1x08 You Found Me

I think this was a good finale even though the ending was meant to be a cliffhanger and surprising but to me, it wasn't. I think this finale set up for a second season very well. We don't know what happens to A-Train, whether he survives or not. We'll find out in the second season. The Deep finally had a genuinely emotional moment. Cool. Hughie, Frenchie, The Female/Kimiko, and Mother's Milk successfully escaped and are on the run. We'll see how that plays out in the second season. Homelander is now on the loose, no longer kept in control by Madelyn. We'll finally see what he's capable of when Madelyn is no longer apart of the picture in the second season. Billy was more of a villain at the end of the episode than Homelander because he let the bomb go off even though the kid was right there though you could put some of the blame on Homelander as well for bringing the kid downstairs. That's what I really like about the show. The "good guy" and the "bad guy" are essentially both the "bad guys." Good stuff.

This show is beautiful.

I can see how those cultivated on post-1990s and corporate entertainment in the Marvel mould might not appreciate such a soft finale, but I found the ending scene sublime-- something that the artless bombast of current mainstream entertainment never goes in for anymore, which is a pity since it imbues a work with such a uniquely human pathos and transcendence. This is how to properly execute self-subversion of established expectations and narrative tone.

I did notice a goof in the shootout scene, though: It was dark, so Frenchie could have triggered the mag release on the M4 Hughie was holding, but, after he switches mags, no one actually chambers the first round, after Hughie completely emptied the first mag, so he shouldn't have been able to shoot. That really should have been caught if the director had known the basics of how guns work, or listened to their firearms coordinator.

But the end of that scene when Starlight makes her entrance and cleans house was properly awe-inspiring. I had frisson watching her. Actually godlike, and affecting in ways that actual superhero films don't affect me. The next scene with Starlight, Hughie and A-Train continues to surprise with the pathos and humanity of the characters in this show. Likewise, with Homelander's seemingly dichomatic moments of infantile sexual immaturity and arrested development in the hands of Madelyn, and his psychopathic revenge on her when she admitted, half-spoken, that she had been manipulating him out of fear-- which was somewhat clear when reading between the lines up to this point throughout the show, given how realistic the characters and their motivations are.

Weird season finale. After all the build up, everything feels anticlimactic. Right down from A-Train--the reason all this mess started--to Homelander.

Before we get to that, let's talk a bit about how weird the whole prison sequences play out. The joke, the attempted rescue, the shootout, all feel really weak especially compared to well-directed sequences in prior episodes. First of all there is really no need for some jocular banter that went for about two minutes or more. Not to mention the pauses. It feels dragging. This includes the attempted rescue which continues the joke.

Second, the shootout looks really weird. We've seen Frenchie did his weird stuff when it comes to the Female/Kimiko, but this doesn't seem logical. He is a professional killer, why the hell he keeps on showing up his head to look at Kimiko when getting shot at? Is he looking to die? Not to mention he got shot prior, on the stomach, how the hell he can walk and help Kimiko walk that easily? Hughie getting to shoot randomly while saying "I'm sorry! I'm sorry" and miraculously hit trained soldiers is even worse. Even the Starlight rescue looks like a cheap deus ex machina for the plot to goes forward.

The Boys had been attempting to mock the quip-ridden superhero genre--that is, the Marvel Cinematic Universe--but the whole prison sequences makes The Boys looks exactly like an MCU episode.

Now we get to the supes.

The Deep. His subplot has been standing on its for quite a while now. There seems to be no direct connection with the bigger plot that has been going on. And this episode his subplot stays that way, while still giving him enough screen time to focus on his emotion. I'm not sure if that is something we wanted to see for a finale. It feels like something to be saved for future seasons. Even if that doesn't mean it's bad, they could have cut it way shorter than what they did.

Then the thing with A-Train feels very anticlimactic. He just popped up there out of nowhere. We were previously shown his desire, his post-power syndrome, his attempt to be relevant. Then in the supposedly final showdown, we finally see Hughie vs A-Train head on. But we don't see A-Train. We see an injured A-Train, a traumatic supe in his mental and physical breakdown. Now this still could be an interesting, emotional confrontation between our protagonist with the one who murdered his sweetheart. Not to mention, the presence of Starlight could make this dynamic interesting--is Hughie done for, how would he cope between his past and present emotion? What we get instead, however, is a slow motion capture with very minuscule combat and almost none of emotional engagement. Then A-Train just went, just like that.

I feel like they are saving him for future episodes, but this being the finale--the culmination of all emotion that has been built up so far--makes this confrontation very lacking. It feels like we are still on Eps 5 or 6, but with worse pacing.

Now Homelander. He is our another main driver of the plot. Everything that has happened so far always leads us back to him. His dynamics with Madelyn the CEO has been a bizarre Oedipus complex-like situation, What happened between them in this episode is actually very unexpected, though one may sense that it would eventually came to this point through the clues scattered so far. This result should have provided a surprising reveal. However, as it turns out, there seems to be something hollow in the encounter. Given the interesting portrayal of their faux-mother-son-sexual-relationship in the first half of the episode, the second half seems to speed up the climax. As if they were being chased by some deadline, that they have to cut it short, while at the same time giving enough spaces for Homelander to give his, in Maeve's words in previous episodes, "boring speeches."

It feels climactic and inconclusive at the same time. And I guess the same can be said with many encounters in this episode. Starlight with Meave. Billy with the CIA. Hughie with Starlight at the church. It feels like they have to speed it up--to shove in the dialogues--for the sake of putting the plot forward. It's shaky and unreliable.

Now, the end of the episode leads us to a quite intriguing reveal. It's not the direction we--or at least, I--expected to take in the season. However, with such really weak build up throughout the episode, the ending feels like forced. As if they have prepared them to be this way, but still unsure how they would bring it up to this moment. As such, while the scene itself is (should be?) surprising, there is not much surprise when I watch the event unfolds. It's less of a "wow, so this is it?" than a "oh okay, so this happens, and then?"

Credits where it's due: Anthony Starr as Homelander and Karl Urban as Billy Butcher display terrific performances in this episode. Especially Homelander with his extremely erratic, unpredictable behavior. But that alone is not enough to pardon the sloppiness of this episode.

Perhaps because they, like MCU and other superhero movies, seem to busy themselves to prepare for the upcoming season instead of trying to give audience a closure of the plot. And that exact reason is what makes superhero movies went boring for these past years. They are focusing to build an universe, instead of writing a good narrative. Unfortunately, this episode robs the fresh air that The Boys has breathe for quite some time. While I hope for the continuation of the series, I am less excited.