In as much as The Boys can ever really bring something down, this week's episode of the Amazon Prime Video series slowed things down a bit just in time to let the show take a breath and start to set up what is going to be a big showdown in the final weeks of Season 3. In doing so, The Boys started to put the chess pieces on the board to prep for an end game. In the process, more lines are drawn, and some of those lines are pretty blurry.
The fifth episode of Season 3 of The Boys starts with Vought still dealing with the fallout of Homelander teaming up with Victoria to take down the company's former CEO, Mr. Edgar. It appears that Homelander has now taken on the role of leading the organization, and while he's got a basic understanding of business jargon, he's not someone who has spent most of his adult life in a board room. When it's pointed out to him, however gently, he understands that to some degree, it's clear he doesn't understand all the ins and outs of running a business. While this is going on, Billy and his team are dealing with the fallout of their encounter with Soldier Boy.
While Kimiko is not healing as she usually does after Soldier Boy's laser blast, Butcher and Mother's Milk are watching research videos of what happened to the Jensen Ackles character when the Russians captured him. The Boys has never really hidden that it is poking a bit of fun at pop culture. It turns out that while Homelander is supposed to be an evil Superman, Soldier Boy appears to be a kind of mashup of Captain America and The Winter Soldier with some powers that neither Marvel character possesses.
Of course, while Butcher and his gang are rebuilding, reloading, and trying to figure out the next steps, the show does an excellent job of showing what's really at stake. After spending the first two seasons of The Boys making the lines very clear, things have blurred quite a bit in Butcher's world, and he's bringing Hughie along with him. Both men teamed up because the thing they hate the most is the idea that Supes exist at all. This season, Butcher decided that the way to take any and all of them down is to become a Supe of his own. It didn't take long to convince Hughie of the same thing.
One of the interesting juxtapositions here is that Butcher seems to understand he is essentially selling his soul for Compound V. Hughie, on the other hand, knows that what he's doing is wrong. Still, he doesn't have the same kind of compunction. He truly is the little man who has been having to tiptoe around Supes his whole life, and now he gets to go toe-to-toe with them. Butcher still seems to understand having powers is a necessary evil. Hughie is having fun. One of the best scenes of this episode of The Boys underlines the differences when Hughie is excitedly telling Starlight about what happened with Soldier Boy.
Another juxtaposition is included in this episode of The Boys that isn't carried out as masterfully. It's evident that the people behind the show want people to know that Soldier Boy and Homelander are two sides of the same coin. Of course, that's been rather apparent from the jump, and two scenes where their old flames tell them they hated them and never had any sense of affection for them seem to be a bit over the top. It seems like overkill when the program could have trusted its audience to understand the two super-powered men are quite similar. There was even an offhand comparison to Stormfront, in case viewers somehow didn't understand that Soldier Boy is in fact, nothing like Captain America.
There are also some scenes where the show seems to lose itself because it wants to be as outrageous as possible. That's especially the case when Paul Reiser makes a special appearance as The Legend, a man who did the job of Stillwell before she got that job herself. The character is supposed to be an over-the-top version of an Old Hollywood player who had sex with everyone he ran across. It's supposed to be a kind of comedic break in the action, but it's mostly just annoying and far too obvious to be really enjoyable. Likewise, a musical interlude at the hospital with Kamiko seems to be more time-wasting than anything.
Eventually, the show stops the rather odd side trips that populated so much of this episode of The Boys, and the show even changes up the music to make it clear that the audience is supposed to tune back in. That in itself is a bit of a problem for the show, because it seems to mean that even the showrunners understand that there are parts of the series that viewers don't have to spend that much attention to throughout an hour's installment.
That said, Jensen Ackles does a very good job of playing someone who appears to be both a real threat to everyone he comes across and a bit more serious of a person than Homelander. The former Supernatural star has quite a presence on screen, despite the fact that his character really couldn't be farther away than the man he played for more than a decade. Ackles even seems to have changed the tone and way he speaks. He's got more gravitas as Soldier Boy to a level where it's understandable if people wished he wasn't quite the murdering psychopath he is.
Of course, the biggest issue The Boys continues to have is that while everyone knows that Homelander is an off-the-chain nutball, it's still not been made clear just why Soldier Boy was considered such a horrible person. If the series really wants there to be some ambiguity when people start choosing sides in a fight between the two goliaths, gaps need to be filled in. Five episodes in, there's just still a lot of head nodding in that direction.