build Australia as like a, you know, super-colony?
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. Or do that, or whatever. And while those are definitely interesting questions, I don’t really see a clean answer to any of them, because at the end of the day, superheroes have too much power. If you live in a world with superheroes, they are going to be the dominant species among regular human beings. And then you have the question: can two equally intelligent species coexist? Right — they’re not necessarily more intelligent, with the exception of Sister Sage. Can two equally intelligent species coexist?
I tend to argue that, well, no — and this is the other thing that would have been interesting — I think Butcher is probably right that after a while, the supes would exterminate the non-superheroes, because they don’t really need them. So over time they would just kind of exterminate them or enslave them, something like that. And while that would be an interesting show, you’d be going toward something like Battlefield Earth, where you have these super-powered beings and the regular humans are like primates.
I hear what you’re saying. And I think you’re right — it would have required a very different season, a lot more about the buildup of some other kind of idea. And I guess for me it’s especially because it felt like that’s what Generation V was heading towards, since so much of Generation V was about people before they become heroes, before they become corrupted by Vought, really wrestling with what does it mean to be good and do the right thing. And you’re right, the way they built Homelander into the biggest big bad that’s ever been a big bad, it sort of had to focus on the big fight with him.
I guess I always saw it as: at the end of the day, he’s not the big bad — Stan Edgar is. Vought is. Homelander is the creation. It’s almost a Frankenstein story. The monster is much scarier than Dr. Frankenstein. The monster can do a lot more damage. But Dr. Frankenstein is the truly horrible one — the monster is just the creation. And yes, you have to stop it and prevent it from doing harm. In Homelander’s case you clearly can’t do that without killing him — although I’d still argue I would rather have seen him arrested. But I get why, for the story, Butcher was not going to do that.
Ocean
Did Homelander arrest him? You mean once he has no powers?
Matthew
Once he has no powers, yeah. Just arrest him.
Ocean
Oh, at that point, yeah. Well, the problem then is you’d have to capture Butcher too, because Butcher is like, I came too far. There’s no way this is anything other than —
Matthew
It would have been a different kind of show, and I get that. Other shows have wrestled with these questions before — the MCU with Civil War and the registration. We were joking about going to Australia — that’s the story in X-Men comics right now, actually. Going to a place called Krakoa.
I guess for me, part of why it’s such a big deal is that in most of those other universes, the basic conceit is that having powers doesn’t make you bad, and that for an awful lot of people, having powers actually gives you more ability to do good in the world. So the idea of being afraid of them is kind of unjustified. But you’re right, in this world Annie and Kimiko are far and away the exceptions. And there’s an interesting world to explore there — is that because of what power does, or is that because of Vought?
I just felt like that’s what the show was building to. Maybe you’re right that they decided they could only do one more season and couldn’t get there. Or maybe it’s partly that the actor playing Homelander is phenomenal, and sometimes you write for the characters you have.
Ocean
I like him in this, I like him in Banshee. I like Anthony Starr a lot of the stuff he does. But I agree with what you’re saying. And I think Generation V was that show. In Generation V, they’re not all trying to be superheroes, not all trying to take over the world. They are really just trying to be their best — yes, there’s competition inside the school built up that way, and they’re trying to grow their abilities and understand themselves and become — I guess “regular” is not the right term — but figure out how they’re going to proceed in the world outside of college and interface with everyone else.
And I think that’s the show that would have done a better job of grappling with these issues, because it was structured and set up differently. In The Boys, Annie and Kimiko are massive exceptions to what you see from superheroes. In Generation V, they’re not. Most of the superheroes there are like Annie and Kimiko. You have stuff where they’re young kids doing things that are taking advantage of people or manipulating things — but you don’t have to be superpowered for that to happen. Go to any college campus and you’ll have situations where people are trying to take advantage of people. That’s just a normal part of growing up at that stage of life.
So I think what we were really robbed of, to get to that more interesting show, was Generation V being canceled. Because The Boys can end the same way it ended, and then all of that can be attributed to Generation V — because those characters would probably end up going more that route, and you would see that show. Which would be great. But part of my love for The Boys means I have to accept that, well, this show couldn’t be that, because this show was all about stopping Homelander.
Matthew
I think that’s fair. And I don’t know who was making what decisions and what conversations were happening — I’d love to find out one day. But I can certainly imagine a world where the writers of The Boys are essentially saying to the writers of Generation V: okay, cool, we raised a lot of questions, but we’re going to kind of hand that off to you. And we’re just going to make this the Butcher vs. Homelander show. And yeah, I guess that makes sense. The oddities of corporate America and how TV works — Gen V getting canceled changed all of that.
And I think right now, from what I can tell, we know very little about The Boys: Mexico, but maybe that’s going to be the show set in a post-Homelander, new Vought, new President Bobby Singer universe. Let’s see what happens.
Ocean
Well, hopefully that one is set in the future. The Vought Rising thing is a prequel, and I’m generally not a fan of prequels because there’s too much of, well, I know where this is going to go. So even when you have characters that could be in danger, if any character from that show also appears in the later one, you’re like, well, nothing’s going to happen to them because they’re alive later. So I’m generally not a fan.
But one thing I did want to touch on while we’re near this area — something I had a criticism about or was curious what you thought of: Soldier Boy’s power to be able to remove other superheroes’ powers. Is that kind of a lazy writing MacGuffin thing? Because when he demonstrates it, I was sitting there going, well, wait — did he know he could do that? Did other people know he could do that? If so, why wouldn’t Vought have been trying to build more people with that ability, especially when Frenchie makes Kimiko do it in the process? I’m like, there’s no way that would have been beyond Vought’s capabilities. They would have made five or six other people that could do this.
So it felt very much like they were thinking, well, we have to figure out a way to kill Homelander, and this is what we got. Because to kill him in a straight battle doesn’t make any sense, especially after they did the whole Compound V thing. So then they have to just kill him this way. But it seems so kind of last-minute lazy, because that seems like too important of a thing to have never come up until the third-to-last episode.
Matthew
Yeah, I’d fully agree with that. I think the fact that we knew Soldier Boy had that power, and sometimes it seemed to work and sometimes it just killed people depending on what the plot needed at that point — remember, it’s the same power that at Herogasm just blew apart and killed a dozen superheroes, not just taking away their powers.
I have two thoughts here. One is that once it’s introduced, that could actually have been part of resolving some of what I’m talking about — even just having Kimiko be part of some official government body trying to keep an eye on superheroes. We’re going to make more people like Kimiko so that if a superpowered person gets too powerful, we can basically take away their license, you know, their super license.
But more realistically, I think this is another trope I was sad to see the show fall into. Once we started down the path of, can we make the virus and can we make the antidote — and even a lot of last season was about that too — I kind of knew that by the second-to-last episode, we’d find out that no, that’s not going to work, and now we have to come up with something totally different in the last two episodes. Because that is a very common trope. And I think it would have actually been great if they had just done it — they finally get him with the virus, but Huey gets the antidote out that Butcher doesn’t want, and that’s the fight they have. I didn’t love the introduction of the original Compound V blood, because again, we could make more of that — it just felt like they were introducing so many MacGuffins at the very end that felt kind of lazy, because they kept wanting one more big twist.
Ocean
Yeah. And I really feel that the beating-a-dead-horse point about Gen V being able to explore these things is: if you have the ability to create a chemical that could take people’s powers away, you have a lot of interesting questions. Like, is that okay to do? Because people’s identity would be wrapped up in these abilities. Even Starlight, who seems fairly well-adjusted — who is she if she doesn’t have any powers? Does that fundamentally change her mental thought process, her own self-worth? And are you doing more than just stopping someone from being a villain — are you actually taking away their identity at the same time? Is that okay to do against their will? If someone volunteers for it, that’s one thing. But if they don’t, what are you doing to them as a person? Is that a punishment that fits the crime? Obviously if you’re trying to take over the whole world, I’d say yes. But if you just robbed a bank, maybe not. Once you have that hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
And this has been explored in other mediums — the X-Men had a whole storyline about taking powers away. But I felt his ability to do that just came out of left field. And I would personally have preferred the virus to be the thing, because then you’re grappling with the bigger question: are they so bad that we should have genocide, or not? And even if Huey finds the antidote and gets it out there and everything is great — there are still going to be several million that die anyway, because you can’t get the antidote everywhere as fast as the virus spreads. And then what does that mean for how things ended? But then again, at the end of the day, people came for the hits, and the hits are Butcher vs. Homelander.
Matthew
Nothing’s wrong with that. You’re right. I think, you know, I kind of thought it might be that Butcher takes the V One and then kills Homelander, and then everyone has to kill Butcher. But I just said, this is the show we got and I definitely enjoyed it. There’s a lot more to discuss and we’ll keep talking about it.
I think there’s a whole area of Homelander becoming God in his mind and what all that meant that we didn’t even get into. So I’m really looking forward to continuing this. Ocean, thank you as always so much for being here. For people who want to find more of your stuff, where can they go?
Ocean
Well, right now I’m on the most recent episode of the Film Board where we’re discussing the new Star Wars — Mandalorian and Grogu. And right now my primary podcast is The Aging Moment, which is the podcast where we deal with the triangulation of sports, movies, and life. We have been on a break for a while because life gets in the way of things sometimes, and we are looking to start it back up again. More information when we get our act together.
Matthew
Please do. And please keep me in mind as a guest, because there are a lot of sports movies I’d love to talk about, and the role of sports in society and how that ties into film and things like that. There’s just so much to get into.
Ocean
Absolutely. Thank you. I’m glad to hear that. It definitely gives us other directions to go with the show — sports is something I was trying to talk about beyond just, did the underdog win?
Matthew
Exactly. And I will say, as a shameless self-plug: this podcast, Superhero Ethics, recently did an episode on The Natural and baseball as mythology. That was really fun and kind of plays into a lot of what you’re talking about.
Ocean
That was a good episode. I recommend everybody go out and listen to it.
Matthew
Thank you so much. We’ll definitely have a link to it in the show notes as well as a link to all of Ocean’s stuff. Of course, you can find this and my Star Wars podcast at TruStory.fm or just go to TheEthicalPanda.com. Star Wars, we’ve been talking about Maul, we’ve been talking about Mandalorian and Grogu — the movie that’s out. You can also find both me and Ocean talking about that on the Film Board. A lot of great things. All of it’s at TruStory.fm. So thank you Ocean, and thank you all so much for tuning in. That’s a wrap on this one.
