S02.E08: What I Know

[Bort]

Quote

Becca shows up on Butcher's doorstep and begs for his help. The Boys agree to back Butcher, and together with Starlight, they finally face off against Homelander and Stormfront. But things go very bad, very fast.

Airdate: 9 October 2020

[MrWhyt]

well now, did not see that ending coming

[mac123x]

Did they bring in Benioff and Weiss to write this episode?  That was just a little too pat and vaguely unsatisfying.  Too many resolutions felt convenient and unearned:

1. In a few hours, A-train stole the files, got them to Starlight, they got published, everyone on the face of the planet read them, believed, them, and turned on Stormfront. 
2. Maeve turning up out of the blue to beat up Stormfront.  How did she find them?  I guess she could have found out from someone at Vought, but how did she get there?  She doesn't fly nor have super speed. 
3. Maeve turning up again, with perfect timing, to blackmail Homelander.  At least that one was set up with the Go-Pro footage in an earlier episode.
4. Edgar blaming everything on Stormfront, and the public immediately buying it.  

There were a few parts I enjoyed.  I liked that the congresswoman was the head-asploder, though I'm not getting her motivation.  If her goal was to get the president to create the Office of Supe Control and putting her in charge of it (separation of powers be damned), how did her attack on the hearing further that goal?  It was counterproductive, and she only achieved her goal by sheer luck.

When Starlight, Maeve, and Kimiko were kicking the shit out of Stormfront, I thought to myself "I get it, 'girls get it done'."  Then I rolled my eyes when one of the characters actually said that because the writers didn't trust the audience to put it together on their own..

I enjoyed Homelander's story to Ryan about flying away.  It gave him a nice bit of humanity.  I also thought that Butcher had inadvertently turned Homelander against Edgar / Vought when H started interrogating the Vought security guys.  They could still go that way but it doesn't look like it.

Edited October 9, 2020 by mac123x

[cambridgeguy]

4 hours ago, mac123x said:

When Starlight, Maeve, and Kimiko were kicking the shit out of Stormfront, I thought to myself "I get it, 'girls get it done'."  Then I rolled my eyes when one of the characters actually said that because the writers didn't trust the audience to put it together on their own..

It's only fitting that it came up though.  The Avengers had that ludicrous girl power scene, Mystique inexplicably bitched about being called the X-Men, Deadpool was all about the X-Force name, etc.

The Seven are going to have some interesting group meetings in the future. 

[Primal Slayer]

I thought overall it was a good finale but they seemed to hold back in some areas. It almost felt like a series finale with how everything was wrapped up.

The big fight, while i enjoyed it, i was wanting to see more choreography and use of powers to get the upper hand when it came to making Stormfront flee. But at the same time... what they did is also how the show likes to flip the expectation. Still wanted to see Starlight have a major glow up moment though. During the day she should be at her prime, i wanted her to blind Stormfront or go all burts of light....same with Maeve. She's the "warrior" of the group, let the girl have a major fight.

There was a lot of "oh i magically" found you going on in this episode. How did Stormfront find anyone in this episode? Same with Homelander.

[Chicago Redshirt]

7 hours ago, mac123x said:

Did they bring in Benioff and Weiss to write this episode?  That was just a little too pat and vaguely unsatisfying.  Too many resolutions felt convenient and unearned:

1. In a few hours, A-train stole the files, got them to Starlight, they got published, everyone on the face of the planet read them, believed, them, and turned on Stormfront. 
2. Maeve turning up out of the blue to beat up Stormfront.  How did she find them?  I guess she could have found out from someone at Vought, but how did she get there?  She doesn't fly nor have super speed. 
3. Maeve turning up again, with perfect timing, to blackmail Homelander.  At least that one was set up with the Go-Pro footage in an earlier episode.
4. Edgar blaming everything on Stormfront, and the public immediately buying it.  

There were a few parts I enjoyed.  I liked that the congresswoman was the head-asploder, though I'm not getting her motivation.  If her goal was to get the president to create the Office of Supe Control and putting her in charge of it (separation of powers be damned), how did her attack on the hearing further that goal?  It was counterproductive, and she only achieved her goal by sheer luck.

With regard to Stormfront, I don't know if it's just "a few hours." But in any case, A-Train is a speedster, so his part in things taking a short time doesn't seem surprising, generally. The one surprising bit is that A-Train would be smart enough to know where to look for the information. My suspicion is: he's not. He was working a con with Vought to infiltrate the Church the whole time. Edgar knew that the Church had blackmail material on its members and that Stormfront had been a member of the Church back in the day. Edgar also wanted to get rid of Stormfront but couldn't do it directly. It makes sense that he caused A-Train's fall from grace to make him a tempting target for the Church and to put him in a position to get the materials. 

The time to take to publish is not hard to believe. No one says everyone believed they were real. Stormfront expressed a view that cetainly some of her followers believed -- that they were deepfakes.  There didn't have to be universal belief that it was true that Stormfront was an OG Nazi. It's possible that Stormfront would have survived the scandal if Vought had put its muscle into suppporting her rather than disavowing her. And again, no one says that everyone believes everything Vought says. It is safe to assume, though, that plenty do. 

Vought could have had Maeve on standby to run interference to allow the Boys  to succeed in their mission if needed, or she could have been deployed specifically to bring in Stormfront, knowing that Vought was in the process of turning on her.We don't know Maeve's starting point, but there's no reason to think that it was far enough away that super-speed or flight was needed. We know that Vought has its supers chipped so finding Stormfront would have been straightforward with Vought help.

The congresswoman is presumably working with Vought. Vought likes to control the narrative. Part of that is creating its own adversaries that it can control so that at the right time it can vanquish them and so that it can attract actual threats. We saw this in Stormfront's hipster anti-Vought public stance when she couldn't be more Vought. Although the plan wasn't initiated by Vought directly, it also comes to play in the creation of Supe terrorists. In this case, the congresswoman being a Vought operative got her in a position to determine Vogelbaum was a threat and take him out in a scary way that might deter future whistleblowers and got them to take out Not!L. Ron Hubbard. (Although it remains to be seen what the successors might do. I mean, the blackmail materials still exist.).

I was acting under the presumption that the congresswoman was giving up her position in congress to become the head of a new cabinet-level agency. If she is somehow going to continue both as congresswoman and head of the agency, that'd be a problem under real government, but I can suspend disbelief in a world with flying men that such a thing doesn't apply in the Boysverse. Being the head of such an agency, being publicly anti-Vought and the survivor of one of the worst terrorist attacks in history gives her inherent credibility to shape policy on Supes however Vought wants. No one will question her when she OKs giving Vought billion-dollar contracts or publicly supports wider distribution of Compound V, or whatever the next step is in Vought's plan might be.

It is not sheer luck that the president would have created a new agency to respond to a massive publicly viewed threat. The pump had been primed for people to think that super-terrorists were coming to kill us all for a while. We have seen snippets of this already -- where talk radio had gotten that poor schlub to think that his convenience store clerk was a Supe and where Homelander and Stormfront had been rallying people about Supes wanting to drag us into the mud. (Which is a nice dog whistle, because one thing racists do is call black and brown people mud people.) We saw it in the public service announcement to survive a supe attack.

Vought created the Supe equivalent of 9/11, and just like 9/11 gave us the Department of Homeland Security, it is fairly predictable that government would react to a crisis by creating a new massive bureaucracy and shoveling money at it. Money that Vought stands to be the primary beneficiary from. Fucking diabolical, one might say.

Edited October 9, 2020 by Chicago Redshirt

[Chicago Redshirt]

53 minutes ago, Primal Slayer said:

There was a lot of "oh i magically" found you going on in this episode. How did Stormfront find anyone in this episode? Same with Homelander.

Chips. Also, Homelander's inherent powers means that he can pretty much find anyone if he bothers to try. 

[GustavMahler]

I really enjoy seeing Giancarlo Esposito, but whether it is here or the Mandalorian, I cannot help but thinking "Fring-Lite".

[Primal Slayer]

28 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

Chips. Also, Homelander's inherent powers means that he can pretty much find anyone if he bothers to try. 

Starlight had hers removed, did the kid/mom have chips? I dont remember it being mentioned. 

[Chicago Redshirt]

8 minutes ago, Primal Slayer said:

Starlight had hers removed, did the kid/mom have chips? I dont remember it being mentioned. 

It stands to reason that Ryan at least has been chipped, and probably Becca. Ryan is an extremely valuable asset that Vought wants and needs to control and study. He is the first natural-born Supe AND he is a potential check on Homelander getting out of control. Becca is a means to control Ryan. It would take nothing for Vought to chip them. Edgar is able to convey to Butcher exactly where Ryan is, of all the places Homelander could have taken him.  There's more than one way he could know, but Ryan being chipped is an easy explanation. In fact, I would have a harder time suspending disbelief if a character ever said explicitly "We set up this controlled lab to monitor Ryan and have him grow up in the right environment, but we didn't bother to put a tracer in him even though we have that technology and easily could have."

But even assuming for argument's sake that Ryan and Becca were not chipped, finding the Boys under those circumstances probably isn't too tough for someone who can fly and has a brain. They could have only gotten so far away in the time from when Homelander had flown off, and there are only so many places they could have hid in the area that would have been blocked from Homelander's vision. 

[mac123x]

56 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

With regard to Stormfront, I don't know if it's just "a few hours."

Up until the denouement, the entire episode took place in one day.  Hughie and Annie visited Maeve, got the info from A-train, returned to the lair and published it during the "gearing up" montage.  Simultaneously, Homelander and Stormfront were taking Ryan to Planet Vought then to the cabin.  While at the cabin, the shit hit the fan about Stormfront.  

1 hour ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

The time to take to publish is not hard to believe. No one says everyone believed they were real. Stormfront expressed a view that cetainly some of her followers believed -- that they were deepfakes. 

The show itself never showed any of Stormfront's supporters expressing those views.  They did show that she was immediately and universally despised.  You can assume it was a lot more divided than that but the show didn't include any subtlety.  

 

[Chicago Redshirt]

12 minutes ago, mac123x said:

Up until the denouement, the entire episode took place in one day.  Hughie and Annie visited Maeve, got the info from A-train, returned to the lair and published it during the "gearing up" montage.  Simultaneously, Homelander and Stormfront were taking Ryan to Planet Vought then to the cabin.  While at the cabin, the shit hit the fan about Stormfront.  

The show itself never showed any of Stormfront's supporters expressing those views.  They did show that she was immediately and universally despised.  You can assume it was a lot more divided than that but the show didn't include any subtlety.  

 

I don't know that you are correct in your assessment that the whole episode took place in a day. But in any event, a day is more than "a few hours." Google tells me that driving from New York (where I believe Maeve lives) to Rochester (where Ryan was kept) is five hours. 

And yes, the show didn't explicitly show the reaction of Stormfront's fans to the news she was a Nazi so if we want to be technical, we have no idea if the public indeed has largely turned on her. For that matter, it didn't show pretty muh anyone's reactions but Our Heroes, Maeve and Vought's. All we know is that there is a meme making the rounds mocking her as a Nazi. We don't even know how Homelander felt about it, or about Stormfront having killed Becca. But there are only so many minutes in the season, and we can use common sense to extrapolate from things that have been shown. It stands to reason that someone who drew enough devotion to get someone to gun a person down will have some people disbelieve the worst that is said about Stormfront. It stands to reason that some people might even like Stormfront more because of the revelation that she's a 80+ year old Nazi.

[Primal Slayer]

I do feel that everything that transpired in this episode could've taken place in 2 episodes. The Stormfront storyline alone could've been an episode in itself. 

[cdnalor]

Very disappointed we didn't get Starlight using Stormfront's electropower to go nuclear on her ass as was suggested in other posts.  Instead it looked like a high school girl gang kicking the crap out of some poor victim.   Also apparently Stormfront's eyes are not invulnerable to poking.  I wonder if that applies to Homelander, even though he has laser eyes.

 

 

[UnknownK]

Stormfront is bulletproof I can't see taking a knife to the eye would cause any damage at all.

How did the kids heat vision or whatever blow off Stormfronts limbs and burn her face when Homelander could barely cause a burn with his laser eyes on her.

Starlight just doesn't seem very powerful against another top tier supe.

[Primal Slayer]

2 minutes ago, UnknownK said:

 

How did the kids heat vision or whatever blow off Stormfronts limbs and burn her face when Homelander could barely cause a burn with his laser eyes on her.

He wasn't holding back and since he is one of the first to be born with powers i can only imagine he'd be more powerful. 

[CletusMusashi]

Different parts of the body are more sensitive than others. Poke yourself in the chest, and then poke yourself in the eye.

Her skin and bone and muscle are apparently more resistant to knives and bullets than her eyeballs are.

I would imagine the same to be true of Homelander. The only question is how weak his weak parts are.

I mean, if his eyeball can still stop a 9mm or something, good luck poking him with your finger.

[UnknownK]

1 hour ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

It stands to reason that someone who drew enough devotion to get someone to gun a person down will have some people disbelieve the worst that is said about Stormfront. It stands to reason that some people might even like Stormfront more because of the revelation that she's a 80+ year old Nazi.

In a country of 330+ Million people you are going to have NEO NAZIs  numbering in the tens of thousands at least. But even if some of the masses believe in what Stormfront was preaching once they found up she was an OG Nazi that would have dumped her. 

There are enough nutjobs out there to get anyone you like gunned down or Governor kidnapped.

[UnknownK]

7 minutes ago, Primal Slayer said:

He wasn't holding back and since he is one of the first to be born with powers i can only imagine he'd be more powerful. 

I think the opposite, more diluted and after a couple generations no powers at all.

Maybe if his mother had powers from compound V there might be some crazy powerful mutation but she was human.

There are plenty of supes out there all well into adulthood and feeling invincible (why even use a condom and Vought will take care of any baby mama problems for you) and not one supe baby was born before?

[Chicago Redshirt]

35 minutes ago, UnknownK said:

Stormfront is bulletproof I can't see taking a knife to the eye would cause any damage at all.

How did the kids heat vision or whatever blow off Stormfronts limbs and burn her face when Homelander could barely cause a burn with his laser eyes on her.

Starlight just doesn't seem very powerful against another top tier supe.

Translucent was also bulletproof, but he's dead now because the Boys figured out he was not so invulnerable from the inside. Presumably, each Supe has weaknesses to exploit.

Homelander probably could have destroyed Stormfront if he full-on rage-blasted her like Ryan did. But yeah, his powers could be slightly different than Homelander's, or he could just have more powerful beams than Highlander.

I suspect The Boys follows the same general rule of comics where in any given encounter Super A can beat Super B or vice-versa. Thus, in one encounter Spider-Man can stop the same Juggernaut who typically gives the entire team of X-Men more than they can handle or handle a herald of Galactus, but in another, a pudgy crime lord with no super powers whatsoever can be a match for him and a pudgy scientist with robot-arms can take multiple punches to the body and stay conscious.  

So far, Starlight beat A-Train when he was weakened by his heart issues, got beat by Black Noir when she had been weakened by being kept in captivity and seemingly was just recovering from having been drained of powers, and obviously is weaker than Homelander, who effortlessly was choking her.  I imagine she wouldn't do well against Maeve, either. I think in a fair fight she would have done better against Noir, and she probably would beat the Deep and the late Lamplighter.

Edited October 9, 2020 by Chicago Redshirt

[Primal Slayer]

12 minutes ago, UnknownK said:

I think the opposite, more diluted and after a couple generations no powers at all.

Maybe if his mother had powers from compound V there might be some crazy powerful mutation but she was human.

There are plenty of supes out there all well into adulthood and feeling invincible (why even use a condom and Vought will take care of any baby mama problems for you) and not one supe baby was born before?

I feel like they've made it seem that passing on that genetic code is hard to do since they were all injected. Being a natural born its been with him since he was conceived. For me it makes enough sense. 

[cambridgeguy]

2 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

And yes, the show didn't explicitly show the reaction of Stormfront's fans to the news she was a Nazi so if we want to be technical, we have no idea if the public indeed has largely turned on her.

The public in general is selectively oblivious.  Take the scene where A-Train pops into the car.  Hughie almost crashes into another car (which honks), he comes to a screeching halt, and then all three of them pop out to have a chat on the sidewalk.  Meanwhile, not a single one of the many pedestrians we see in the background even bother to glance at famed superhero A-Train just chatting.

[AimingforYoko]

So what's Neumann's game? If she just wants power, I'm going to be disappointed. (I'm probably going to be disappointed.)

[Chicago Redshirt]

28 minutes ago, AimingforYoko said:

So what's Neumann's game? If she just wants power, I'm going to be disappointed. (I'm probably going to be disappointed.)

My vote is Vought catspaw. She wants to shape government policy on Supes and eliminate threats to Vought while being a lightning rod for criticism. So far she seems to be doing a good job.

[iMonrey]

I was satisfied with the ending overall. It served as a nice series finale if there's no third season. (And if there is, God only knows when that will be.)

Quote

Very disappointed we didn't get Starlight using Stormfront's electropower to go nuclear on her ass as was suggested in other posts. 

Yeah, I was really hoping for something like that. The girl fight scene was pretty lame in comparison. 

Quote

1. Maeve turning up out of the blue to beat up Stormfront.  How did she find them?  I guess she could have found out from someone at Vought, but how did she get there?  She doesn't fly nor have super speed. 

Maeve turning up again, with perfect timing, to blackmail Homelander.  At least that one was set up with the Go-Pro footage in an earlier episode.

I had a problem with this as well, especially when she showed up in the woods. I know some of them are chipped by does Maeve have a chip locater on her? 

Quote

The one surprising bit is that A-Train would be smart enough to know where to look for the information. My suspicion is: he's not. He was working a con with Vought to infiltrate the Church the whole time. 

That's a pretty good idea but I'm afraid you're giving the writers way too much credit. Taken at face value, A-Train overheard the conversation between Stan Edgar and the church guy so he set out to bring down Stormfront in order to get himself back in the Seven. It's really just that simple. And it was Homefront who kicked A-Train out of the Seven, all on his own - clearly without any other agenda.

[mac123x]

1 hour ago, iMonrey said:

I had a problem with this as well, especially when she showed up in the woods. I know some of them are chipped by does Maeve have a chip locater on her? 

Also, where did she keep her phone?  In a previous episode Stormfront complained that Vought didn't let them have pockets in their costumes, and her costume has twice as much material as Maeve's.  

[UnknownK]

10 minutes ago, mac123x said:

Also, where did she keep her phone?  In a previous episode Stormfront complained that Vought didn't let them have pockets in their costumes, and her costume has twice as much material as Maeve's.  

Inside her boots, under her armor, etc. Where do women keep their phones when they are on the beach?

[UnknownK]

1 hour ago, AimingforYoko said:

So what's Neumann's game? If she just wants power, I'm going to be disappointed. (I'm probably going to be disappointed.)

I would suspect that she being a supe herself and seeing all the crazy the 7 are doing she probably wants oversight to their power so the 7 don't go batshit crazy enough for the world to kill or lock them all up.

Its like being super rich, you give enough back to the masses so that the poor don't demand all of it.

[UnknownK]

Didn't Homefront have super hearing in season 1? Its not like the boys are not super loud for being hunted. I think that noise generator was to drown out any movement or talking of the boys giving them time to get away from the scene since they were so close to the cabin.

[Chicago Redshirt]

1 minute ago, UnknownK said:

Didn't Homefront have super hearing in season 1? Its not like the boys are not super loud for being hunted. I think that noise generator was to drown out any movement or talking of the boys giving them time to get away from the scene since they were so close to the cabin.

It is a standard thing with Superman that he can be distracted with hypersonic signals. For instance, he has given Jimmy Olsen a signal watch to summon him in emergencies and in Superman the movie, Lex Luthor used such a signal to draw his attention.

The Boys used the same sort of playbook, using a bunch of signal devices to lure Homelander in one direction while going to get Ryan (who could hear the signal too). I think you have to handwave that Homelander didn't just find the signal in 2 minutes, briefly investigate and then fly back.

[tennisgurl]

10 hours ago, cambridgeguy said:

It's only fitting that it came up though.  The Avengers had that ludicrous girl power scene, Mystique inexplicably bitched about being called the X-Men, Deadpool was all about the X-Force name, etc.

 

I think that the scene in the fake movie The Seven made where the three female members all got zoomed in on with a "Girls Do It Better!" stinger was a deliberate parody of that scene in Avengers Endgame, and of awkward attempts at feminism by writers that dont really know much about feminism in general. I think that Maeve/Annie/Kimiko kicking the crap out of Stormfront made a lot more sense though, both on a practical level, as they are the only people around who have powers, and from a more thematic perspective, as Stormfront was all about her "Girl Power" stuff when she first arrived, and she did in fact get women to come together...to kick the crap out of her Nazi ass. 

Homelander might be terrible and twisted and a danger to society, but I do feel rather bad for him at times. Its clear that he grew up without any kind of love or real human interaction, and that his whole existence revolved around his powers and what they could do for the people around him, so its not that surprising that he would grow up to have little to no idea on how to deal with people, feel empathy towards others, and would see himself as divorced from the rest of humanity. And its no wonder he gave into Maeve threatening to ruin his image, the love of the people is the only love he has ever had. A lot of that is of his own making in his adult life, due to his horrific actions, but it really is rather sad that in other circumstances, maybe he really could have used his powers for good. Ryan does seem like a sweet kid, so hopefully it will turn out better for him. And maybe raising him can give Mallory a bit of closure with what happened to her grandsons. 

This almost felt like a series finale, everything got wrapped up quite nicely, in fact so much got that wrapped up that it felt a bit rushed at times, there was so much going on that they probably could have made this two episodes. I thought this was a good caper for the season, a lot was finished but they set up a lot for the next season. I think that the stuff with Butcher/Ryan/Homelander was the one that had the most satisfying ending, with Butcher showing some growth by accepting Ryan and getting him somewhere safe, it was a good end to his arc this season of realizing that he was becoming way too much like the man he hates for comfort. I felt like most of the other characters got rather shot changed, especially Annie. I liked her last scene where she talked about how she had found her faith again, but I wanted to see more of that and get more of her taking down Stormfront, especially using her powers against her, which I really thought was going to be how she got taken out. That or Kimiko killing her, and while they all got to beat the crap out of her, Ryan was the one who actually took her down, which was just kind of...poor kid. 

Did they give Hughie this whole Billy Joel backstory just to play Only the Good Die Young at the end? Oh Hughie, this does not bode well for you. 

[DeeDee79]

5 hours ago, UnknownK said:

How did the kids heat vision or whatever blow off Stormfronts limbs and burn her face when Homelander could barely cause a burn with his laser eyes on her.

It did cause a burn; you could actually hear her skin sizzling. Maybe he wasn't using full power? I don't know.

[Morrigan2575]

5 hours ago, AimingforYoko said:

So what's Neumann's game? If she just wants power, I'm going to be disappointed. (I'm probably going to be disappointed.)

I'm thinking Vought wants her inside Government. 

I didn't see that ending coming at all.

The girl fight scene was everything I never knew I wanted. So glad Maeve joined the Team. It reminded me of the beat down in Death Proof.

I figured Becca would die but, I also thought Homelander would kill her. Is Stormfront dead? Are we going to get Darth Stormfront in S3?  Noir is down for the count but, I wonder what he'll do to Maeve once he wakes up? 

All in all a great ending to a slow starting season. 

[Chicago Redshirt]

4 hours ago, iMonrey said:

That's a pretty good idea but I'm afraid you're giving the writers way too much credit. Taken at face value, A-Train overheard the conversation between Stan Edgar and the church guy so he set out to bring down Stormfront in order to get himself back in the Seven. It's really just that simple. And it was Homefront who kicked A-Train out of the Seven, all on his own - clearly without any other agenda.

You're probably right that we're just meant to think that A-Train eavesdropped his way to things but to me that doesn't quite work. What he hears was basically Edgar telling Not!L.Ron that Stormfront had a problem with A-Train, NLR asking why, Edgar saying, I hear she was a member of the earliest version of the church, NLR saying he can't confirm or deny that, and then Edgar saying, well then you've probably got blackmail material showing why.

It seems too hard for A-Train to independently extrapolate from that, "Hey, I should go to the blackmail vault to see what they have on Stormfront and use it to get back in the Seven." But maybe I'm just not giving A-Train enough credit for smarts.

In terms of Homelander firing A-Train, either he could have been in on the act, trying to make a good show, or Vought could have approached A-Train after the real firing by Homelander to look at the opportunity to go undercover at the Church. 

But this could just be better left as headcannon.

[Chicago Redshirt]

7 minutes ago, Morrigan2575 said:

Is Stormfront dead? Are we going to get Darth Stormfront in S3?  Noir is down for the count but, I wonder what he'll do to Maeve once he wakes up? 

We last saw Stormfront talking in German (anyone know what she was saying?) and as a quadraplegic. It seems odd that Ryan's vision would have cut off her arms and legs but not her affect her body at all. Homelander tells the press that Stormfront has been "neutralized" and is being held at an undisclosed location. Of course, that could just be a lie. But comic book rules say that if you don't see a dead body, then they're not dead. (And heck, even sometimes when you do see a dead body, they're still not dead.)

My guess is that Noir is either going to die and get replaced, have amnesia or have "amnesia" and plot to get Maeve and Starlight when they least expect it. 

[mac123x]

6 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

We last saw Stormfront talking in German (anyone know what she was saying?)

I saw this on Twitter so I can't verify because I don't speak German:  “Do you remember the day Frederick, Chloe put her hands out of the car window. we found the perfect place at the river, in the shadow of an apple tree. it was the first time that Chloe ate fresh apples.”  So, flashing back to when she and Fred Vought went for a drive with their daughter.

 

[Quickbeam]

I gotta see The Deep win one along the way. Too much piling on. I enjoyed Stormfront’s remaining bits muttering in German. 

[peridot]

It looked like Homelander was grimacing when she started with her "white genocide" crap to Ryan.  Do you think that he would've left her over that, or stayed with her so that she could be a mom to Ryan?  That poor kid, let's hope the accidental murder of his mom won't turn him into someone worse than Homelander.

I'm glad that Stormfront was taken down.  Was she actually tearing up when she saw the bad press and memes?!  I thought that Kimiko was killed, I didn't think she could come back from a neck-snapping.

I wasn't expecting the Congress lady to be the mystery Supe.  It looks like Hughie stepped right in the thick of it.  I hope there will be a third season.

[Arynm]

1 hour ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

It seems odd that Ryan's vision would have cut off her arms and legs but not her affect her body at all

She got the full Anakin Skywalker treatment for sure. He did burn off half her face/neck too so that's nice.

I bet we have not seen the last of Stormfront.

[mac123x]

43 minutes ago, Arynm said:

She got the full Anakin Skywalker treatment for sure.

That had to have been a deliberate visual reference, right?

[Cthulhudrew]

7 hours ago, UnknownK said:

Inside her boots, under her armor, etc. Where do women keep their phones when they are on the beach?

She could have a phone strap on her armband or vambraces, maybe.

I felt the Stormfront thing was a bit rushed, and thought it was kind of ridiculous that she survived the triple attack from the three female supes relatively unscathed. Also not a huge fan of how they basically reset the status quo back to the beginning of season 1.

Still a much more enjoyable show to me than its comic source (I find myself liking Ennis' work less the further I get from my college years).

[AnimeMania]

It would have been funny if the girls had broken Stormfront's arms and legs so that when she was lying on the ground she looked like a Swastika, but that wouldn't have fit with the rest of the story. I would say R.I.P. Stormfront, but she is not dead. Laser eyes should cauterize wounds, Becca shouldn't have bled out.

They are already greenlit for a Season 3 and Soldier Boy (played by Jensen Ackles) will appear. 

 

[Morrigan2575]

19 minutes ago, AnimeMania said:

Laser eyes should cauterize wounds, Becca shouldn't have bled out.

I don't think it was the laser. I think (although I don't know if it makes sense). When Ryan hit Stormfront with the laser blast she ripped open Becca's kneck (reflex/force)

[DeeDee79]

2 hours ago, peridot said:

 I hope there will be a third season.

They’ve already been renewed for season three.

2 hours ago, Arynm said:

I bet we have not seen the last of Stormfront.

Unfortunately I agree with this. Aya Cash is great in the role but I just hate every moment that Stormfront is on my screen.

[DeeDee79]

43 minutes ago, AnimeMania said:

They are already greenlit for a Season 3 and Soldier Boy (played by Jensen Ackles) will appear. 

 

And as a Supernatural/Dean Winchester fangirl I can’t wait to see him on this show!

[shrewd.buddha]

On 10/9/2020 at 8:20 AM, Primal Slayer said:

There was a lot of "oh i magically" found you going on in this episode.

Maeve cannot fly, yet she magically appeared at two locations in the nick of time. That felt too convenient. 
And it is becoming a bit unbelievable that Butcher is repeatedly coming face-to-face with Supes  that could kill him in a half-second - yet manages to walk away each time.  Homelander and Black Noir are shown to slaughter people without hesitation, but they seem to know that main characters require time for smack-talk.

At least Stormfront is gone. Maybe. I was tired of her Nazi shtick, and ready for her to go, but her exit was not handled very smoothly.  It felt clumsy - - as if the writers wanted every female character to get a piece of her before she died. Becca even got to stab her in the eye (somehow).  They had ramped Stormfront up into the nastiest villain possible and then took her out like a piñata. 

Vought's reasoning for using Stormfront seemed pretty sketchy. And how did a hate-monger like Stormfront suddenly appear on the scene without her reputation being known? 
The motivations of the head-popping senator woman are even more difficult to understand.  Why kill the CIA director lady at the beginning of the season - but none of the Boys team? If she is helping Vought - by killing people willing to testify against them - why is she not stopping The Boys and the retired CIA woman? She knows all the players on the anti-Vought side.  It should also be easy for her to find out where they have taken Ryan.

I was expecting the head-popping Supe to be the not!Scientology leader - so that was a surprise. The show is really hammering Scientology's crazy tactics and beliefs. That does not seem like something that would have happened years ago. 

Edited October 10, 2020 by shrewd.buddha

[Morrigan2575]

2 hours ago, shrewd.buddha said:

Maeve cannot fly, yet she magically appeared at two locations in the nick of time.

I'll grant you the first one but, the second doesn't seem far fetched. Billy/Becca/Ryan ran into the woods, not like they could have gotten that far. Maeve could have easily headed into the same direction (which any of the others could have told her) and, then followed the sound or bright light created by Ryan's laser beam to find them in the woods.

[Chicago Redshirt]

3 hours ago, shrewd.buddha said:

Maeve cannot fly, yet she magically appeared at two locations in the nick of time. That felt too convenient. 
And it is becoming a bit unbelievable that Butcher is repeatedly coming face-to-face with Supes  that could kill him in a half-second - yet manages to walk away each time.  Homelander and Black Noir are shown to slaughter people without hesitation, but they seem to know that main characters require time for smack-talk.

At least Stormfront is gone. Maybe. I was tired of her Nazi shtick, and ready for her to go, but her exit was not handled very smoothly.  It felt clumsy - - as if the writers wanted every female character to get a piece of her before she died. Becca even got to stab her in the eye (somehow).  They had ramped Stormfront up into the nastiest villain possible and then took her out like a piñata. 

Vought's reasoning for using Stormfront seemed pretty sketchy. And how did a hate-monger like Stormfront suddenly appear on the scene without her reputation being known? 
The motivations of the head-popping senator woman are even more difficult to understand.  Why kill the CIA director lady at the beginning of the season - but none of the Boys team? If she is helping Vought - by killing people willing to testify against them - why is she not stopping The Boys and the retired CIA woman? She knows all the players on the anti-Vought side.  It should also be easy for her to find out where they have taken Ryan.

I was expecting the head-popping Supe to be the not!Scientology leader - so that was a surprise. The show is really hammering Scientology's crazy tactics and beliefs. That does not seem like something that would have happened years ago. 

Since Stormfront is apparently the wife of Frederick Vought, the founder of corporate Vought, presumably she holds a fair amount of stock and sway with Vought the corporate entity.

The show explicitly told us that Stormfront had been the supe knowns as Liberty back in the day. Presumably she periodically assumed new Supe identities to cover the fact that she a) didn't age and b) was a Nazi.

I think it is pretty clear that the Congresswoman is working for/with Vought. She apparently does not consider the Boys a real threat. As, frankly, well she shouldn't. Aside from killing Translucent, what have the Boys really accomplished against Vought without inside help? They made the existence of Compound V public (needing Starlight's help). As Edgar said, inconvenient but didn't really hurt Vought. They lined up Lamplighter and Vogelbaum to testify. Both dealt with fairly easily. They exposed Stormfront as a Nazi (with A-Train's help)  

It is clear that Vought could have the Boys killed any time it wanted to. Black Noir spared them at Edgar's command earlier in the season. A-Train easily found Starlight and Hughie in this episode and could presumably easily have found the Boys any time he wanted to. Homelander obviously could find the boys with his abilities. And even excluding Supes, Vought has plenty of resources that it could use to track and kill the Boys if it wanted to. It simply does not want to.

[Res]

18 hours ago, Morrigan2575 said:

I'm thinking Vought wants her inside Government. 

I didn't see that ending coming at all.

The girl fight scene was everything I never knew I wanted. So glad Maeve joined the Team. It reminded me of the beat down in Death Proof.

I figured Becca would die but, I also thought Homelander would kill her. Is Stormfront dead? Are we going to get Darth Stormfront in S3?  Noir is down for the count but, I wonder what he'll do to Maeve once he wakes up? 

All in all a great ending to a slow starting season. 

I didn't see it coming and I didn't like it at all.

[Bobcatkitten]

Anyone surprised they had Ryan kill his own mother? That was a bit rough.