Boys Season 3 Episode 7 aired Friday 1st July. This episode is filled with easter eggs, a big backstory segment for Billy Butcher and a lot of things just like that which pull from the comics.
So sit back, shut up and get ready for a Vought News Network special report where we go through it all.
Recovering From Last Week
After last week’s live stream exposing Vought, Homelander and Soldier Boy pick up with a news report by VNN. This comes across like a propaganda edit from the start and it has the stars and stripes burning, suggesting that Starlight wants to destroy America. However, this also has its own symbolism as Homelander’s cape is of course based on the stars and stripes.
Ashley denies the claims that Maeve is still missing and in this episode actually clears up that she’s in a secure cell located at an undisclosed location owned by Vought. We can confirm this due to the SWAT Team members who wear Vought’s logo on their shoulder pads. Due to what Homelander says about getting used to it this is likely where he was raised and the white corridors look very similar to the videos that we’ve seen of him as a kid.
These would be built to be supe resistant and in the comics, we discovered that there was actually a nuke pointed at the entire facility on the off chance that one of them wouldn’t play ball and they had to destroy the entire thing.
Homelander’s Parentage Revealed
Homelander was raised here without a mother or father and this explained a lot of his psychological issues. In the comics, we discovered that he was cloned from Stormfront but I had a feeling that they might have changed it up with the pair getting it on in the second season.
Last week in theory time we discussed how Homelander could’ve been cloned from Soldier Boy but in this episode, we learn that he’s actually his biological son. The series has been heavily laced with the idea of fatherly relationships and this has been a motif for characters like Hughie and his dad, Mothers Milk and Janine, Stan Edgar and Victoria, Billy and his father and so on.
In episode 6 Soldier Boy even talked about how he’d wanted to have kids with Crimson Countess.
This line almost gets played beat for beat in this episode when Homelander is talking to Maeve. Lots of similarities going on here as they both want kids but there’s a really f**ked-up side to it too. Soldier Boy didn’t really consent to having a son and Homelander also tells Maeve that her eggs will be harvested so she won’t have a choice either.
He says one of the coldest lines in the season in ‘I’m not letting you live, I’m keeping you alive.’
Really messed up and I kinda hope that she actually gets a happy ending.
Maeve’s Whereabouts
In the comics, Maeve was killed in Vought Tower during a fight with Homelander but they do tease something else here that could happen. Maeve wants nothing more than to be normal and with Soldier Boy stripping someone of their powers there could be a way for her to lose them and get somewhat of a regular life.
She’s Maeve up, ey, that Homelander is wearing concealer due to him having a bruise and as Vanko said “if you make God bleed people will cease to believe in him.”
Starlight Spin
As I mentioned Ashley says Maeve is in rehab, further carrying on this lie and she also states that Soldier Boy died in 84, again sticking to the official story. Ashely is now the SHE-E-O and she’d likely have access to all the info including the stuff about Soldier Boy.
She also brings up Starlight’s connection to Kimiko and states that she’s a member of The Shining Light Liberation army. This was the terrorist organisation that kidnapped Kimiko and her brother so that they could be turned into Supes to fight for their army. Ashley says to connect the dots and Shining Light is of course similar to Star Light so as I’ve been saying.
Now I think this very much shows that Homelander’s plan of destroying the world is all talk and that he needs to be loved to the point he’d never actually carry it out. The Boys comic series was always pushed as the Superpowered people’s biggest weaknesses being their own egos which he’s definitely a victim of. He gets exposed again by Starlight in a moment that made me literally punch the air like got you you summoffabich but he immediately transforms to try and save face.
Homelander is all talk and therefore he runs spin on Starlight instead of immediately killing her because he knows what the public backlash would be like.
Damn chump.
Soldier Boy
Cut to Soldier Boy singing the song If You Wanna Be Happy by Jimmy Soul. He of course appeared on Solid Gold the other week and the guy had a lot of musical success. The song If You Wanna Be Happy is basically about how you’re better off marrying an ugly woman as no one will want her and, yeah dunno if it would fly today, cos you, you get offended by everything.
Huge shoutouts to Gera Ramos for also pointing out that this music video is parodying the Robert Mitchum album.
I’m sure that the music video is based on something too and I spent about 20 minutes searching for 80s music videos with desks and red backgrounds but couldn’t find anything.
Turns out The Legend produced it and above his fireplace we can see the Payback Movie poster that was used in the promo material for the show (left).
Hughie is wearing a Doobie Brothers T-shirt and we also learn about Soldier Boy’s time in the war. Much like Captain America, he was used purely for Propaganda and the character was only created to sell war bonds for the US. Cap, of course, ended up actually getting involved in the fighting whereas Soldier Boy was just a PR stunt. With him being an actor this could also be riffing on John Wayne who made numerous World War 2 movies but he’s gone down in history as a draft dodger. However though this is reported quite a lot as being the truth, Wayne actually did try to register but he was rejected because he had a wife and four children.
Soldier Boy still doesn’t mind getting it on with women his age though and he can’t fight the feeling anymore to get in deep as we hear REO Speedwagons classic in the back. Legend also references some of the old stars that he’s had which include Jacqueline Smith and Bissett. Hughie again has no idea who they are but they starred in Charlie’s Angels and Bullitt.
Who is Mindstorm?
In this episode, they’re after Mindstorm, a character that’s a new creation for the show. He’s basically a psychic based on the likes of Professor X and Jason Stryker. Due to the character design, I’m leaning more towards the latter and like Stryker, Mindstorm can infect someone with powerful visions that they end up getting lost in.
He’s living out in the wilderness and is referred to as Howard Hughes, a major business magnate, aviator, philanthropist, and film director. He’s regarded as being one of the most accomplished people of all time. However, as the years went on his mental health started to decline and his OCD went to extreme levels. Hughes would sit in a darkened room just screening movies non-stop for four months and he urinated in bottles, crapped in mason jars and wore Kleenex boxes for shoes. Basically lived the life of a movie YouTuber and his personal hygiene slipped massively resulting in him growing long hair and fingernails.
He was heavily medicated and using Mindstorm’s prescriptions they track him down. Soldier Boy also brings up that he needs more weed which Butcher and Hughie use to stop his PTSD from triggering. However, he gets one of the common side effects of this which is paranoia, which I wouldn’t know about in case my mother’s watching.
He ends up second-guessing Hughie and Butcher which does have some foundation as we of course know he was betrayed by his team in Nicaragua.
Mother’s Milk Easter egg?
Jump to Frenchy and Kimiko going to Mothers Milk and he once more wears a DMX t-shirt. On top of the Black Panther poster from last week, there’s also one for Huey Newton and a picture of Barack Obama.
Also interesting coincidence here, MM lives in apartment 42 which is the same number that Jackie Robinson had. A number of them popped up in Into The Spider-verse as a reference to him and since then I’ve just thought of that whenever I see them in a show. 42 is also the meaning of life anyway…moving on.
Butcher & Co
We cut to Butcher, Hughie, and Soldier Boy out in the woods and they open the trunk. This is a similar shot to earlier in the season in which they were with Mother’s Milk. He’s gone now though and the group are very much enabling each other. Butcher has been criticised for turning Kimiko into a weapon and he’s very much using Soldier Boy for the same thing.
They also discuss Soldier Boys’ drug use and they are also clearly hooked on Compound V24 even though we discover it’s very much killing them. It’s of course injected much like heroin and it gives someone a high for 24 hours giving it very addictive qualities.
Black Noir’s Hideout
From here we jump to Black Noir who’s hiding out at a run-down Buster Beavers. This Chucky Cheese parody was actually advertised on the social media accounts for the show all the way back in February so we had some inkling that this might be a location that showed up. Buster Beaver stutters like Porky Pig. He brings up the Black Noir massacre in Lagos which has already been touched upon in the season. This was a play on Wanda at the start of Civil War who killed several Wakandans out in Lagos. Really it was Homelander who got him through it but he thinks it’s these cartoon characters.
Noir imagines the animals coming to life and as we discovered in episode 3 he had brain damage after the attack in Nicaragua. This has taken him back to having an almost childlike mind state and his retreating to this shows how much comfort finds in his childhood memories. He also drew one of the characters earlier in the season and through them we learn what really happened in Nicaragua.
Now Soldier Boy is played by the eagle character which of course represents America’s mascot whereas Noir is a timid sheep. We also discover his name is Irving and I’m still kinda sticking with the theory that he could be a relative of Stan Edgar.
Butcher’s Backstory
After Soldier Boy sets off a trip wire, Butcher is transported back into his worst nightmare by Mindstorm. This pulls several elements from Butcher’s origin story in the comics. Beginning in Omnibus five we see his childhood in the arc titled Bomb Alley. The entire arc runs for six issues and it’s centred around Billy going to his father’s open casket after the undertaker has done him up. We learn that he was a baker which Butcher found hilarious due to their surname.
However, their dad would kick the crap out of anyone who made fun of it and Billy used to spend his nights listening to his dad beating his mother. He would go to sleep promising to kill him one day and this anger inside spilt over into the classroom. He punched a teacher whilst fighting another kid whereas in the show he attacks one after he says he doesn’t want to turn out like his dad. Now on top of this, they also have the scene where his dad gives him a beer. In the show, it’s during a visit to the pub whereas in the comics he cracks open a can for him in the bakery.
It’s during this conversation that he says his brother is like his mother whereas Billy is like him. These words stuck with him for the rest of his life and Billy turning into his dad has also been touched upon by Mallory.
Shortly after his father had a stroke and one night his mother tried to cut up his steak for him so he could eat it easier. He ended up breaking her eye socket and for the rest of the story, she has a glass eye. Billy said he was gonna kill him but Lenny ended up talking him down. He said that it would break his mother’s heart and that if his dad died and he went to jail they’d have nowhere to live and that they’d have no money.
This line about breaking hearts is also brought up in the series and Billy’s grandfather also says it to him when he toys with joining the army.
Realising that he couldn’t work with his dad because he’d end up killing him, Butcher joined the Royal Marines and he fought in the Falkland wars. Now I wanna do a big breakdown on his backstory in another video but that’s pretty much how it plays out in the comics in terms of what we also get in the episode.
We learn that he’s gonna be stuck in this until he starves to death unless Mindstorm frees him. Soldier Boy says he better get that idea out of his head otherwise he’ll slap him like he’s Connery. Sean Connery had an interview with Barbara Walters where she asked him if he stood by his statement on slapping women from a couple of years prior. He doubled down and said he stood by it and said it was fine if the circumstance called for it.
This idea of abuse of course carries over to the flashbacks and we see how Billy hid his brother and took the beatings for him. Lenny is someone who has weighed over Butcher massively and he’s appeared in hallucinations throughout this season. At one point he appeared on the tv for a second and he also flashed in place of Hughie after they set Soldier Boy free.
Billy’s room is full of football memorabilia including flags of both West Ham and Charlton Athletic. At one point in the episode we see a calendar that says 1989.
Charlton actually shared Upton Park with West Ham for a season and a half explaining why he supports the two teams.
Billy’s fathers beating of course mirror his anger and as they’ve discussed throughout the season, V only brings out what’s inside of someone already. This is mirrored in Kimiko who too wishes to be injected with it once more.
At Mother’s Milk, we see Frenchy saying it’s the greatest sorrow of his life that he missed Herogasm and he’s constantly bigged it up throughout the series.
They’re trying to find a way to take out Soldier Boy and I think for the finale that he’ll end up teaming with Homelander. Can see them both just going wild and this will make The Boys rejoin forces to stop them both. Who knows, they might even end up getting someone like Black Noir on their side and he could lead them to Maeve who will join the fight so you kinda have mixes of The Seven, The Boys and Payback. This would mirror Noir and Homelander’s rivalry in the comics and I think it would be such a cool way to take things.
Kimiko sits with Annie watching Michael Sembello’s Maniac from Flashdance. This is later given a second reference when we find out that Soldier Boy slagged off Black Noir to its producer Don Simpson.
She focuses on the video for a bit but rather than slipping off into a fantasy she stays with Starlight and focuses on the important things. I think this is truly symbolic of how she’s now accepted that she’ll never have the happy life she’s fantasised about and that sadly, she is the killer she didn’t want to be.
She needs to be strong to protect Frenchy and this puts Starlight in the position where she has to return to Vought Tower.
Back with Hughie and Soldier Boy
Soldier Boy says that Butcher must suck like a Hoover Deluxe for him to constantly look out for him and this classic device had the suction power of Ryan Arey’s mum on a Friday night.
Got you again you chump.
Hughie also mentions his Malboro Man act which is a reference to the video at the start of the episode which was based on classic cigarette adverts.
The Deep
From here we jump to the Deeps waterbed…it’s not but that would’ve been cool. Either way, he’s found out he’s about to be on Sean Hannity and to celebrate this fox is about to get wet, wet, wet. Time for some tentacle p*** as we watch Deep suggest a threesome to the song More Than Words by Extreme.
It’s an extreme scene and Deep says that the octopus Ambrosia wants to taste Casandra and I guess that’s how with a Squid you get 8…
Right, I’ll stop with the s**t puns.
Deep also mentions that Dave Eggers says he has a formidable intellect and the author was behind the book A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius.
Back with Black Noir
The animals act out his time with Payback at Vought American. This was the name of the company in the comics which was then shortened to Vought for the show but it’s nice that they gave a slight callback to its prior name in this flashback to the past.
Soldier Boy beats the crap out of Gunpowder and as we learned in Episode 3 he was abusive towards him.
Noir walks in, angered that Soldier Boy had him dropped from Beverly Hills Cop.
Axel Foley is the name of the character Eddie Murphy Played and Noir said in Episode 3 that he wanted to be the next him.
As we mentioned earlier, Soldier Boy bad-mouthed him to the legendary Don Simpson who was a producer for not only Beverly Hills copy but also Top Gun, Bad Boys, The Rock and of course Flashdance.
Soldier Boy smashes his face in like you should smash that like button and this idea of him not being upstaged of course plays into the ending. Whereas he didn’t want Noir to replace him, come to the end of the entry he seems to genuinely want Homelander to succeed him.
Later on, he comes across a priest and nun out on the road in one of the funniest scenes in the entire season. I love how he shoots them saying that they’re brainwashed by Mindstorm and you kinda go back and forth over whether Soldier Boy is just paranoid. Turns out he’s justified and in a hilarious jump scare that ends in a black and white and red all-over joke.
It’s the way I tell them.
Robert Singer’s Election Rally
Next, we see Homelander at a Robert Singer election Rally where he spins Starlight house for runaway teens as being tied to the Shining Light liberation army as a location that traffics children to their organisation. Builds on Ashley’s statement from before and this clearly convinces Todd who’s at the rally with Janine.
Throughout we see Victoria Neuman watching him like a Hawk which further calls back to when he arrived at the rally in season 2 and she wouldn’t take her eyes off him. Now that we know she’s the head popper this adds extra context to it.
Homelander also points out the media camera’s at the rally which I believe is meant to be a nod to when Donald Trump did the same thing at one of his.
Homelander ends the speech by saying ‘vote Bob Singer’ and this is a great Supernatural Easter Egg.
Now Robert Singer…are ya listening? Well, Robert in the show is played by Jim Beaver. Now Jim Beaver also starred in Supernatural and he played the character Bob Singer. Supernatural also starred Jensen Ackles who plays soldier boy. It was also produced by Eric Kripke who runs The Boys and as I’ve been saying.
Now after stressing out over a hallucination of Soldier Boy Homelander ends up going to milk a cow. This further plays into the fact that he never had a mother or father in his life. Homelander developed this fascination with milk in Season 1 when Stillwell breastfed her son and he got jealous of him having a mother.
In the background, we hear Crimson and Clover by Tommy James and The Shondells but this moment of peace is interrupted by Victoria Neuman. Similar to last week with Starlight she wants to work with Homelander but instead of getting rejected, he seemingly sides with her. She handles over a yellow piece of paper, which we later see has an address on it. Guessing that this is the location of Ryan which will probably be how he gets to him for the Season Finale.
Stop, it’s theory time.
Now we get some foreshadowing to her potential arc in the series with us later seeing a news report for Lamar Bishop who’s the favourite to be Vice President. In the comics, Victoria’s counterpart Vic The Veep ended up taking the position after he was planted there by Vought. So I guess that this news report is shown to us to introduce the Vice President pick for him to be taken out by Victoria so that she can replace him.
Vought was desperate to get Vic to become the president so that they could rule over the entire country with their inside man and if she does get that position I think she’ll end up killing Dakota Bob, much like how Vic the Veep killed him in the comics.
Catching Up With A-Train
Cut to A-train in the hospital and I was so glad to see him back. I know a lot of people thought that he died last week but I think keeping him alive was the smarter way to go about it. We discover that he’s had a heart transplant and now he carries Blue Hawks. He doesn’t exactly seemed thrilled by it and Ashley kinda bombards him with all the plans that they have for him. This includes talking trash about Starlight and as we theorised Soldier Boy is going to take the blame for killing Blue Hawk.
Ashley says they also have a biopic in the work him starring Tom Hanks as his running coach that’s gonna be written by Julian Bellows. Hanks is very much whitewashing the person who actually trained him which is his brother.
I do think that A-train won’t just fall back in line like this scene paints him out to be and I actually think that after last week’s apology that he might end up joining the Boys in the fight against Soldier Boy and Homelander.
During the news report, we also see that there’s a headline asking whether Starlight Drinks Adrenochrome. This is basically a solid form of adrenaline that was tested during the 50s until the 70s and it ended up causing schizophrenia. However, in recent times it’s also been linked to PizzaGate as being a substance that was used in…well yeah you know what it is. This ties into Starlight’s home and builds on the conspiracy theory put forth by Homelander.
Frenchy
Frenchy finally figures out that gas hasn’t been knocking out Soldier Boy and instead it’s a vapourised nerve agent. This is Novichok which is believed to have been used to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The footage in the video, of course, made it seem like he was being gassed but when Milk tried this at Herogasm it didn’t work.
However, this will be a way to put him to sleep out when it comes down to it.
Also, this might be a reach, so bear with me yeah but Frenchy wears a weird flowery orange top. Looks a bit feminine and when we look at the stuff that Little Nina has worn throughout the series it looks similar to something she’d have in her collection. So I think it might actually be one of her clothes that they grabbed last week after they were captured.
After dancing to dream a little dream of me, Kimiko explains why she wants V back and that they’re more than just lovers, they’re family.
Starlight steals some V and after looking at the notes for V24 we get a split-second flash of a document for it. If we slow down the footage we can see that this causes tumours along with atrophy which will kill the user, confirming why Butcher and Billy’s ears are bleeding. It’s lethal after three to five doses.
Back to Buster Beaver
Cut back to Buster Beaver and we see the scene in….that country that I can’t pronounce and here we discover that it was actually Edgar who ordered Soldier Boy to be taken out, not Noir. Edgar is portrayed as a weasel and he also continuously eats Almond Nuts in front of him, which are of course Noir’s weakness, showing that he holds the power here. He clearly knows Soldier Boy is a bad product and wants him out the way so that they can try again with his son.
We see what really happened and how Payback turned on Soldier Boy which led to him burning Noir’s face and smashing his skull open so that some of his brains came out. This has left him unable to speak and given him a child-like brain.
They strap on a vapour gas canister to his face and this tactic may also be used next time to take him out as we now have two scenes that discuss this method.
Milk ends up punching Todd after he sees that he’s trying to indoctrinate her into his politics. He doesn’t think there’s any danger with Soldier Boy and as we’ve talked about in other videos, the creative team discussed how there would be metaphors for the pandemic which are there if you wanna see them. At least I think so anyway.
After getting a confession that Homelander killed Supersonic we learn that Starlight actually lost 3 million followers since the last episode. Last week Neuman said she had 193 million but now she’s dropped to 190. Still though, it’s enough to expose him and it’s gonna be interesting to see what the repercussions of this are.
Finishing Billy’s Flashbacks
Finally, Soldier Boy and Hughie come across Mindstorms cabin which is littered with wind chimes, probably to distract from the fact that he has people’s thoughts constantly entering his head.
Hughie teleports him out of there and we see that this was part of his original plan as he left the bag of clothes behind so that they could get dressed.
We see the final flashback in Billy’s head and learn how Lenny ended his own life. This alters things from the comics as he was hit by a bus in that which happened long after he’d grown up. Billy still leaves for the army and he abandons him, uttering his dad’s homophobic slurs as he exits showing he ended up becoming him.
Really heartbreaking scene watching Billy beg his younger self not to go and though the accents sound like some dick van dyke thing, the emotional beats work really well.
The gunshot sounds as Butcher snaps out of it and he mistakes Hughie for Lenny for a split second. The words about him getting everyone killed who gets close to him ring in his ear but Soldier Boy arrives and kills Mindstorm, smashing his head in with the skull.
Very similar death to how John Walker killed a Flagsmasher in Falcon and the winter soldier and Mindstorm reveals that Homelander is his son.
Hughie also wears a Footloose t-shirt and Soldier Boy realises that he can’t trust the pair. They return to the cabin and we also see a poster for The Countesses’ Whiskey Sunrise which is similar to Tequila Sunrise. Starlight rings Billy to get through to Hughie and she tells him the truth about V24. As Lenny said he gets everyone close to him killed and this is cemented here when he doesn’t warn Hughie about the side effects.
The Ending
Kimiko ends up taking the refined version and her wounds disappear showing it worked.
We end with the Darth Vader moment that spins the whole show on its head.
Next time things are about to get crazy and though I don’t think this quite topped last week it was still an incredible episode. This season especially has really knocked it out of the park and I can’t wait to see what they do next time.
There’s also a post-credits scene involving the Looney Tune-type characters bowing and that’s the end of the video. Shabow.
I’d of course love to hear your comments and what you think will happen as well as any easter eggs that we missed.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.