Spoilers

The past becomes a guide…

This didn’t feel like a penultimate episode. I think that’s because there’s so much still moving about. We have a lot of people making decisions, events transpiring in surprising ways and yet more reveals that leave some quite huge questions unanswered and screaming for resolution.

Except that resolution doesn’t quite feel like it’s setting us up for a season’s ending. If there’s one thing the show does well though it’s pulling the rug of expectations from under your feet, although this week’s major revelation was a little too much Dynasty for me.

The stars of this episode are Butcher and Noir.

Noir first. When people learned Soldier Boy was back Noir fled and we haven’t seen him since. This episode lays out where he went and why. It’s handled with a unique approach that largely works and certainly lays out clearly what’s happened to Noir and where he is right now. I liked its exploration of his history and how, just as with everyone, Vought is complicit in the disaster capitalism that defines the lives of everyone in this show.

As for Billy, this is entirely more challenging to watch and the show, quite rightly, comes with trigger warnings ahead of the main credits. Why? Because Butcher’s upbringing was horrendous. It’s saved from being tired cliché both by tight writing and because of the way we see what happened to Billy.

It isn’t played for sentiment (which it easily could have been) and it’s also not presented for laughs. I think, most importantly, Butcher’s suffering isn’t presented as entertainment – which saved me from feeling it was exploiting both the subject and me as a viewer.

The way Billy’s life is tied together as one long series of repetitions of the very things he hated and feared as a child is terrifying and deeply meaningful. The show says we are a sum of those things which defined us as children. We may focus on personal growth and not being who we feared we’d be as children, but Butcher’s experience is a sobering reflection of the fact that so often we don’t even know we’re repeating the events of the past in our own lives.

The bitterness for Butcher is that in trying to avoid becoming his father he has done exactly that – and hasn’t even realised it until someone else shows him in the starkest possible terms what a carbon copy he’s become.

The one person we haven’t talked about enough is Ashley, played by Colby Minifie. Her character is a difficult one to talk about because she exists to facilitate a whole slew of really bad people and their nonsense.

Except Ashley is a crucial component of The Boys because she stands in the one place no one else does – between titans at war. She is the child forced to listen to their parents argue, powerless to intervene, always going to suffer the fallout and expected to carry on as if nothing’s wrong.

She is an object lesson in how we skew ourselves to make bad things seem ok when we can’t escape from them. Ashley skates the edge of debilitating cognitive dissonance – she knows the things she’s doing, allowing and facilitating are unconscionable but she is also entirely trapped in her place. There is no walking away, no escape for her and so she contorts who she might be into a twisted, corrupted version just to survive and damn anyone less powerful who gets in the way of her trying to live.

In another circumstance she’s the scab or the prisoner who works with the governor.

Worse still for her is the sense is the pretence of agency her own abusers grant her. As a critique of capitalism, the abuse of power and, fundamentally, slavery, it is pointed and powerful. Ashley does bad things – and she does them knowing they’re bad. However, she is also pressed into this shape by a desire to live.

Sometimes we talk about how resistance under pressure can look really strange and almost unrecognisable for what it is. Ashley is what happens when there is no resistance to that pressure. The pressure doesn’t let up, it doesn’t let you go – it continues to crush and Ashley’s treatment of others is the shape that pressure so often makes people take.

We are crushed – so we crush others. It is both survival mechanism and a case of Monkey See, Monkey Do. There’s always an Ashley in the mix of any kind of culture like this – and if there isn’t they are found and put into position because without them everything collapses.

Amongst the noise and fury of The Boys it’s worth focusing on people like Ashley because they make this world work. The Boys gets Ashley right and that itself is devastating when we want to ask the question of why people accept such situations – the answer is nearly always because they have no other choice.

Lastly, let’s talk about the parallels to MAGA and right wing extremist political thought in the US. The show has been mainlining real events and recasting them with its own characters at the heart of it.

Central to this are two different stories that tell the harm that incessant lying and the debilitation of the public realm inflict.

Mother’s Milk’s children are being brought up by other people and one of them has drunk the Kool Aid, by which I mean they refuse to engage with anything except what their message boards are saying. They love Homelander and are prepared to believe anything about anyone except him. To this end, we see the grim presentation of the paedophile conspiracy theory perpetuated against the Democrats in the real world here weaponised against Starlight. It is depressing because in the show it’s just part of the scenery but when you recall it’s been lifted from real life? That hits hard because there are many millions of people who still subscribe to this story and the entire edifice which made it acceptable and plausible to them in the first place.

We also see the other side – Homelander and his entire support structure creating these lies to deflect attention from their own evils. The main reason they do this in the show is to ensure they themselves do not have to give up power. So much, so damningly realistic.

This has been a thread running through the season and it has been, possibly, more controversial than almost anything else in the show. Why? Because here is the line where those who might watch this show ‘apolitically’ cannot get away from the fact that it’s criticising them. The Boys criticises us all – but speaking about lies in the public sphere so boldly is to cross a line for many right wing viewers because it hits right upon one of the main challenges to the stories they are telling.

Perhaps just as painfully there’s absolutely no easy answer to this problem in the show. In many ways there’s only bad outcomes because how do you deal with people who lie all the time both as a way of attacking and a way of defending their own actions?

More than any other storyline in the show this one feels substantial even if it’s a background thread of world building.

Rating? 8 bad fathers out of 10.

Stewart Hotston