The Boys: Season 2 Episode 6 'The Bloody Doors Off' Recap & Review
‘The Boys’ Season 2 is nearing the end, and some loose threads are slowly being tied up. Episode 6 ‘The Bloody Doors Off’ gives us a couple new ‘Supes’ and a whole lotta ‘wtF?’
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
The episode begins in a flashback from “8 years ago” and Frenchie (Tomer Capon) is getting high with his usual enabler, Cherie (Jordana Lajoie) and their friend Jay (Michael Ayres). Frenchie mentions how the ‘Golden Girls’ got him through his darker times and ends by holding up a bomb saying, “who wants to rob a bank?” Cut to him holding up a surgical saw as Starlight (Erin Moriarty) asks, “are you sure this will cut through my skin?” Hughie (Jack Quaid) looks nervously as they start to remove Starlight’s tracking chip implanted in her neck. Hughie says to Frenchie, “we’re just friends,” after Frenchie teases him about love.
Elsewhere, Homelander (Antony Starr) and Stormfront (Aya Cash) apprehend an armed robber (he’s got a gun and loose wads of cash) in an alleyway. Homelander and Stormfront have a performative discussion over the efficacy of the justice system and as they corner their prey, Stormfront starts stroking Homelander’s… ‘national treasure’ shall we say? As she keeps stroking him and egging on their fascist conversation, Homelander pushes harder into the man’s face as he screams in pain until finally; pop! Homelander’s hand flattens the top of the guy’s skull into the wall. Homelander and Stormfront then have sex right over his dead body and even smear his blood on each other’s faces as ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles plays. Title Card. Sick and hilarious. This show always nails making me laugh while cringing in disgust.
Starlight, Hughie and Frenchie head back to the hideout where the rest of The Boys crew are waiting. Butcher (Karl Urban) sarcastically greets Starlight with enthusiasm which she returns in measure. She offers a lead she got from Stormfront’s emails corresponding with Mr. Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) about a psych ward called Sage Grove Center where some supes are being held. Butcher happily agrees to go because Starlight will be who Vought goes after instead of them.
In her on-set trailer, Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) watches herself in an ad for an energy bar called, “Pride Bar” with rainbow packaging. She is clearly still being exploited. The Deep (Chace Crawford) enters and Maeve is worried because she doesn’t want to be seen with The Deep. He’s still on his public image recovery tour and Maeve is using his desire to get back into The Seven for her own agenda. She tasked The Deep with finding “the black box” that planes carry with all the flight information that would likely be at the bottom of the ocean after the plane crash from season 1. His “sources” (a school of halibut) found a Go Pro instead.
The Deep tries to connect with A-Train (Jessie T. Usher)as someone who was also kicked out of The Seven but A-Train’s pride won’t let him bond with The Deep… until The Deep does some mysterious baiting and offers a Fresca; a recurring product placement this season.
At Sage Grove Center, The Boys crew prepares to infiltrate. Frenchie and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) are in scrubs and are acting bitter towards each other. Cut to the flashback from “8 years ago.” Frenchie is in a an interrogation room when in walks Grace Mallory (Laila Robins) praising his clever use of weaponized Xanax to depower a Supe that runs on rage. She offers him an ultimatum: work with her or go to jail for decades along with his friends, Cherie and Jay.
In modern day, Homelander asks Stormfront to come to his trailer but she says she has to stop by Vought tower but she’ll be back in 20 minutes. He’s not used to the rejection but after promising a… back door visit, he happily agrees.
Frenchie, Kimiko and Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) sneak into the Sage Grove Center while Butcher is posted nearby with a sniper. His sights are aimed at Starlight but he doesn't pull the trigger. She doesn’t see this but confronts him anyway. They’re interrupted by Stormfront flying overhead so she apparently lied to Homelander. Hughie and Bucher try to contact the other three but they’re busy taking out guards and getting into the security room. On the various screens are different “Supe Terrorists” as Frenchie calls them. There’s one punching holes into walls, one that vomits acid and one… just with a massive baseball sized outline of a penis in his pants. Then they see Stormfront on the cameras. She is talking to a patient who’s in filthy clothes and asking to go home but she is all fake smiles and gives a halfhearted promise. As she leaves, she gives the orderly a look. The orderly takes out his lighter then sends a massive blast of flames at the patient. Frenchie exclaims, “That’s Lamplighter!” Lamplighter is played by Shawn Ashmore and Stormfront calling a random orderly last episode makes a lot more sense all of a sudden. He’s the Supe that was part of The Seven that Starlight replaces in Season 1.
As Frenchie and the others are trying to sneak out of the center with the hard drives or whatever macguffins they were after, they run into Lamplighter. Frenchie blows their cover and goes to attack but Lamplighter sends a flame towards a patient’s door, melting it to release the Supe inside. The Supe turns out to be Cindy (Ess Hödlmoser) a mentally unstable patient with the power to instantly crush her enemies with her mind. She makes an orderly explode and then crumples the doors of the other patient’s room. Lamplighter and The Boys run and get trapped in the same room together. Suddenly, the Supe that vomits acid bursts in and almost kills Lamplighter but Kimko saves him. He accepts their help and they leave.
Back at the van, a Supe sneaks up on Butcher, Starlight and Hughie. They try to calm him down but he sends out a shockwave that rolls the van with Hughie still inside. Hughie gets a large wound in his gut and Butcher is clearly panicking. He tells Starlight to cauterize the wound with her powers but in a sneaky little bit of likely foreshadow, she says she can’t use her powers if there’s nothing with electricity around. They leave the van and carry Hughie away leaving the rest of the crew on their own.
Homelander loses patience after waiting for Stormfront so it’s heavily implied he burnt down his trailer in frustration. She finally comes back and Homelander calls her out saying he stopped by Vought tower but she wasn’t there. He puts his hands on her neck and despite not actually choking her, Stormfront gives a worried look.
The Deep and A-Train have dinner with The Deep’s cult leader. The Deep confesses the anger he’s had toward A-Train and A-Train tries to leave but the cult leader calls him out on his debt and desperation. So A-Train stays.
Frenchie and Lamplighter are still butting heads because Frenchie saw Lamplighter kill a bunch of kids. Flashback to “Five Years Ago:” M.M. shows Frenchie the ring he’s gonna give to his girlfriend. Grace Mallory congratulates him and Butcher looks annoyed. Early ‘The Boys’ days as an off the books team apparently. There’s also a transgender joke here that I’m not sure works all that well. Lamplighter walks into the room in full comic booky costume including goggles and flaming staff. Mallory tells Lamplighter that he has to report back to her and he is gonna be a rat for them.
Starlight stops a car on a quiet road. Both her and Butcher try to commandeer the car nicely but the guy asks for ID from Butcher who’s claiming to be FBI (with his thick English accent!) The guy with the car pulls out a gun and is about to shoot but Starlight uses her powers (utilizing the car’s energy) and accidentally kills the man. She’s upset but Butcher tells her to cauterize Hughie’s wound. They get in the car and Starlight sees a carseat.
Frenchie keeps talking shit to Lamplighter and is surprised when Lamplighter says he didn’t brag about killing the innocent kids to Homelander. Finally, Lamplighter snaps and says he didn’t know the kids were there when he carried out his attack. He was supposed to be killing The Boys’ boss (Mallory). Lamplighter says he saw Frenchie following him so why didn’t he stop him? Flashback to Frenchie abandoneding his post because his friend Jay overdosed on drugs. He helped Cherie resuscitate Jay but then leaves them to go back to following Lamplighter.
Lamplighter explains to the crew that they’re not making Supes at the Sage Grove Center but rather trying to stabilize Compound V for adults. He says, “infants handle it best,” but with adults, “sometimes you get powers, sometimes you get freaks, sometimes you just explode.” M.M. asks why would Vought want thousands of more Supes when that could mess up their profits. He says, “they don’t tell me, I just burn the evidence.” Which is a scary way of saying he burned a person to death. Frenchie explains the night he left he was only gone for 30 minutes but that’s when Lamplighter left. He never saw his friend who OD’d again because he died a few months later. Then, there’s a knock at the door. Suddenly, a giant tentacle like creature bursts in through a window and wraps around M.M.’s neck. They all fight it until suddenly it loosens and starts retracting. Remember that Supe from earlier with the gigantic penis? Yep. After Kimiko knocked him out, the Supe’s super dick slithers back inside his pants. M.M. looks horrified but Frenchie tells him, “don’t be so closed-minded.” Solid wiener comedy.
Frenchie, Kimiko, M.M. and Lamplighter are almost out of the center but Cindy is blocking their exit. They try to gas her but she crushes the canister with her powers. Then, Deus ex Stormfront. She bursts in and zaps Cindy into submission. She screams for Lamplighter who plays it off as if Cindy broke free of her own accord and set the others loose. She leaves to look for more patients and The Boys finally sneak out.
Starlight and Butcher have their cute bonding moment like we all knew was coming. They talk about Hughie and his nerdiness. They mention L’Oreal shampoo and Axe body spray so maybe more product placement? Starlight says Hughie is “too good for both of us.”
In the following scene, Elena (Nicola Correia-Damude) says she’s going to Postmate Sugarfish (more product placement?) and uses Maeve’s phone where she finds the Go Pro The Deep gave to Maeve. The footage plays on Maeve’s phone and it’s a passenger’s video of Homelander and Maeve leaving them to die on the plane crash from season one. Like the usual go-to for instant empathy as demonstrated by the carseat earlier, this passenger says to tell his kids he loves them. Maeve tries to justify herself to Elena but Elena just looks at her, disgusted.
As they wait in the woods outside the Sage Grove Center, Frenchie finally admits that he was trying to save Kimiko because he was seeking atonement. He says, “you cannot absolve me of my sins and I know that now.” Look at that, character development!
Mallory shows up and as soon as she sees Lamplighter, pulls a gun on him. They were her children that he murdered and she has every right to be unfathomably angry at him. She is shaking but Frenchie begs for Lamplighter’s life despite the grudge he held for all these years. She lets him live. It seems the story goes, Frenchie was supposed to tail Lamplighter but left to help his friends. In the time it took him to return, Lamplighter left to kill Mallory upon Homelander’s orders but killed her kids instead. If the public found out, that explains his expulsion from The Seven. See what I mean about loose ends getting tied up?
Back at Vought tower, Stormfront meets up with Homelander. He’s still upset with her but she starts to reveal secrets of her past. She shows a picture of her and an old woman. Homelander asks, “your grandmother?” “My daughter,” she replies. Stormfront reveals she was born in the year 1919 in Berlin, Germany. Homelander is obviously shocked as she shows more old photographs including one with her and the Nazi, Joseph Goebbels, right hand man to Adolf Hitler. Then, the final picture is with Frederick Vought who she says gave her the first successful Compund V injection. This explains her not only how she could still be a young looking woman after so many years but also all the obvious racist remarks and penchant for power. She even says, “we’re in a war for the culture. The other races are grinding us down.” She then tells Homelander he will be the one to lead them. He perks up at this. His blonde hair and blue eyes are the features the Aryan assholes wanted right? To symbolize his acceptance of this horrendous ideology, he kisses her deeply.
The final scene shows Cindy, the supe who can crush things with her mind, hitchhiking away from the Sage Grove center.
Wow, so… that’s some big reveal here. Stormfront is for sure a 100 year old Nazi and Homelander is down with that. Frenchie is coming to terms with his past, Butcher and Starlight are cool and we learned the truth about Lamplighter; a plot line hinted at all the way back in season one. Plus a handful of new mutants. I mean Supes.
Honestly, I’m loving all this dark historical fiction and mysterious rabbit hole business. Connecting these villains to real life monsters is a bold storytelling move and for former-conspiracy theorists like myself, leaning into stuff like Operation Paperclip wherein thousands of German scientists were brought into the U.S. after World War II, is just the type of unexpected turn a show like this needed. While it’s not exactly a twist because it’s been hinted at a few times, this is still a great way to take the premise of a show that, upon release of the first season, seemed to just be an R-Rated stick-poking at Marvel and DC. I’m still very curious where the plot line of having thousands of Supes will go, not to mention Homelander and Stormfront’s potential global domination.
Will Starlight and Hughie get back together? Will Butcher and Becca? Will Frenchie and Kimiko? So, many questions answered and so many remain. See ya next week ya bloody wanks.