The Boys Season 2 Episode 7 : Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker Review
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With the congressional hearing against Vought fast approaching, The Boys are tasked with protecting Lamplighter and keeping him alive until he can testify before Congress. However, his testimony might not be enough so Butcher goes off to try and get an extra witness in the form of Vogelbaum, the former CSO of Vought who knows where all the bodies are buried.
Meanwhile, Homelander and Stormfront’s attempt to radicalise their fanbase is going great. Not only are their rallies growing in size (and their rhetoric is starting to turn people into lone wolf gunmen killing people they believe might be supes) but they’ve captured Starlight and are using her as a symbol of treason and treachery. To celebrate this, they decide to do the one thing that Homelander has been wanting to do for a while… go and get Homelander’s kid and get him to join their side.
Due to circumstances, the only people available to save Starlight are Hughey (who is still recovering from his injury from the last episode) and Lamplighter. Naturally, all this has to be dealt with before the big congressional hearing… that hearing doesn’t exactly go according to plan.
The Good Boys
Throughout the season we’ve kept returning to Butcher’s wife Becca and her son Ryan and it’s felt like that storyline was going to end badly for Becca. Well, finally things went where they were inevitably going to go, with her lies being exposed to Ryan and him running off with Stormfront and Homelander. He still doesn’t know the extent of his powers but with next week being the finale, either he’s going to use them for something big or this show’s about to kill the kid.
Hughey and Lamplighter teaming up to break into Vought to save Starlight is a genuinely fun scene. They bounced off each other really well, it’s honestly a shame we won’t see them together again due to the thing I will be bringing up in the bad section of this review.
While I really wish there was a lot more Deep in this episode, the few scenes he had were some of the bluntest mockery of Scientology, the mockery hitting its peak with Eagle the Archer being shut out by the church in a manner similar to disconnection techniques used by the Church of Scientology. I do want them to go in a little harder on this ribbing of Scientology because it’s absolutely needed… maybe next season? Hell, hire Leah Remini and really just go for broke.
Of course, the centrepiece of the episode, and where the insanity truly hits the fan is with the closing scene at the hearing where heads explode one after another in brutally glorious fashion. I honestly wondered if they’d forgotten about this, since we haven’t seen someone’s head explode like this since Raynor in episode one of this season. Well, they made up for the time they’ve lost on this by just having head after head exploding during a hearing which now has no more witnesses. We still have no real clue who is responsible for it or even have a hint but with an escalation this big, next episode is probably going to reveal it and if I were to bet, I’d probably bet on Stormfront being the one to be doing this.
The Bad Boys
This episode marks the final stand of Lamplighter, setting himself on fire in the middle of the rescue mission. For some reason, the man with the power to manipulate fire isn’t fireproof which feels silly since most of the other heroes are pointedly indestructible (it’s why Translucent’s death in season 1 was such a big deal) but Lamplighter can die for something that could happen accidentally? It’s not even that his death was sad, it just felt like it was there purely for shock value and little other reason. We’ve been denied more episodes of Shawn Ashmore as a drunken depressive asshole who sets things on fire and frankly that’s unforgivable.
Stray Observations
- Opening on a basement-dwelling idiot who falls down an alt-right rabbit hole, turning him into an angry extremist who kills an innocent man was jaw-dropping.
- Porn Titles: “Deep does it in the blowhole”, “Translucent the invisible cock”, “Queen Meave Pleasure Slave”, “Big Black Noir” and “Starlight pulls an A-Train”. I wish I was in the writers’ room the day they were pitching those.
- “Has there ever been anyone in history more persecuted just for trying to protect their own?” has big “calling me a racist is the real racism” energy
- “Do you wanna be the cuck or do wanna be the guy who fucks the wife” wins the award for ‘Best Inspiration Speech’
- “This is not lesbian, this is not on brand!” can that please be on shirts in time for pride next year?
In general, it feels like we should be a little ways off the big climax of the season but we’re not, we’re a week away from all this needing to come together in a big finale. This series has been a non-stop blistering call out of the Alt-right and this week it hit its peak with calling out how lonely people get pushed to violence or how easily charismatic racist leaders can get large crowds on their side. I’m a little nervous how they’re going to wrap all this up in a week and what elements of this story are going to be left open until next season, but The Boys really just keeps hitting it out of the park every week and they’ve yet to really drop the ball so I have faith that they’ll pull it off.
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