One year after the Stormfront scandal, the Boys work as contractors for Victoria Neuman's Bureau of Superhero Affairs to apprehend rogue Supes, with Hughie Campbell as their liaison. Stan Edgar appoints Annie January, who is now publicly dating Hughie, co-captain of the Seven to repair Vought International's reputation and unsuccessfully attempts to sell V24, a Compound V variant that temporarily grants superpowers, to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Singer.
Queen Maeve secretly works with Billy Butcher and has him investigate Payback - a disbanded superhero team whose leader Soldier Boy mysteriously died - in hopes of finding a weapon capable of killing Homelander. She also gives Butcher several vials of V24, which he considers using.
Hughie encounters a man named Tony, who claims to be Neuman's best friend and calls her "Nadia". Suspicious, Hughie follows the pair into an alley, where Tony urges her to tell the truth about "Red River". She refuses, prompting Tony to retaliate before she kills him with her powers, unaware of Hughie's presence.
Tropes for this episode include:
- Accidental Murder: Termite accidentally kills a man after crawling up his dick to pleasure him, only to turn back to normal size after sneezing.
- Adaptation Dye-Job: In-Universe, Stormfront has blonde hair in the Dawn of the Seven film, while she has brown hair in the world of the show.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: In-Universe for Stormfront. The real Stormfront (Aya Cash) isn't unattractive, but the actress playing her in Dawn of the Seven (Charlize Theron) is way more attractive.
- Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear if Homelander visited Butcher at his apartment to challenge him to a fight to the death or if it was all in Butcher's mind, considering the leader of the Seven suddenly disappeared as if he wasn't there. While you could chalk it up to Homelander having super speed, it could also be Billy's darker impulses egging him to fight the sociopathic Supe. "Herogasm" would later confirm the conversation to be real.
- Anvilicious: The in-universe movie, Dawn of the Seven, even after rewrites and re-shooting, is completely devoid of subtlety, with corny, team-building lines. Notably, Stan Edgar is eye-rolling during the premiere.
- Artistic License – Politics/Artistic License – Law: It's against the law and the Constitution for the Secretary of Defense to hold appointed office while running for President, and for Congresswoman Neuman to continue serve in Congress while serving as a presumably appointed and Senate-confirmed director of a Federal agency.
- Body Horror:
- Stormfront survived what Ryan did to her. She's covered and scars and missing three limbs and an eye. At this point, she's almost an expy of Darth Vader.
- Victoria (aka Nadia) has to kill Tony by blowing bits off him until she can get to his head.
- Brutal Honesty: Defense Secretary Robert Singer doesn't mince words and raises some good points that Supes in the military are a complete disaster and thanks to Stormfront, Compound V is such a toxic subject in the public eye, Congress will never approve Edgar's proposed V-24.Defense Secretary Robert Singer: Supes in the military are an unmitigated shitshow. [...] Stan, you say Compound V, you know what the public hears? "Gestapo". "Swastika". And that's your fault. You used a Nazi to sell it! Compound V is radio-fucking-active, it's not gonna fly in Congress.
- The Bus Came Back: Hughie's dad returns via a video call after not having been seen since the penultimate episode of Season One.
- Call-Back: Following up on his "not a superhero company" speech from Season 2, Stan Edgar agrees with the Secretary of Defense that using the supes in the military has been a disaster because they have been ruined by their fame. He wants to turn Vought into a serious company by marketing the powers themselves using V24, and leave the superhero business entirely.
- The Cameo: Charlize Theron in the "Bourke Cut" of Dawn of the Seven as Stormfront, the character having been rewritten into the villain after the real Stormfront's disgrace.
- Career-Building Blunder: Edgar admits Vought dropped the ball by making "the supers into heroes" to Robert. By making the Supes revered and giving them sex, movie deals, and other things, they ruined their potential. He also says he wants to leave the superhero business and turn Vought into a better, legit company: a defense and medicine enterprise instead of a Supe daycare.
- Child Soldier: Discussed. In Dawn of the Seven, Stormfront comments on how her and Homelander's children would become beautiful Aryan child soldiers.
- Cradling Your Kill: Neuman has a heartful moment with Tony while he is dying from her attack.
- Dartboard of Hate: Billy is seen throwing darts at a magazine with Homelander's face on the front page.
- Daydream Surprise: While watching someone play the piano at Termite's party, Kimiko sings ''Dream A Little Dream of Me''. Alas, it is just in her head.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Almost literally. Homelander pays Butcher a visit, and the two talk, while Butcher has a cuppa. Or maybe not.
- Do Wrong, Right: Homelander threatens to rip Butcher limb from limb to find Ryan. Butcher isn't impressed: he'd pass out from shock long before he could talk, and suggests starting small (like fingers) would be more effective.
- Excrement Statement: Maeve recounts how when the Seven overtook Payback as the premiere superhero team, Crimson Countess sent her a box of cat feces.
- Expy Coexistence: The Deep namechecks Leah Remini when talking about his new cult survivor activism, indicating that the Church of the Collective and the Church of Scientology both exist in this universe.
- Fan Disservice:
- A horrifically disfigured Stormfront gives Homelander a handjob while she's ranting about the Aryan cause.
- Termite stimulates a man by crawling through his partner's urethra and rubbing his penis from the inside, only to accidentally kill him by growing back to his regular size while still in the penis.
- Foreshadowing: Termite does a line of coke and sneezes, then he does another line of coke and crawls inside his partner's urethra ... Then we get Five-Second Foreshadowing as he struggles not to sneeze.
- Go-Karting with Bowser: Homelander drops in at Butcher's apartment and the two arch-enemies have a halfway civil conversation over tea — pertaining, of course, to the bureaucracy-free Final Battle they each crave. Butcher knows he's a dead man if the whim strikes his foe, but Homelander is at such a nadir as his Humiliation Conga continues that venting his frustrations to his worst enemy actually seems cathartic. After all, he's begun to sour on the downfallen Stormfront and has no one else left.
- Good News, Bad News: Neuman has good and bad news for Hughie and asks him which one he wants first. He chooses the good news but Neuman tells him there's none and the bad news is that they lost Termite as a client.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Hughie has a lot of trouble meeting Supersonic, Starlight's ex-boyfriend.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: We get a view of a man's urethral opening before Termite goes in.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: The fate of the poor sap that lets Termite crawl up his dick, being torn in half when Termite accidentally goes back to normal size.
- Happy Ending Override: Downplayed. Mother's Milk and his wife have divorced, with her finding a new partner. The two are amicable, though, and he still gets to be in his daughter's life.
- Hour of Power: Vought has produced a temporary variant of Compound V that lasts for 24 hours, dubbed V24.
- Innocently Insensitive: Monique's husband dresses up as Homelander for his stepdaughter's superhero-themed birthday, causing distress in Marvin, who knows what a monster Homelander is.
- Instant Turn-Off: When Stormfront give Homelander a handjob from her hospital bed, he gets turned off instantly when she starts another rant about a master race.
- Internal Reveal: Hughie learns Neuman is a supe.
- Butcher watches the Flight 37 video showing Homelander and Maeve leaving the plane without rescuing anyone.
- Insult to Rocks: Mallory jokingly tells Butcher that calling him an asshole would be "an insult to assholes." She does retract that statement somewhat, saying he might not be as much of "an asshole" after he lets his care for Ryan show in a discussion with him.
- Irony: Neuman gets Hughie on her side by reminding him that they're taking down supes "the right way, without covering people in blood and guts".
- Know When to Fold Them: Stan finally agrees with Robert when he says superheroes in the army are a terrible idea. Edgar realizes these "heroes" that they made at Vought made are more trouble than they are worth, and it's easy to understand why. The Supes are granted these extraordinary abilities, but they only care about doing whatever they want and soaking up the spotlight, virtually wasting their potential. He plans to leave the superhero industry and give the V24 to more capable hands: trained, mature soldiers who'll hopefully be trustworthy with their abilities instead of the hedonistic manchildren they made at Vought.
- Leave No Witnesses: Termite tries to kill Kimiko and Frenchie to ensure no one knows he killed someone.
- Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Vought not only managed to successfully survive the PR disaster that was the outing of Stormfront as a literal Nazi, but even include it in their incoming blockbuster, greatly boosting its reception and revenue.
- Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Ashley has sex in the bathroom with the director after the film premiere, while he sits on the toilet.
- Male Frontal Nudity: Termite's penis is shown after he has sex with a doll while tiny. Later, his male partner's penis is also shown in extreme closeup before Termite goes inside tiny to stimulate the guy's urethra.
- The Missus and the Ex:
- Hughie meets Annie's first boyfriend, getting jealous in the process.
- MM also spends some time resenting his wife's new boyfriend Todd at their daughter's birthday party.
- The Mole: Maeve has become one for Butcher, tipping him off about Termite and Soldier Boy.
- Morality Pet: Grace Mallory reminds Billy how much of a better person he has become because of Ryan.
- Murder Is the Best Solution: Maeve decided that killing Homelander is the only way to defeat him since he is an all-powerful maniac.
- Noodle Incident: The Secretary of Defense mentions something Black Noir did at a Hard Rock Cafe in Lagos, insisting Noir should have faced war crimes charges.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Hughie's reaction when he bumps right into Homelander during a movie premiere, especially since Homelander is giving him a Death Glare over it. Nothing happens, since there are about a hundred or so journalists around them, but Hughie remains tense for the rest of the night.
- Deep and Ashley get this after Deep reveals he got the slot before Homelander on the Coleman show. Ashley realizes right away that Homelander is going to be furious, but Deep rambles on for a while, excited about his book launch, only to Mood Whiplash into terror when Homelander furiously asks how Deep got the slot before him.
- The Other Marty: In-universe. Dawn of the Seven ends up requiring a few changes after the revelation about Stormfront being a Nazi goes public. To this end, her character remains in the film, though now as the Big Bad, but she herself has been recast and replaced with Charlize Theron.
- Poirot Speak: To underpin her Aryan roots, Stormfront squeezes in some German words ("Kindersoldaten" and "Liebchen") in her dialog with Homelander in the opening scene of Dawn of the Seven.
- Power Perversion Potential: Termite uses his size-shifting powers to crawl into his male partner's penis and pleasure him. It goes very, very badly.
- Proscenium Reveal: When the opening confrontation scene with Stormfront zooms out into the theatre revealing this part to be a Show Within a Show.
- Put on a Bus to Hell: In-universe. After the reveal of Stormfront being a Nazi, her character in Dawn of the Seven is re-written to be a mean antagonist who gets killed by the Seven.
- The Reveal: We learn more about Nadia's powers; she can blow up any body part, not just the head, but she has to be able to see it.
- Revenge is Sweet: Maeve gets to very quietly enjoy Homelander's pain watching the reshot Dawn of the Seven in the opening, recalling how he used the original version to torment her.
- A Rotten Time to Revert: Here, Termite shrinks himself to the size of a flea and climbs into his boyfriend's penis to stimulate him from the inside. Everything seems to be going well, right up until Termite sneezes - and accidentally reverts to full size. Termite survives unharmed. The boyfriend... doesn't.
- Sharp-Dressed Man: Hughie's lifestyle has changed including him now wearing nice suits. Billy, still wearing his Badass Longcoat, remarks on this change condescendingly.
- Shout-Out:
- While the Church of the Collective is mostly a blatant Church of Happyology, in Vought's retelling of the story Alistair Adana had the Deep branded with his initials, which was part of the MO of recently incarcerated real-life cult leader Keith Raniere
. - Thanus, the MCU meme relating to Ant-Man destroying enemies, namely Thanos, by crawling inside them and expanding, is played out with the supe Termite. First he crawls into a partner's urethra and accidentally expands when he sneezes. Then he tries to kill Frenchie by crawling inside his anus, but is stopped by Kimiko.
- Ashley chastises the director of Dawn of the Seven as they're having sex in a restroom, telling him that Tony Gilroy had to reshoot the movie in order to salvage it.
- The director of Dawn of the Seven mentions the online movement from fans to #ReleaseTheBourkeCut.
- While the Church of the Collective is mostly a blatant Church of Happyology, in Vought's retelling of the story Alistair Adana had the Deep branded with his initials, which was part of the MO of recently incarcerated real-life cult leader Keith Raniere
- The Singing Mute: The mute Kimiko suddenly starts singing "Dream a Little Dream of Me" until it's revealed that it was a Daydream Surprise.
- Sneeze of Doom: Termite's untimely sneeze gets his lover killed.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: After Neuman explodes a guy, with Hughie having seen the result, Billy Joel's upbeat "Uptown Girl" plays.
- Spy Cam: Frenchie wears a hidden camera for Billy when he and Kimiko enter the party where they meet Termite.
- Squirrels in My Pants: When tiny Termite gets into Frenchie's pants and he and Kimiko desperately try to get him out before another disaster happens.
- Technical Virgin: Starlight teases Hughie about Supersonic.Hughie: And-and really great you guys are still... so close, just really, really great.
Starlight: You have nothing to worry about.
Hughie: No! No, no, no, totally. He's gross. And you've known him your whole life. And he, you know, took your virginity, so why would I worry?
Starlight: Okay, it was a mutual taking of virginities. And you know what? It happened so long ago, and only a couple of times.
Hughie: Wait, really?
Starlight: Yeah, you know, we were really religious, and we weren't married, so it felt weird having sеx. I mean, sex-sex. We did a ton of butt stuff. - Tempting Fate: Hughie tells Butcher that in his new job, at least he doesn't end up covered with guts. By the end of the episode he ends up covered in guts and blood after Victoria kills Tony in the alley.
- Troubled Production: The in-universe Dawn of the Seven went through extensive reshoots, after Serendipity Writes the Plot and they had to both recast Stormfront herself and give her a role as the villain.
- Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: V24 is still in research and has never been widely tested. Billy is somewhat concerned by this fact but decides to use it despite the risk.
- The Unreveal: After Neuman completely destroys Tony, she calls for a clean-up crew, but we don't know who she called.
- We Can Rule Together: Stormfront in Dawn of the Seven offers Homelander to join her in her cause and rule the world together, remarking how they are both perfect genetic specimens.
- Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: After Nadia was forced to kill her old friend Tony, she cried "Why did you had to come for me?"
- You Monster!: Homelander calls Stormfront this in the Dawn of the Seven sequence.
