'The Boys' Season 5 Episode 3 Recap and Review: Cycles, Transparencies, and Warped Family Dynamics
the third episode of season five sees tensions old and new boiling over.
Last week’s review remarked how the fifth and final season of The Boys unfolded in similar fashion to so many of the series’ previous plot points, with a few major exceptions, and criticized the adherence to the kind of formula that the show’s plot-lines have slowly crystallized and even refined. Simply put, the third episode of the final season, titled ‘Every One Of You Sons and Bitches’ mostly keeps this up, but trends towards the latter characteristic, operating as a slightly more refined episode of what we’ve come to expect from this show and its seemingly perpetual “endgame” territory, elevated by some solid emotional beats and unexpected connections to the show’s past.
The episode opens up with a slasher-esque action scene in some sort of Russian black site, with several mercenaries being taken out by a mysterious superpowered assailant, later revealed to be none other than Ryan Butcher, (Cameron Crovetti) the biological child of Homelander (Antony Starr), and adoptive son-figure to Billy Butcher (Karl Urban). Ryan has long been a point of contention amongst the series’ two main forces, Homelander and Butcher respectively, and also amongst the fanbase. The past few seasons have seen much push and pull with Ryan’s allegiances, being publicly trotted around as Homelander’s son in some instances, and harbouring a genuine connection with Butcher in which he reveals resentment for Homelander in others. The series has often built up young Ryan to be a focal ‘weapon’ against Homelander, and as the character and performer have aged, we get to where the character is in Season Five, with his own sense of agency, albeit still existing between the shadows of two kinds of violent figures peering over each proverbial shoulder.
Back at Vought Tower, Homelander and Vice President Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) host a press conference to unveil the seemingly dandy Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) as the newest member of The Seven, and in tandem, make it public that he is indeed Homelander’s biological father. Soldier Boy appears to be fine, and the skin-boiling reaction he had upon exposure to the Boys’ Supe Virus last episode is long gone. Homelander explains to Soldier Boy that his immunity to the virus can be attributed to his powers coming from ‘V1,’ a more primitive version of supe-drug Compound V, engineered by Vought nearly a century ago.
The Boys see Soldier Boy alive and well on TV, and Doctor Shah, aka Sameer (Omid Abtahi) makes the same conclusion of V1 being resistant to their anti-supe virus. The news of their failure to take out Soldier Boy upsets Butcher and MM, but the possibility of an antidote to the virus means different things for the group’s two couples, Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) + Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and Annie (Erin Moriarty) + Hughie (Jack Quaid), with both Kimiko and Annie both obviously having superpowers and previously feared being collateral deaths in the grand plan of unleashing the virus to take down Vought and its evil supers.
Thus, the team devises a plan to search old Vought sites for any traces of Compound V. Upon arrival, they find former Vought CEO Stan Edgar (longtime guest star Giancarlo Esposito), his granddaughter Zoe Neumann (Olivia Morandin), the superpowered daughter of the late congresswoman and ally Victoria Neumann. The grandfather-granddaughter duo last appeared as surprising allies to Starlight’s allies, the main cast of the series’ offshoot Gen V. They are joined by an invisible young superhero known as Maverick, the son of Translucent, a member of The Seven who Hughie killed in self-defence all the way back in the early parts of the series’ first season. This dynamic, with Maverick believing it was Homelander who killed his father, makes for some good comedy portrayed between glances and facial expressions between Quaid and Moriarty, as they go along with Maverick’s story of his father’s demise.
Elsewhere, Butcher travels to find Ryan, and the two end up sharing drinks, (yes, of the alcoholic kind, you read that right), further conversing about Ryan’s overall role in the series’ ultimate conflict against Homelander and Vought. Crovetti further portrays much more of a maturity on Ryan’s end, even going so far as to come to a tentative agreement with Butcher that he would be fine with dying alongside him fighting Homelander and unleashing the virus. While this later turns and Ryan finds himself emotionally burned by Butcher, the scene represents a slightly different spin to the seasons-old relationship dynamic, and a welcome one at that.
Back with the rest of the team in the old Vought site, MM (Laz Alonso) shares a similar kind of conversation with Stan Edgar, albeit this time over cigars. MM notes the strange and cruel irony of his moment with Edgar, a man that his late father, a noble, small-time lawyer spent so much time fighting Vought that it ended up eventually killing him. The two argue about their respective roles in the plot against Homelander, and how Edgar merely plans to reinstate himself at Vought when all is (hopefully) said and done, citing the cyclical nature of capitalism and how society would ultimately need Vought as a domineering presence, to MM’s obvious disagreement. It’s fun to watch these two actors spar, and it is nice to revisit MM’s very personal and unique familial connection to the ongoing fight against Vought.
Back at Vought Tower, sparks fly between Firecracker (Valorie Curry) and Soldier Boy, eventually leading to the two hooking up, in a series of exchanges that reveal the warped and very Freudian relationships to Homelander that both of them have. Firecracker, aka Misty, reveals that she felt attracted to Soldier Boy because she feels discontent in her very weird sexually charged relationship with Homelander, whereas Soldier Boy admits he wanted to hook up with Firecracker as some kind of way to make Homelander jealous.
Back at the Vought site, our protagonists realize they are not alone, as The Deep (Chace Crawford) rolls in via Cybertruck, a funny gag in its own right. The Deep comes with a ragtag team of the series’ greatest hits in terms of recurring minor villains, including Dogknott from Gen V, Cindy, the bald telekinetic supe who’s recurred throughout the last few seasons, and of course, Black Noir. The Deep eventually abandons the rest of his team after meeting Maverick and revealing that it was in fact Hughie that killed his father Translucent. In usual Boys fashion, bloody conflict ensues, with our protagonists nearly making it out alright, and Hughie trying to level with Maverick, wanting the cycle of bloodshed to end, to no avail, as Maverick is accidentally killed by Cindy.
Elsewhere, Ryan makes his way back to Homelander, confronting him with the dark truth that Butcher finally revealed to him earlier on in the episode, that he is in fact the product of his mother being raped by Homelander, and that their relationship was neither loving nor consensual. Homelander initially denies this, trying to play the holier-than-thou, nice father act, but it’s not long before Ryan sees through the lies and lets his natural and righteous anger flow through laser eyes toward Homelander. This already tense confrontation meets its end when Homelander aggressively overpowers and unleashes a barrage of punches toward his son, leaving him barely alive by the time Butcher finds him in the episode’s gut-punch of an ending scene.
This final turn of events in the episode is dark and unsettling, even by this show’s standards, nor does it feel done for shock value as many other instances of extreme violence do in the show’s later seasons. While indeed a hard watch, the Ryan plotline finally coming to a necessary and uncomfortable breaking point gives the series some much-needed new intrigue, and sees a shift back into darker territory, which is where it’s often been most successful, see the largely unimpeachable Season One for instance. This isn’t to say that the more satirical elements aren’t also crucial to the show’s identity, but nonetheless, this episode’s turn emerges as truly impactful. We as an audience have long known that Homelander is a downright irredeemable evil, and I’d hesitate to say that it’s ‘nice’ to be reminded of that, more that it felt somewhat necessary in terms of tone, especially after the more zany hallucinations that he’s had this season.
The aforementioned notions of repetitive cycles of violence and dominance from Edgar sort of serves as the microthesis for this episode within the season, as represented by Homelander and Ryan, Hughie and Maverick, and even MM and Edgar within the context of the scene in question. It feels like the show is on the precipice of coming to a more concrete point around this topic, and it could make for some dramatically metatextual addressing of the show’s routine attempts to achieve its end goal of the end of Homelander/Vought being progressively drawn out with each season. However, who knows what could happen next? At least there’s a bit more intrigue as the season builds, hovering a bit over the surface level of what the series has become.