Meet OD, the superhero community's go-to guy for drugs. One fateful day, he is approached by Billy Butcher with an unpleasant task: spike the heroin supply of one of his customers, the Great Wide Wonder, with one of Frenchie's chemical cocktails, lest he be ratted out to the DEA. What sick designs does Butcher have in mind for the Great Wide Wonder...?
This short provides examples of:
- Adaptational Jerkass: Homelander here is more openly sardonic to his colleagues than he is in the live-action series. When the Great Wide Wonder and Ironcast inadvertently kill each other, Homelander is more annoyed than horrified. He also snorts cocaine here. Justified because this is the Homelander from the comic's continuity, who has a different personality.
- Armor-Piercing Question: When Butcher shows up at OD's apartment, the latter at first tries to get him to leave. And then Butcher casually asks where he keeps the dead kids' blood he gets for Ironcast. OD's face says it all, really.
- Ass Shove: Great Wide Wonder's preferred method of imbibing is via heroin enemas.
- Asshole Victim: Great Wide Wonder and Ironcast. The former was a drug-addicted super who had sex with two college students while flying high up in orbit which naturally led to their deaths and their bodies being left up there, something that, according to Butcher, GWW got off on. The latter meanwhile drank literal gallons of blood from terminally ill children just to fix his erectile dysfunction. While gruesome, their deaths were very well deserved.
- Black Mail: How Billy obtained O.D.'s cooperation:
- Blind Without Them: OD needs his corrective glasses, which is how Butcher gets the drop on him.
- Blood-Splattered Innocents: Several people in the crowd get covered in Great Wide Wonder's blood.
- Corrupted Character Copy: There is a tree-like supe shown at the party in the opening scene who looks like Groot
. Also, Ironcast looks like a combination of Colossus and Ironclad. - Cruel and Unusual Death:
- The deaths of the two college students. Great Wide Wonder had sex with them in orbit, where they asphyxiated and froze to death, and according to Butcher, their corpses are still up there.
- The end result of Great Wide Wonder's drug-induced flight is Ironcast with a new hole in his torso and Wonder himself sinking to the bottom of the East River, his innards pasted every which way from a high-speed collision with both Ironcast, which compounded his spine, and soon after a wall.
- Cruel Elephant: Averted. While certainly not cruel, there is an elephant supe who snorts cocaine with his trunk.
- Even Evil Has Standards:
- Even OD himself, who was shown to be an unpleasant Jerkass and even tried to kill Butcher at one point, is horrified to hear about Great Wide Wonder taking two college girls to have sex in upper orbit and then leaving their lifeless bodies to drift in space to cover it up. He's also disgusted by how Ironcast gets off on drinking dead kids' blood and was visibly traumatized after witnessing the death of him and GWW.
- Butcher sounds notably somber when recounting how the Great Wide Wonder got two women killed whilst on a sexual high.
- Evil Redhead: GWW has red hair and freckles. Like most supes he is also a moral degenerate who does heroin and once took two women up into orbit for a threesome and left their bodies behind when they inevitably died from Asphyxiation.
- Fat Bastard: Ironcast is obese as hell. The bastard part comes from the fact that he's depraved enough to drink the blood of terminally ill children for recreational purposes. With that in mind, perhaps this is the reason he's fat to begin with.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Butcher's way of convincing OD to spike Great Wide Wonder's drugs is to start with a High-Altitude Interrogation, then assure him with Can't Kill You, Still Need You before threatening to out him to the authorities, landing him in the slammer, with an added threat of Prison Rape.
- Meaningful Name: To OD—or overdose—on drugs is often fatal, making it a fitting nickname for the dealer responsible for Great Wide Wonder's drug addiction and later, his demise.
- Never Found the Body: Downplayed. According to Butcher, the bodies of the two college students are still up in orbit where Great Wide Wonder left them. The poor kids are still up there, but no one knows where in orbit.
Billy Butcher: Thing is, it's a bit fucking cold way up there. And by the time they twigged he didn’t give a shit, and it was part of the fun for him... it was too late. As far as we know, they're still up there in orbit.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The two college girls clearly wanted to stop having sex with him when they realized they couldn't survive such a high altitude, but Great Wide Wonder essentially ignored this and continued, and it's implied he enjoyed this.
- Required Secondary Powers: Great Wide Wonder is durable enough to survive the stress of flying at mach speeds (including withstanding the freezing cold of space and even smashing through buildings unharmed), though colliding with Ironcast at 1500 miles per hour is sufficient to pop his spinal cord and intestines out like a squeezed caterpillar (really, the second collision with the concrete wall after that just stops the momentum of the corpse).
- Stepford Smiler: Queen Maeve is in fine form here, smiling for the cameras while hating every moment of it.
- Stout Strength: Ironcast might have a prominent gut but he also has very muscular and clearly defined arms; not that he gets much of a chance to show off before his Cruel and Unusual Death.
- Sympathy for the Devil: It is unknown how much Hughie knows what OD has done as his time as a drug dealer to the Supe community but it is strongly implied he regardless feels remorse for his trauma that was caused along with so many other people from the deaths of both GWW and Ironcast.
- Truer to the Text: Being set in the continuity of the original comic and being written by Garth Ennis himself, the short being a more faithful adaptation than the live-action TV series is to be expected; Butcher is constantly smiling and has no beard, Terror is his loyal Attack Animal, Hughie has a Scottish brogue and is based on (and voiced by) Simon Pegg, Jack from Jupiter is present, Queen Maeve is blonde instead of redheaded, and the superhero devravity is much more over-the-top for shock value. The only thing connecting the short to the series is Antony Starr reprising Homelander.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: One of the models who got a front-row seat at Ironcast's brutal demise from having Great Wide Wonder blast through his gut at top speed unsurprisingly vomits in horror and shock.
- We Need a Distraction: In order to distract the crowd from Great Wide and Ironcast's gory deaths, The Seven pretend there's a huge enemy hidden by the sunlight. And the people actually believe them.
- Zero-G Spot: Great Wide Wonder had sex with two college honor students in Earth's orbit. He could survive the frigid temperatures of high altitudes and the hard vacuum of space. They couldn't. They froze to death and possibly suffocated, and according to Butcher, to cover up his crime, GWW left their bodies up there afterward.
