Ever since Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons gave us the platonic ideal of deconstructed superheroes with Watchmen, the deconstructed superhero storyline has become its own subgenre. We’ve seen all kinds of takes on it, from Warren Ellis’s cynical Planetary to Mark Waid’s serious Irredeemable to Kurt Busiek’s celebratory Astro City. (Heck, your humble reviewer has also dipped into that subgenre in prose, with the Super City Cops stories.)
In 2006, Garth Ennis (best known for his Vertigo comic Preacher) and Darick Robertson (best known for his work with Ellis on Transmetropolitan) gave us their own deconstructionist take, The Boys.
[Some spoilers follow.]
Initially published by WildStorm, an imprint of DC Comics, The Boys was abruptly cancelled after a half-dozen issues, likely because DC was uncomfortable with portraying analogues of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Aquaman as total assholes. However, DC expedited Ennis and Robertson getting the rights back, and even granted Robertson an exception to his DC exclusive contract to continue to work on The Boys after it was picked up by Dynamite Entertainment. The comic ran for six years, and also had a few spinoff miniseries, finally ending in 2012.
Amazon Prime has just dropped the first eight-episode season of an adaptation of The Boys, developed and show-run by Eric Kripke (among other things, the creator of Supernatural), and it’s remarkably well timed.
We’re now two decades into the revolution where superheroes took over our TV and movie screens. Prior to the release in 2000 of X-Men, superhero movies were not to be taken seriously. Those that did take the source material seriously (rare) were often done in by budgetary concerns that made it impossible to do justice to the heroes in live action. The closest anyone came were Richard Donner with 1978’s Superman and Tim Burton with 1989’s Batman, the only 20th-century adaptations that had the budget to make the heroes not look goofy and who also approached the medium with any kind of affection for the characters.
Then Bryan Singer opened the dam with his X-Men movies, followed quickly by Sam Raimi’s Spider–Man trilogy and Christopher Nolan’s three Bat–films, and then the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and then you had Greg Berlanti’s DC adaptations taking over The CW on television, Netflix gobbling up all kinds of comics adaptations (Marvel, Sabrina, the Umbrella Academy, etc.), and suddenly superheroes were all the rage.
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By the mid-1980s, with the popularity of Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men and Secret Wars and DC’s New Teen Titans and Crisis on Infinite Earths, the time was ripe for a deconstruction along the lines of what Moore and Gibbons did in Watchmen.
And in 2019, with the TV and movie landscape very well populated by solid, positive takes on superheroes, it’s the perfect time for Kripke to unleash Ennis & Robertson’s deconstructionist take on the genre.
In The Boys, superheroes are completely corporatized. Vought International has pretty much all the superheroes in the world under contract, and the company licenses them out to municipalities to help them with their various crime problems. The cream of the crop are The Seven, the elite team, who are a not-remotely-subtle analogue to the Justice League. There’s Homelander, a flag-cape-wearing ubermensch who combines Superman’s powers with Lex Luthor’s personality (publicly a hero, privately a psychopath). Queen Maeve is a powerful woman in leather armor who isn’t from an island of Amazons, but is a lesbian, so there’s that, I guess? (Sigh.) The Deep can breathe underwater and talk to fish, and is generally made fun of as much as Aquaman was in his Super Friends days. A-Train is the self-proclaimed fastest man alive (though not the only speedster, as a race between him and another hero is a major event akin to the old Superman-Flash races around the Earth, only monetized). Black Noir dresses in all black (obviously, since his name is, in essence, “Black Black”) and never says a word, pretty much Batman taken to his absurdist extreme. And there’s Translucent, a character created for the TV show, who can turn himself invisible—but only himself, so he has to be naked to be effective (so of course he’s a voyeur and pervert).
The new seventh member of The Seven is Starlight, a Christian from the Midwest raised by a single-mother Pageant Mom who managed her life toward becoming a famous superhero.
Meanwhile, we have the titular Boys, a bunch of civilians who were part of a now-disbanded CIA black-ops team meant to keep superheroes in line. Billy Butcher, the team’s leader, gets the band back together after A-Train literally runs through a woman, pulping her body.
A-Train’s victim’s boyfriend is Hugh Campbell, an electronics store worker. At first Butcher just wants to use him to leverage Vought’s paying him off with hush-money to plant a listening device in Vought’s corporate headquarters, but Hugh winds up becoming a valuable member of the team.
This first season is quite the thrill ride, one that makes it very easy to eagerly tap on the “next episode” tab when you get to the end of an episode while watching it on Prime. It’s a visual feast, with strong, convincing superhero action, some delightful visuals (my favorite being Butcher wielding a laser-eyes-firing baby like Mr. Incredible wielding Jack-Jack), and a global aesthetic. Though it’s filmed in Toronto pretending to be New York, it has a crowded-city feel, and is never claustrophobic, which I like. It feels like it takes place in the large ol’ world, and that gives it a big feel that helps root it in the world, however distorted it is.
The acting is mostly magnificent. Antony Starr beautifully plays Homelander, from his charismatic, charming public persona to his frustrated private persona trying to do more with his powers than his corporate masters will allow to his utter psychopathy when things get serious. I likened him to Lex Luthor earlier, and in particular his performance reminds me favorably of how John Shea played Luthor in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman 25 years ago, as the public persona is convincing enough to make you believe that people love him, but you also have no trouble accepting the asshole behind closed doors. I also like that we first only see the public persona, even in his meetings with his teammates, so we believe that maybe he, at least, is noble and pure—and then episode one closes with him downing the Baltimore mayor’s plane in order to preserve Vought’s secrets, killing not just the mayor and his staff and crew, but also his son.
Erin Moriarty threads the needle nicely as Starlight, as she really is trying to actually be a superhero, which is at odds with Vought’s mission statement, which is to make money (at one point, The Seven have a team meeting, and it’s entirely about profit shares), or the wishes of the other “supes,” which is mostly to be as self-aggrandizing as possible. Plus on Starlight’s first day as a member of the team, she’s sexually assaulted. (More on that in a bit.)
Laz Alonso as Mother’s Milk and Tomer Koran as Frenchie are both very good, giving their characters depth and feeling, as well as a tremendous amount of humor and heart. Karen Fukuhara is brilliantly expressive and shows a great physicality as Kimiko, who has yet to have a line of dialogue. Simon Pegg has a delightful recurring role as Hugh’s father. (Robertson used Pegg as the template for Hugh in the comics, but Pegg is too old to play that role now, so they cast him as Hugh’s Dad.) I particularly like how Pegg’s hangdog head-in-the-sand attitude is what has held his son back, as Hugh doesn’t thrive until working with The Boys enables him to live up to his potential. Casting Haley Joel Osment as a former child-star superhero now trying to eke out a living as a past-his-prime grownup was a masterstroke. And there are brilliant guest appearances by Jim Beaver, Jennifer Esposito, John Doman, and David Andrews as, respectively, the Secretary of Defense (named Robert Singer, a nice Supernatural in-joke), the Boys’s former CIA handler, the scientist who raised Homelander, and a senator who is blackmailed by Vought.
The rock stars of this series, though, are Elisabeth Shue, Karl Urban, and Jack Quaid.
Shue is superb as Stillwell, a gender-flipped version of the Vought corporate handler of the “supes” they have under contract. I love that every line of dialogue out of Stillwell’s mouth—whether in public, in a private meeting, or a personal conversation—is in MarketingSpeak. She communicates entirely via buzzwords and corporate nonsense, and it’s fantastic. She also has to try to control egotistical assholes who can kill her with no effort, and that tap-dancing serves her well for most of the first season (in particular, she’s able to manipulate Homelander through sex), but eventually it all comes crashing down on her.
Urban makes the whole series, and without him, it would be disastrous. But his Cockney accent and blunt attitude and unparalleled ability to live in his roles makes Butcher a fully realized character. He’s a force of nature, determined to get his way no matter what gets in his way—which, of course, makes him no better than the “supes” he’s going after. The only real difference is that he wants revenge against the supes in general and Homelander in particular for the rape and presumed death (she’s been missing for eight years) of his wife. (That plot thread comes to a devastating cliffhanger at the end of episode eight that presages some interesting notions for what season two will be about…)
But Quaid is what really makes the series work, because Kripke very sensibly focuses a lot of the story on Hugh’s PTSD. There are buckets of blood and gore and guts in this series, to a nigh-desensitizing degree, and most of the death we get is of faceless people we don’t care about, or victims we’re supposed to feel sorry about in the abstract but not really know. But Robin’s death while Hugh is holding her hands is devastating, and it continues to haunt and devastate Hugh throughout the rest of the series. Quaid beautifully plays it—Hugh just going blank periodically and remembering the trauma, and it informs every action he takes throughout the rest of the series. On top of that, however, you also have Hugh’s burgeoning competence, as he proves time and again that he’s got tremendous skills as an operative, and his work with Butcher and the gang is giving him a chance to shine that his dead-end job and hang-dog father never gave him the opportunity to do.
With all that, though, the show has some serious problems.
For starters, the original comic is completely over-the-top, and leans into the pure hedonistic, psychotic insanity of how emotionally crippled shitheads would be if given super-powers. Kripke and his writing staff don’t go nearly as far as Ennis did, and that’s both good and bad. Sometimes restraint is a good thing—but also it seems like it’s skimping on how awful a lot of the behavior can be.
Starlight’s sexual assault is particularly problematic. In the original comic, it was three of the heroes saying she had to orally pleasure one of them or be kicked out. This is modified in the show to only The Deep (not one of the three from the comic) saying that she has to blow him to stay in the group, but instead of being portrayed as standard operating procedure, it’s shown as something that happens on the down-low, and then becomes an issue when Starlight goes public with it. But then the follow up is that Deep is sent to Sandusky, Ohio to become their superhero (a very obvious punishment, especially since Sandusky has a low crime rate), and we keep cutting back to his boring, frustrating life, including him hooking up with a woman who turns out to be turned on by his gills. A significant amount of screen time is spent making us feel sorry for this shithead, who also tries to rescue aquatic life from captivity and gets them killed instead. It’s really yucky that the show is trying so hard to turn this sexual predator into some kind of victim, and I’m sorry, but fuck that shit. He deserves much worse, and trying to make him out to be sympathetic is entirely the wrong way to go with it.
On top of that, the fallout from Starlight going public with Deep’s sexual assault is half-assed. They paid some lip-service to what happened, but that was it. Starlight has as much of a right to cope with the aftermath of her specific trauma as Hugh and Butcher—both of whom lost the women they loved to supes—but while the two men get to feel pain and try to deal with it, Starlight just goes on as if she’s finished her part of the plot and is moving on to the next part. And maybe that’s supposed to be a statement on how strong she is as a character, but it doesn’t come across like that. It mostly just feels like the woman doesn’t get the same meaty character stuff the men get. Hell, Deep gets more story space dedicated to how he’s recovering from being punished for the sexual assault than Starlight gets in her recovery from the actual assault. Instead, Starlight gets to blame her Pageant Mom From Hell (played with no nuance whatsoever by Ann Cusack).
The writers have no idea what to actually do with A-Train, as his character changes to whatever the plot needs it to be. Is he an entitled asshole? Is he a troubled drug addict? Is he a victim of his success? Is he a screwup, in over his head and backed into killing his girlfriend? Is he scared of aging? He’s impossible to get a handle on, and it doesn’t help that Jesse Usher is spectacularly uninteresting in the role.
One of the most important events in the season is Homelander and Queen Maeve’s botched attempt to rescue Flight 37, which has been hijacked. First of all, the hijacking is written as if it takes place before 2001. Of all the changes made to airport security over the past 18 years, the one that’s most important is that cockpit doors are now bolted shut during flight, which makes hijacking damn near impossible.
But much more important is that planes have black boxes and people have cell phones. Homelander and Queen Maeve were still on the plane for several minutes after Homelander (rather incompetently) fried the cockpit and realized that they couldn’t save anybody. Maybe there wasn’t much of a signal over the ocean, and maybe the plane wifi was out after Homelander fried the console, but I find it impossible to believe that in 2019 nobody was recording the two heroes taking out the hijackers and sending it to their friends or livestreaming it somewhere before the cockpit was fried. Between that and the black box, there’s no way the cover story that they got there too late would hold water. The entire Flight 37 sequence comes across as a poor substitute for the comics, which had the supes deal with the hijackers on 9/11 to disastrous consequences (though it was the Brooklyn Bridge, rather than the Twin Towers, that was destroyed). That worked as recent backstory for a 2006 comic book, less so for one set thirteen years after that, but the change doesn’t work.
Some of the changes made from the source material are improvements. In particular, I like that The Female in the comics gets an actual name in the TV show (Kimiko), and that the Boys don’t have powers. Butcher’s pathological hatred of supes has more heft to it if he doesn’t inject the rest of the team with Compound V to give them powers as well, as he does in the comics. And the gender-flipping of Mallory (the Boys’s former boss) and Stillwell is done to good effect.
However, the biggest change involves the final fate of Butcher’s wife, which isn’t completely revealed until the last scene of the last episode of the season, and it’s brilliant.
All in all, The Boys is a problematic, difficult, sometimes great, sometimes horrible series. If nothing else, after two decades of good and noble heroes, the audience is probably pretty well primed to enjoy a look at the same characters and explore what would happen if they were irredeemable assholes.
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest novel is Alien: Isolation, based on the classic movie series and the 2014 videogame in particular, and is on sale this week—go out and buy it! He has written about pop-culture for Tor.com since 2011, with a special (though not exclusive) emphasis on Star Trek and comic-book adaptations.
Watching the trailer for this, the first thing that came to mind was Rich Veitch’s Brat Pack.
Of course the comic is over the top, it’s written by Garth Ennis. The man is a lunatic, and we are better for having him in this world. He also hates superheroes, depicted several times in Hitman (“Green tightwad is more like it” and the petition for Superman to cut his hair come to mind), so this is a delightful forum for him to let go.
I really liked how they did not pull any punches about how these superpowers would affect normal humans.
Tomer Koran was a delight in every scene, especially when he starts trying to coax The Female out from under the table. Also his story to Hugh about the first person he killed, he really nailed that. I want a buddy show with him and MM!
I didn’t feel sorry for The Deep, he deserves the downfall for assaulting Starlight.
I was surprised when this was released since I knew nothing about it being adapted to TV before the day it came out, but since I enjoyed the source material, I binged it during the weekend.
It was much better than I expected. The guy who plays Homelander does an awesome job, and most of the changes kind of work better for the TV show, given the limited space it has to tell the story. At first I didn’t like that, unlike the comic, Butcher and his Boys (Blanked to avoid spoilers) didn’t use Compound V to give themselves powers and be able to fight the Supes on their own terms, but then I kind of felt that having them be normal humans without powers raised the stakes and made the show more exciting.
The bit with Mesmer was just genius, and there’s enough brilliant bits to mostly make up for the stuff that doesn’t really work.
The only thing I’m not totally sold on, unlike krad, is the reveal at the end of the season. That’s one change that I didn’t feel worked so well in comparison to the comic book. Comic book Billy Butcher (blanked again) knows for a fact what happened to his wife and is hellbent on revenge, since she died in bed next to him and he had to kill the superpowered baby right then and there, while TV show Billy Butcher merely suspects it and the Homelander actually mocks him for doing all he does based on basically a hunch. Of course, depending on what they do with Season 2, this can still work, but I think that as things stand now, it fundamentally changes Billy Butcher as a character and not for the better.
BTW, I think Maeve is bisexual in the TV show, since it’s mentioned several times by various characters, both publicly and in private, that she was previously in a relationship with the Homelander. They even discuss it among themselves when nobody’s watching, so it must be true and not a PR stunt.
Props to the actors portraying Frenchie, the Female, and Mother’s Milk. They nailed the characters almost as well as Homelander. Especially Frenchie. He was spot on.
On a closing note, I’ve never felt so old as these past few weeks after seeing Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter play one of the new characters in Stranger Things, and now Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan’s son play Wee Hughie Campbell in The Boys. Though, to be honest, while Maya Hawke looks like her mother when she was her age, Jack Quaid looks more like a young Michael Shannon instead of one of his parents.
I was happy when I saw a new post about the Boys on Tor.com. I was very happy when I saw that you were the one writing it, Keith.
I agree with most of your review. I enjoyed the show immensely – I read the comics just last year so it was still quite fresh in my mind.
Your commentary about the airplane is spot on. I’m wondering, however, if later seasons won’t make use of that somehow (someone finds the black box (if Homelander didn’t just destroy it once he got to the wreckage), or someone unearths a cellphone, or video from someone finally comes to light) – they’ll have to have some sort of ammunition/leverage in future seasons, right?
As for the Deep, I agree with @2 BonHed – I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. I felt like they were, well, sorta reveling in putting him through his own version of Hell because he deserved it. Unfortunately I fear you might be right that the show is aiming to (in future seasons) give him some sort of redemption arc and his SanduskySuffering is setup for that.
I felt like the show really got the “feel” of the comic right, despite the changes (small and large) that it makes to the plotting and the characters.
On a side note, I’m getting fed Facebook ads from Amazon Prime that are featuring members of the Seven in their own commercials – it is pretty funny/cool. The Deep is selling sushi (a guy in a horrible squid costume walks on camera and the Deep does a horrible “Japanese” bow and says “Thank you for your sacrifice.”) and Starlight is selling skin cream or something “You’re not ready to be a superhero until you’re ready for your closeup.”
Haven’t read the comic or watched the series, but thought it did look interesting when I saw it browsing on Prime the other day.
Why I want to comment, though, is that I can’t believe that Keith didn’t point out the ridiculous lack of research effort by the producer if they exiled Deep to Sandusky, OH because it’s “landlocked.”
Um, Sandusky is literally on the shores of Lake Erie. Look at Google Maps. Unless that’s a typo in this article, or they were trying to make some kind of meta-joke, that’s just unbelievably sloppy work by the writing team. There is a very small town called Upper Sandusky, OH, which is indeed landlocked and oddly nowhere near or north of Sandusky, so maybe that’s where they mean to potray. If they just say Sandusky, though, that’s some pretty horrendous coastal bias showing through. Columbus, Dayton, Akron – all of those are obvious, well-known and much more fitting choices.
@5, IIRC in the show they specifically call out the proximity to Lake Erie.
Regarding The Deep, I read all the stuff that happened to him (especially the “gill rape” scene) as a kind of poetic justice that forces him to experience the same kind of humiliating violation that he inflicted on his victims (and I doubt that Starlight was his first victim). Not so much a redemption path per se as an “eye for an eye” experience.
Regarding the big reveal, //this makes me suspect quite strongly that Homelander is not simply making oblivious claims when he says that the encounter was consensual.//
jlhanke: My bad. This is what I get for writing a review while I’m away at a convention and have spotty internet access. Will fix that….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, grateful as always for the edit function to cover me being a moron
I got more of a Namor vibe off The Deep, since he used to be super horny for Sue Storm in his FF appearances. The bit with the dolphin hitting on him during the rescue was funny, till it got pulped… His gills being covered by a tight jacket didn’t make sense. But the woman abusing his tender gills was funny, if cringe worthy.
Anthony Starr is very good as the Big Cheese. He’s more believably terrifying than many villain portrayals I’ve seen. Maybe his scariest is the floating Jesus bit at the Christian festival. His speech is also far right-wing religious supremacist crap. After the wreckage of Flight 37 is found, he gives an almost verbatim re-enactment of Bush’s 9/11 statement in NY. There’s also some very creepy Oedipal psychodrama going on between him and Stillwell. Until she mounted him, I thought she was merely breastfeeding him, standing in for the mommy he never had.
Also at the festival, the (deeply) closeted stretchy guy as a youth minister gave Petit Hughie (stop calling me that, I’m 6 feet tall) another chance to show his chops. They really went after hypocrisy in that episode.
Agreed that A-Train is a mess of a character. I’m not even sure at this point what the noodle shop has to do with anything. Or why he’s sneaking around with the compound if it’s sanctioned by Vought. Do none of the “heroes” know about it? Are they only dosed with it during infancy? Initially it seemed like only his girlfriend, Popclaw, knew about it and was supplying him, but later, he bogarts the supply. The bit with pulling a literal train made no sense either. He’s a speedster not super-strong.
The bits with Maeve’s relationship with Homelander were sometimes confusing. Made me think of DC’s pairing of Wonder Woman with Superman for awhile. Sometimes Homelander came off as very naive, so wasn’t sure if there was any actual contact between them.
One subtle effect of Starlight asserting herself after the assault reveal is that she goes back to wearing her original costume, even after the X-fest.
@@@@@#5: A mention is made of “We have Lake Erie”. But it still fits because of the (unmentioned) lack of dolphins, whales, sharks, and all the other “cool” creatures that aren’t found in the great lakes, as well as the (mentioned) lack of crime for Deep to fight. Still, I think a quick montage of Deep’s “suffering” would have been enough rather than going back to him multiple times (although what really should be described as a rape at the hands of the gill-fetishist girl absolutely did fit as him getting a taste of his own medicine!).
I really did enjoy the show, however. Certainly certain beats could have been better explored, and the extremely short (compared to comparable streaming shows) season didn’t really leave room for a lot of empty downtime where they could have been filled.
Excellent review. I think you covered all the good and the problematic aspects of the story. I wonder how many women were in the writer’s room for this. I get the sense that the writers were trying to address the continuing issue of sexual harassment, but were not really sure how to do it. I was also uncomfortable with how they were trying to create a sympathetic character in The Deep. One possible motive was to show that someone can have good intentions in one part of their life (saving dolphins) and still be guilty of sexual assault. Unfortunately, the other possibility was the writers are trying to show that he’s really a “nice guy” and his penchant for sexual assault shouldn’t define him. If it’s the latter than the writer’s room needs a serious smack upside the head.
I have to give Anthony Starr (Homelander) credit for playing that character with such a creepy tone. The duality of superhero and psychopath made for fascinating viewing.
@9. Dedic: if you look at the trivia/background info on Amazon, it seems like much of the budget went into getting the VFX right. Some of the shots took months top complete, which may have reduced the budget for extra episodes.
@6 Prorphy: Had a similar thought. Homelander seems very passive sexually, at least in the instances we see. Stillwell tries to manipulate him. We don’t know why Butcher’s wife goes into the room with him and stays for hours. Both women are very likely afraid of him, although we’re not shown the use of outright force.
Warren Ellis’s cynical Planetary
Huh — I wouldn’t really call Planetary cynical, though it has cynical moments; it’s too suffused with a sense of slightly gonzo coolness and wonder and playfulness. (“It’s a weird world. Let’s keep it that way.”)
@8 A a little clarification on some of what you were saying you didn’t understand:
1. The noodle shop is where they were keeping Kimiko (the Female) and (repeatedly?) dosing her with Compound-V. It was stated by Homelander (to Stillwell) later that he (Homelander) had A-Train taking the stuff all around the world, building super villains. Vought had nothing to do with it (at least Stillwell didn’t know about it – who knows about the mysterious “Mr. Edward” guy). So it went like this: Compound V is distributed by Ezekiel (stretchy religious guy) in packaging that looks like polio vaccine. A-Train steals portions with his super-speed and distributes it to make super villains. He also keeps some for himself because he has a habit. He stores it with Popclaw because it would be found Vought HQ.
2. The bit with the pulling the train was silly, but it was meant to show that his legs were strong/healed and ready for the strain of super-speed running. All because he shot up with some more Compound V after his brother was trying to get him to quit.
3. Homelander and Maeve used to be together (8 years prior to the events of the show). It isn’t explicitly stated, but I’ve inferred that Homelander enjoyed the relationship more than Maeve, as Maeve prefers women and was only with Homelander due to pressures from Vought marketing. Once she was able, she broke it off, but she still isn’t able to come out publicly.
I read the scenes with The Deep much differently than you did. He repeatedly gets punished for what he did (he get sexually assaulted, he botches the rescue attempt, etc.) while she gets to have a cathartic moment in front of the world and get rewarded for it. As for the plane scenes — is there any indication there WAS a terrorist attack in 2001 in this world? And it seems like you No-Prized a good explanation for why no one tattled.
Having sympathy for a character is a choice. They are merely showing what life (in their world) is like for an Aquaman versus a Superman. The Deep’s portrayal as being inadequate compared to other “heroes” informs his character but it doesn’t mean anyone has to condone his actions.
I’m not familiar with the comic series, but this reminded me a lot of Brandon Sanderson’s The Reckoners Series (Steelheart, Firefight, Calamity), which is a lighter, more YA-friendly take on the genre. In that, the Epics (as the super-powered people are called) don’t even try to pretend to be heroes, becoming ruthless dictators instead and carving up what’s left of America into their own territories. Again you have non-powered folks going up against god-like beings with nothing but their wits (and weapons that harness the powers of Epics that they have managed to kill). Oh, and the protagonist is as bad at making metaphors as Billy Butcher is at giving pep talks. Anyone who likes this kind of story should check it out.
As for this series, I mostly enjoyed it. Some of the nudity seemed to be purely for “shock value”, though I did notice the number of “Adult Content” warnings decreased as the series went on.
If 9/11 never happened in this world (or if this was supposed to be the equivalent of 9/11 in this world), it would make sense that the cabin doors are not bolted closed yet. Also, disabling the Wi-Fi was probably the first thing the terrorists did, to prevent anyone from calling for help. True, there is the black box, and any videos stored on cell phones (which would have to be de-water-logged), but that could play a factor in Season 2.
Terrific review, Keith.
Can we all agree that Homelander’s cape is one of the greatest superhero costume accessories, like, ever?
@13. Kalvin: thanks for explanation no.1. That ties it together better. Maybe I tuned out/nodded off times when A-Train was on screen.
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@14 I agree with you about the Deep and Starlight.
The Deep was barely punished by actual people and is instead being punished by other things happening to him. It definitely felt rape-y in the gills scene.
I’d be OK with a redemption arc for The Deep, now that he’s experienced the same (which is still not OK, no matter whom it happens to) he can actually have a scene with Starlight and give her a heartfelt apology. It won’t change what he did, but as a character he can grow again. If people can’t change for the better and learn from their flaws, why do we keep them around after what they did at all? Some evils can be forgiven, just don’t forget them.
A-train wan’t to bad of a character though I agree that his motivation and actions had me confused sometimes.
No cell signal over oceans, wifi might not have been an option on this aircraft, the black box if it survived should have the conversation in the cockpit but will otherwise show electric failure after it got laser eyed.
Good review and I’m looking forward to season 2
The initial trailer for this and what I’ve heard about the original comics turned me right off this but I gave it a go anyway and ended up loving it!
I can kind of see where you are going with your issues with The Deep doing this horrible thing and then being at least partially treated as this laughable guy who doesn’t have a clue and keeps screwing up rather than a predatory monster but I’d be lying if I said it spoiled my enjoyment of the show. His botched rescue of the pervy dolphin was one of the bits I (guiltily) enjoyed the most.
Anyway it’s a big thumbs up from me considering I thought it looked awful in previews.
What is it with Amazon and deciding characters from Garth Ennis comics that don’t have beards, need to have beards?
@22. who says it’s Amazon? I doubt they have that level of micromanaged creative control.
Or, maybe they just want to tempt the Beard Hunter:
Doom Patrol’s Beard Hunter
“The Deep doing this horrible thing and then being at least partially treated as this laughable guy who doesn’t have a clue and keeps screwing up rather than a predatory monster”
Why not both? I think it’s a real problem with modern culture that we have forgotten how to mock our enemies. We have to treat them terribly seriously. But people can be evil and also ridiculous- more often than not they are. Stephen King gets this right by making his worst villains also small and needy and inept, without making them any less terrifying. Like Randall Flagg.
And if you insist on describing them as sinister and powerful and terrifying… isn’t that going to make them more attractive? Especially to the sort of petty mockable villain that actually exists in reality? “If I were awful enough they’d have to take me seriously.”
Put it another way: I can imagine people wanting to be Nazis after watching Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth. I can’t imagine them wanting to be after watching Sergeant Schultz.
What is it with Amazon and deciding characters from Garth Ennis comics that don’t have beards, need to have beards?
It’s not Amazon, it’s the zeitgeist. When Ennis wrote the comic no one had a beard unless they had to. (Same for Preacher which I guess is the other one you’re thinking of?) Now a Wave of Beard has swept across the country from (correctly) right to left, starting in Thanet, and settled on a lot of hitherto-blameless chins.
On another subject: has the series explained the origin of the name “The Boys”? Always rather liked that. “Where I grew up, people would talk about sending the boys round.” “Who were the boys?” “The ones you sent to do it.” “Do what?” “Whatever needed doing.”
ajay: There’s no real explanation on the show of the derivation of “the boys,” no.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
ajay @@@@@ 24:
Put it another way: I can imagine people wanting to be Nazis after watching Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth. I can’t imagine them wanting to be after watching Sergeant Schultz.
The video essayist Lindsay Ellis makes a similar point, noting that while some white nationalists have adopted the fascist nationalist song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” from the film version of Cabaret as a kind of anthem, and some neo-Nazis love the imagery of Edward Norton in American History X (another serious ant-fascist movie), none of them seem to have ever adopted anything from The Producers….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62cPPSyoQkE
In general: fantastic show. Antony Starr was hi usual great form – anyone who saw him in Outrageous Fortune would know his switching between roles. The transitions from Hero to Villain are very very nicely done. Karl Urban was his immaculate self, though oh god the accent was painful to anyone who has spent time in Britain. Frenchie was a delight, and MM was solid. Hughie I liked, Annie was a nice take on the all American Christian girl that isn’t just a negative take on religion – Ezekiel and his Church is, but Annie still has her own faith, even to the end.
Regarding The Deep, clearly what we see here is a humiliation conga played out on screen. And I can understand somewhat why they might have done it that way – he’s genuinely still a nice guy, trying to save the sea creatures and the oceans. And he’s a fuckup and a sexual predator, because nice guys are often those as well. None of the villains are really one dimensional except Noir, who barely gets screen time, and even he gets to murder and play piano. And the Deep also acted as comic relief, even if continually inept, there isn’t really anyone else in the show who could bring the more comic notes outside of Hughie and Annie’s dates.
One thing I did find – it may have been my tv speaker which is rubbish, but the music seemed very on the nose at times – the show seemed to rely on the music change undercutting the previous to control mood rather than support it, which is a different feel to the darker Netflix shows.
Also the plane hijacking is still somewhat plausible – while the cockpit doors are bolted, the cabin staff do go in and out on long haul to deliver meals. There are ways around all the security theatre at the airports. The far bigger issue is that there are two doors that were ripped open and thrown away and a lasered cockpit. The plane isn’t going to disintegrate, most of it will be in large chunks, so a dsrv and camera will easily spot the unexpected damage. Perhaps that’s another reason for the Deep to be temporarily landlocked so he doesn’t go looking and find something he shouldn’t.
Sometimes he went into full on Cockney (well, closer to mockney), but most of the time he sounded like the Kiwi that he is. It might be only Brits who will notice that though.
@29. phuzz: he sounded Kiwi to me. It’s the vowels…
@29 But if he’d gone full Cockney we might’ve needed subtitles.
(Speaking as an American, there have been times I could’ve used English to English subtitles…especially thick Scots and working class Briton accents…in documentaries. Not to mention what Brits/Scots/Irish/Aussie/NZ actors sound like to American when they try to do “American” accents. I figure there’s a reason so damn many Commonwealth actors play Southerners…it and New England are the only non-rhotic accents available in North America.)
I enjoyed the show, and I was glad that it adapted many things from the book as faithfully as possible, but that only made what was lacking more glaring. As with Runaways, they removed something that made the comic stand out, in this case the fact that The Boys are a Compound V infused goon squad, and their history. I assume they will get the shot at one point, but the character histories suffer because of this. I really must disagree with you there, Keith, as I feel that “fighting fire with fire”, the hypocrisy, makes it more interesting.
Particularly Mother’s Milk (his whole name comes from that) and Butcher, who was much more interesting as an older man with experience in the Falklands War. And also Hughie, who in the comics has to deal with the fact that Butcher injects him with V without his knowledge or authorization. I feel it all becomes much blander without that background. I understand that changes must be made for adaptations to work, and in this case, I do not see the need for these changes, and feel the show is good, but could have been so much better.
Other than that, alnmost all actors are perfect in their roles, particularly Anthony Starr as the Homelander, and who doesn’t love Karl Urban?
I agree that they spend a bit of time kinda trying to make us feel sorry for the Deep (although I didn’t feel that); but I also see his banishment to Sandusky as the type of “slap on the wrist” some abusers get, such as priests. I didn’t feel any of the other issues you mention.
As for the black box of the plane, if Homelander knows they found the wreckage, he can probably go and destroy it while pretending to help.
@3 – jmhaces: In the comics, even with V, they are wildly inferior in power to the Supes, so the stakes are already there.
Hah, true!
@6 – Porphyrogenitus: Yes, Deep is humiliated by that “gill rape” thing, but it kinda seems they took it a bit humorously. Additionally, payback rape for rapists is a bit problematic.
@8 – Sunspear: V is sanctioned by Vought to give people powers, but not to be used as a performance enhancement drug for people who already have powers.
Quoth MaGnUs: “As for the black box of the plane, if Homelander knows they found the wreckage, he can probably go and destroy it while pretending to help.”
That doesn’t solve the incredibly glaring cell phone problem.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me that much, seeing as they were flying over the ocean.
Most planes have wifi these days. And either way, you know that people were taking video of the hijacking and especially of the heroes attempting to save them. I find it impossible to credit that all that phone footage was destroyed, in addition to the black box. That entire hijacking was a plot structure that worked twenty years ago, but does not work in 2019.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Man, if Karl Urban were younger, he’d make a great Wolverine. I didn’t realize it until watching this show.