Emmy Catch-Up: The Boys

Every year, I watch the six submitted episodes of every series I don’t regularly watch that’s up for one of the Emmy series prizes. Last year, I started watching the entire season of each show to get a better idea of the quality I missed, and I’ve decided to continue that this year.

The Boys: Season 2, Episode 4 “Nothing Like It in the World” (B)

This episode delivered a few monumental revelations that don’t change the power dynamic but show just how deadly it can be to have people like Homelander and Stormfront, who couldn’t be further from heroes, so embraced by the public and yielding so much destruction from their comfortable celebrity positions. Homelander was ready to let A-Train go because he didn’t think he brought much to the Seven but then changed his mind in a moment during an interview when he got accused of not being diverse enough, and he also felt perfectly fine outing Maeve on live television and even mentioning who her girlfriend was. He wasn’t terribly convincing when he told her that it didn’t bother him and that he was happy for her, and there’s no way this is the end of it. Starlight did manage to make him believe that she wasn’t lying when he tried to strangle a confession out of her in the elevator, and she’s the one who’s actually spending time with the enemy. Homelander’s visit to Doppelganger pretending to be Madelyn showed the extent of his need for validation, and Doppelganger turning into Homelander so that he could provide the ego boost was quite fascinating but of course proved to be fatal for him. Valerie’s identification of the female hero who killed her brother decades earlier as Stormfront is quite shocking since it indicates a deeper layer of deception that only makes her more dangerous. The Deep auditioning potential wives was a peculiar process, and he’s clearly being used in whatever scheme Carol wants to orchestrate to achieve her mysterious aims.