Finally, a character literally called “Love Sausage” in the credits stretches his member down his pant leg through his window and around the neck of Mother’s Milk, nearly killing him. Another one spits acid à la Alien but ends up spitting up all over himself. One new superperson that we’ll call the Human Popper can just look at people, squeeze her hand, and pop them like a bloody balloon. The action in Sage Grove is a little more intense. It’s a relatively clever way to bond Annie and Billy over how much they care about the dumb kid. When the super-weirdo blasts them with enough telekinetic power to flip their Mystery Machine, Hughie ends up with a big piece of shrapnel in his gut. While Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, Kimiko, and Lamplighter seek safety from the new mutants, Hughie, Billy, and Annie encounter one of them outside the facility fences and it nearly ends in tragedy.
It led to some serious bad blood, but that’s cast aside when the patients at Sage Grove break out and start, well, experimenting with their powers. He used to be under the thumb of Grace Mallory and her team, blackmailed into reporting on what was going down with the Seven and Vought, but tragedy struck one night, a night that Frenchie wasn’t paying attention. Lamplighter and the Boys have a dark history. And she’s using the formerly famous superhero Lamplighter (Shawn Ashmore) as her Nurse Ratched, burning patients who get out of line.
Of course, the most charismatic Nazi, Stormfront, is guiding the experimentation straight out of a playbook from her buddies in World War II - it’s later revealed she literally danced with Himmler. They discover that it’s basically a testing ground for super terrorists, injecting mental patients with Compound V and just seeing what happens next. Most of the action takes place at a facility that Annie discovered on Stormfront’s laptop called Sage Grove, where Billy, Hughie, Annie, Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, and Kimiko - the whole gang, really - end up in an effort to figure out what Stormfront and Vought are up to. There may have been Golden Girls references this week, but the show isn’t resting on its comedy. Is this going to be looked back on as a transitional season? Or will the writers rush through to a climactic showdown involving Stormfront that eliminates her in time for a new “big bad” next year? Right now, this show should be all buildup to a climax, and it still feels like the stage is being set even though there are only two episodes left. In terms of momentum, some of what was lost last week is regained, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be doing heavy backstory and flashbacks six episodes into an eight-episode season. And the end implies that Homelander and Stormfront are forming a new kind of family, a power couple hellbent on destroying everyone who doesn’t look like them. It’s definitely there in the makeshift family formed by Billy and Annie when they save Hughie, bringing all three of these very different people closer together. It’s in the devastated face of Elena when she realizes her super-girlfriend has been witness to super-war crimes. It’s reflected in the origin story for Frenchie, who left his post one night to save a friend who was overdosing, but then lost that friend again when he returned to his job watching the watchmen. This week’s The Boys is about the cost of human connection, and how it can be both a strength and a weakness.
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