The Boys (2019 Amazon series)

Who knew Maverick shared his father's hobbies?

As for Cate, I don't think she's a villain so much as she's a pawn and a victim. The scene with Shetty makes clear that Shetty is manipulating and grooming her. Cate clearly loves and cares for the people in her life. She feels genuinely bad about what she is doing, and she knows it's wrong, so there is a clear moral compass there. She went through with it, though, because Shetty was manipulating her into believing that she was "helping" people, and in this instance that help was given to her friends because they could get hurt or die. If she was truly evil and beyond return, she wouldn't be giving Andre back his memories when the others told him she was the mind wiper, which is what she did in that final scene.

Cate's whole backstory about her parents never touching her after the incident with her brother also in hindsight seems like the sort of thing that would make her prime fodder for Shetty to manipulate through a "mother substitute" act (the scenes we've had of Shetty using this same "mother substitute" act with Marie gives some idea as to how exactly she might be doing the same with Cate).

Have to wonder who the mysterious benefactor is that Marie might have. Maybe Stan Edgar is still finding a way to keep afloat the agenda he was pursuing before Homelander got him ousted from Vought?

Edited by dmcreif on Oct 12th 2023 at 9:52:48 AM

In fact, I want to take back likening Cate to Kilgrave, because if anything, I'd say she's more of a Charles Xavier: misguided but ultimately good. But even she does have a bit of a leg to stand on compared to Xavier. Xavier wouldn’t come clean the way she did at the end of this episode. He would instead try to justify what he did, as opposed to Cate leaving herself open to judgement. (Her choosing to come clean with the others, beginning with Andre, is very much her choosing to come down on their side and not Shetty's. And given the episode 6 preview showed a shot of her bleeding from her eyes, I can see her pushing herself really hard to make amends.)

In fact, it's also clear that Cate is feeling a lot of guilt (as evidenced by her behavior before Shetty, and ultimately her confession) over being pushed into this by Shetty, so she's been subconsciously self-sabotaging. To give an example: why didn't she nip things in the bud when Andre was the only who discovered the conspiracy? (Which was one of the things that initially led me to discount her) At the time, the scale of the problem was way smaller. She could have just wiped him and made him forget about the phone he found in the statue. But she didn't. She even says, "I could make you stop." But she doesn't. Sure enough, he tells Emma, then Jordan and Marie get dragged in. Makes it seem like she wanted Andre to pull on this thread and unravel everything, because she was overwhelmed by her contributions to Luke's death.

The same goes with the whole thing with putting trackers in the other kids. Those tracker implants were doomed from the get go. We saw how Marie found hers, and she similarly found Jordan's. Jordan's could come out while gender-shifting. Emma's is likely to pop out when she shrinks down to Little Cricket size. And Andre surely would be able to sense metallic components within his own body. Cate probably convinced Cardosa to implant trackers on the other four, and to put them where they can be easily found.

It's official: Gen V is being renewed for a second season.

Episode 6, in which somewhere off screen Billy Butcher feels warm and fuzzy inside for some reason

Also known as: The one where Dusty dies, and there was much rejoicing

Also also known as: The one where we find out Andre is like, the worst friend in the history of friends; Jordan knew there was something sketchy going on between Luke and Brink but stayed silent because of (self-acknowledged) cowardice, some degree of grooming and bribery by Brink, and implication of something bad happening if they don't keep quiet (also that was a really nice scene getting to see both Jordan actors interact with each other); and we see the full nature of Kate's dependency on Shetty and her losing the will to live until Marie tries to counsel her and Andre more or less bullies her into waking up (side note, speaking as a crisis counselor, what Andre just did is not in any way a healthy or effective method of suicide intervention.

Also also known as: The one with more happy puppet fun time and has what might honestly be the most wholesome sex scene I've ever seen, between the casual emphasis on care and continual enthusiastic consent and Emma just generally being the heart of the show.

Also also also known as: The one in which every single line out of Soldier Boy's mouth is solid gold.

Edited by TheAirman on Oct 21st 2023 at 3:59:09 AM

There's a clear inversion of the dynamics from this show vs. The Boys. In The Boys, the main villains are Supes and secondary villains are those at Vought who manage them, and the good guys are humans. But in Gen V, the Supe kids are the good guys, and the humans are the villains. Shetty might very well be a female Butcher.

I have a hard time deciding which X-Men Cate is an expy of. Her telepathy seems to be from Charles Xavier with some elements of Emma Frost mixed in, the gloves element seems to be from Rogue, and there also seem to be some elements of Jean Grey in there too.

Yeah, I think Clint Barton would've probably used better words there.

I'm almost surprised that Sam envisioning Emma as a Muppet, and Emma recreating the iconic "orgasm hand on glass" shot from Titanic (1997) didn't lead to the scene being scored with "You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want When You're Makin' Love" there. (Sidenote, this episode also established that Avenue V and that Muppet Deep frorm Sam's previous episodes are very much real. Did you see Muppet Deep on the container of Vought Tots Twists that Sam is eating from?)

Edited by dmcreif on Oct 21st 2023 at 4:52:47 AM

And today's featured trope on the home page is hilariously appropriate for this episode

Marie's power is indeed the same as Neumann's, whoever Mallory had listening in on her talk with Shetty is absolutely gonna lead straight to Butcher doing the thing, Cate's gone off the deep end, and poor poor Sam chugged that Kool-Aid in record speed

Can you really blame them when they're the two who've been the most manipulated and abused by humans? I mean, Sam practically has Magneto's origins if you swap out the Nazis and the concentration camp for the Woods (making Jordan likening the whole thing to "a fսcking Mengele health clinic" in episode 4 more appropriate).

Is it wrong that I'm expecting things to go full Resident Evil starting next episode?

What do you mean by that?

I just have this feeling that Supes and Lethal Virus obviously aren't going to mix well. Thus, I want to see some crazy Body Horror mutations going on due to that.

I know this isn't that kind of series but I want to see the insanity of a whole college full of Supers fighting it out with their mutating classmates as the virus starts going out of control.

If that makes sense. Pipe dream I'm sure.

I am fairly sure that not everyone is going to make it out alive from the finale. Marie is probably safe as she is the "main" character but otherwise it really could be the case that anyone might die.

Andre, Emma and one of Cate or Sam seem the most likely to go to me but we will see.

I've seen some stuff suggesting Cate and Sam will have an appearance or two in The Boys season 4, but I'd take it with a grain of salt.

x2 Welp, everyone's still alive. But Cate's down a hand. Marie, Jordan, Andre, and Emma are now being held captive and have been smeared as the bad guys while Vought's propaganda machine have spun Cate and Sam as the "heroes". They'll probably now be completing the Seven's roster alongside the already confirmed Firecracker and Sister Sage since they share Homelander's hatred of humans (although admittedly in Cate's spot, what happened with Blindspot in the past makes me a little skeptical since if Homelander wasn't okay with a blind man in the Seven, I doubt he'd be okay with a one-armed woman; unless Cate gets a prosthetic hand or Vought has their own version of Extremis derived from Gecko's blood?).

I will digress, though, that Cate's Face–Heel Turn feels...about as abrupt as Daenerys Targaryen's and Trish Walker's downfalls? Like, we never saw her looking down on humans before episode 8, although she did harbor anger towards her parents for locking her in her room all those years and treating her like a monster. And I suppose it made sense for her to kill Shetty given that Shetty had been forcing her to control her friends.

So what we have is essentially...Cate's mom and Shetty are the villains in her life. They used her and abused her; and Shetty also had Cate drugged this whole time in order to make her more pliable and useful as a pawn. But Cate stops using her meds, and… DUN DUN DUN, Cate's actually been a psycho all along. Yes her mom was trash, and Shetty was using her, but SUPRISE, she did need to be limited and controlled because off her meds, she is a bad, bad person. At least, that's what I think they want us to feel. It's like, there's either an episode or so that we missed out on, or we're meant to see Cate as an abuse victim emulating her abuser (Shetty) but with the ideology flipped.

Edited by dmcreif on Nov 2nd 2023 at 10:59:41 AM

I’m thinking it’s a safe assumption that Homelander’s the one who decided that the supe-supremacist teens get the glory and our heroes get locked up. What a tool.

I have to wonder if that finale was the subject of rewrites and reshoots. Like, it seemed like it they were building up to a final fight against Sam. But for whatever reason (likely the decision to include Sam in the fourth season of The Boys, they cobbled together a new ending where Sam gets taken out anticlimactically. Seriously, go back and watch the scene where she makes all those blood knives like she's Yondu about to unleash his arrow on some baddies; the buildup feels a little too dramatic for her to be unleashing them to just kill a single Red Shirt. It's more likely she was going to kill Sam or a big group of baddies and then this changed. Meanwhile, the editing with Sam makes it feel like he was going to go down a lot more dramatically than just "get quickly subdued by a random weapon lying around", especially given how easily he could've crushed Andre's throat the moment he felt the voltage.

One thing I will admit to liking is the whole bit where Polarity is shown to have brain damage as a result of using his superpowers, and that Andre has inherited the same issue. I think they're suggesting that Perma V can also cause the same kinds of damage that we know Temp V has done to Butcher and almost done to Hughie; maybe we're meant to assume that Homelander's increasingly erratic and unhinged behavior in the main show is because his brain is deteriorating from pushing his powers too much.

Should we rename the thread to General The Boys Discussion or something?

I don't think there is a way to rename a thread.

Mods can do it upon request.

If you think about it, it actually wasn't that hard to spin Cate and Sam as the "heroes" and the actual heroes as the "villains". All Vought had to do was spin some Jedi Truths and take advantage of most on campus not getting the whole context of what happened due to the communications blackout.

Marie's actions, especially, would make it easy to spin her as the "bad guy". Her fashioning blood daggers to kill the teleporting Supe? Easy to spin as her murdering an innocent man trying to flee to the safety of the helicopter. Her taking out Maverick? Same thing. Her maiming Cate to protect Jordan? Easy to spin as Marie maiming Cate to stop her from subduing Jordan.

The wrecked helicopter can easily be pinned on Andre. Not just the damage from him landing it, but the initial damage that led to him having to save it...because no one but Marie saw Cate tell that Supe to jump at the helicopter's rotors.

Homelander's actions also serve to damage Marie's credibility. Here's what bystanders see: he arrives right after Marie kills the teleporting Supe, fights Maverick, and destroys Cate's hand. He and Marie face each other, then he shouts for everyone to stay back right before he lasers Marie, to make it seem like she's about to attack more bystanders. The bystanders don't hear what Homelander says to Marie right before he lasers her: "What kind of animal are you? Do you like attacking your own kind?"

And for the record, these people are more likely to feel sorry for Cate. They've known her for years. She's also got close ties to several of the faculty. Plus think of the optics: Golden Boy's girlfriend, while still reeling from his death in a tragic murder-suicide, loses her arm in the course of seemingly stopping a Supe terrorist attack? They're probably all going to be sending flowers and get well cards to her in the hospital. By contrast, they don't know Marie at all. She's only just started at Godolkin after having spent her teenage years in Red River. And she doesn't have any connections like most of the rest of the main group (only Shetty knew about Marie's ties to Victoria Neuman). And her track record before this wasn't great either: I mean, she killed her parents (easy for Vought to spin that as a deliberate thing), and while she didn't kill Brink or Luke, I wouldn't put it past Vought to have Tek Knight find "evidence" that says she did (which would also conveniently further help them spin Sam and Cate as "heroes").

I guess I was right in my thinking about how Vought will spin this tragedy.

We'll have to wait and see for confirmation, but it looks like Cate either got a new arm or a prosthetic as was the more common theory.

I feel like Cate gets a prosthetic and advanced hand akin to Bucky Barnes'. It would certainly be in-character for Vought to give her one for the sake of milking her disability for the diversity points. Plus, it's great for helping make Vought's narrative about the "Godolkin 4" stick in the minds of the public.

While Cate herself has to live with this constant reminder of what happened.

Edited by dmcreif on Nov 12th 2023 at 12:44:44 PM

Sadly, my biggest disappointment about this series is that I wanted to see superhero college and the show was utterly uninterested in that.

I would admittedly have appreciated longer episodes as a whole. Here's what I would add with longer (and more) episodes.

• Delay Golden Boy's and Brink's deaths to episode 2 so we spend a bit more time getting to know them.

• Give us more scenes in the classrooms, to illustrate how the teachers indoctrinate the students into Vought's ways of thinking.

• What I think is most important: more scenes and dialogue to establish Cate's relationship with Shetty. That's probably the big one. I'd add more scenes between Cate and Shetty that are written in such a way as to make them look benign and innocent on a first watch, but on second watch, you realize they have a more sinister subtext. There's a few points where I'd do this:
  • For instance, I'd rewrite the scene of Marie having breakfast with Shetty on the morning of #ThinkBrink to also include Cate. And Cate's reason for being there is (ostensibly) because Shetty is her academic advisor, and after Marie is finished and leaves, Shetty pointedly asks Cate in a cryptic way if there's something she wants to say about last night (referring to rescuing Andre), written in a way that it could be Shetty asking Cate about the nightmare flashback we saw of her and Luke visiting Sam at Sage Grove, but in hindsight she's actually asking about Cate rescuing Andre and whether or not she's wiped his memories of the incident.
  • When describing to Marie what happened to her brother, Cate doesn't have to mention that her parents locked her in her room for nine years, but she can mention something about Shetty being her parental substitute.
  • A scene where Cate visits Shetty after telling Rufus to hit himself in the balls, where Shetty offers her grief counseling.

(And the shorter episodes had everything to do with budget, as the creators have admitted in interviews.)

Edited by dmcreif on Nov 13th 2023 at 11:38:24 AM

We have news. Deadline says they’re making a spin-off set in Mexico. Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal, and the guy who wrote the Blue Beetle movie are working on it:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/the-boys-mexico-spinoff-amazon-gareth-dunnet-alcocer-diego-luna-gael-garcia-bernal-1235640996/