The Boys (Amazon)

[red snow]

57 minutes ago, Werthead said:

It did take me a few minutes to realise that the supreme head of the evil organisation of evil was Gus from Breaking Bad.

There was also rawls from the wire playing the evil scientist as well. There's a lot of fun guest stars throughout.

On 8/5/2019 at 1:35 AM, Ramsay B. said:

I had no idea Homelander was the guy from Banshee until I looked it up after I finished. I was thinking that this is gonna make this dude a star. He was incredible throughout. There was also another brief appearance by a Deadwood actor the last episode that drove me crazy for like a half hour. Thankfully it dawned on me who it was before I checked:

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Ellsworth

Anyways, I loved it. I expected a little more from the finale but not a big deal. I was also waiting for something to happen with the fly but too soon I guess. Exciting it already got the green light for another season.

He was good in Banshee but he's on another level as Homelander. To be fair Homelander is a much more complex character for the actor to sink his teeth into but even though the Banshee character was fairly straightforward he did instill a lot of charisma into the role. I agree that the role has the potential to get him really noticed. If the show progresses Homelander has the potential to become a classic antagonist/anti-hero. I keep referring to the show as "homelander" instead of "the boys" which says a lot about how I view the character and performance.

[Kalbear]

Also, I've been going back and re-reading the comics, and I have to say the show is absurdly better on like every single level I can think of. They've taken basically everything that was good about the comics save perhaps some of the superfights with the Boys vs. other teams and removed all the stupid, childish bullshit. And holy shit, is there a ton of stupid, childish bullshit. 

There's some other things that are interesting that they can add later, but most everything they've cut has been excellent. The one major difference is that Homelander is not nearly so psychopathic in the comics, at least not immediately, and the others are a lot moreso. 

Well, okay, the Deep in the show is a waste of time and space, but otherwise yeah, really good job making the changes work. 

[karaddin]

On 7/29/2019 at 3:04 AM, Corvinus said:

On the plane thing

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I liked how they inserted some realistic superhero physics in there. An individual like Homelander/Superman cannot simply lift the plane up and be fine. That being said, if Homelander actually gave a shit, there were ways where at least a portion of the passengers could have been saved.

 

If you read the situation as 

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He never intended to save the people on the plane, he decided in advance that the way he uses it plays better than saving the plane and he fries the controls intentionally then it changes how you view his refusal to save anyone.

On 7/29/2019 at 7:44 AM, The Anti-Targ said:

I really enjoyed this show and am looking forward to season 2. There's going to be a season 2, right?

Anyway, I imagine English and NZ board members will have noticed, but I wonder if the rest of the world really picked up on Butcher kind of butchering his English generic regional accent by dropping in quite a lot of NZ-ish sounds. I got used to it after a few episodes, but either he needs more accent training, or he should just speak New Zealand and let most of the audience assume he's Australian.

Honestly the weird in between accent averaged out at sounding closer to Aus than NZ to me which is just weird. Its definitely an odd hodge podge, and if you isolated it to specific sounds when the NZ accent shines through you definitely can get it right but on the whole? Sounds more like me than a NZer.

 

On 7/30/2019 at 10:56 AM, Kalbear said:

 

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I don't buy for a second that Vought would let Homelander's son live a normal life in suburbia, especially when they grew him in a lab. 

 

I think the idea at that point was 

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Vought had realised how badly they'd fucked up with Homelander already at that point and the #1 priority was keeping him from finding out about the kid/keeping him under control. I guess you can argue that they'd kill Becca and go with the lab again but if they're aware of the mistakes from last time and are trying to raise his kid to be his replacement it makes sense to fix the major errors by letting the kid grow up with a loving mother.

 

On 7/31/2019 at 2:50 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

 

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Deep's gill rape scene seemed really odd to me. Why would a supe allow some mundane person to sexually abuse him in that way? He certainly doesn't lack for physical power to stop it, and the woman had no mental or psychological hold over him (like he was able to convince Starlight he had). 

 

The psychology of 

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rape is a really complex thing. The rapist doesn't have to be capable of overpowering the victim physically to have them shocked into a subordinate state where they don't feel like they can resist. At that point Deep's life has blown up, he's lost his public status (which was the only thing that was really giving him any power in social interactions), he's been sent off to a small Ohio town and his personal confidence is shattered. 

He then gets into a situation with a girl that he thinks is familiar, where he's going to have the power and be in control and able to exploit her except...she's not a victim, she's a like he used to be. So his last tether to his sense of self snaps and she's able to psychologically overpower him. Its absolutely rape and its not unrealistic. I just don't think it did what it was supposed to do in the show, if I even know what it was supposed to do.

 

On 8/1/2019 at 7:10 AM, Inigima said:

The Bechdel test makes no attempt to say that media that passes it will be good, or that not passing it necessarily makes it bad. Just that it's a very low bar and yet most media doesn't pass it, and maybe we ought to think about why that is. It's other people who are trying to turn it into more than that. 

Yup this. The bechdel test is primarily a tool for analysing the media landscape as a whole - the trends in the industry etc rather than a particular work. There can be perfectly reasonable reasons to tell a story that won't pass it, the critcism is when basically every film in a year or a decade fails the test - then you can see the equivalent stories for women aren't being told.

On 8/5/2019 at 11:19 AM, The Anti-Targ said:

The thing that concerns me about Starlight's Mum knowingly agreeing compound V her daughter is, how many other parents out there know (and agreed) to their kids being compound V'd?

....

Just do some clandestine vetting if parents and some genetic testing of newborns, make up some bullshit pretext for keeping the baby in the hospital for some tests and administer the compound V without the parents knowledge.

Perhaps that's what happened with most of them, Starlights mum signed on for a more intensive treatment course which is why she wound up as one of the really powerful ones? And testing whether the duration of administration has an impact like that is part of why they were doing tests with aware parents.

[john]

I’ve only seen three episodes so far but one thing that strikes me is the difference between comics Homelander and TV Homelander.

Comics Homelander seems like a lot more of an interesting fictional character.  He was a guy that was basically trying to psyche himself up to be a psychopath and struggling with it. In the show he’s just an overgrown child with no emotional maturity.

They also had a more nuanced approach to Vought as a company in the comic.  They were an arms developer with the superhero division just one fairly irrelevant branch.  IIRC, in the comic they were trying to get supes in the military only as a way of leveraging better contracts for actual weapons.  Because supes are genuinely useless in the comics.  In the show they’re quite useful, not just as a brand but practically, they’re actually stopping crimes.

[dooog]

Rewatched it and it enjoyed it almost as much as first time around.

There is a lot of silly stuff I could nitpick, but I guess even this superhero show isn't supposed to be scrutinized too much. To name but a few

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such as wanted fugitive Butcher simply walking into central park with a very large powerful rifle, shooting one of the Seven twice and then simply getting away without any sweat

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or the way nobody on the doomed flight calls loved ones or uploads a video of the two heroes after they've been "saved"  not to mention the laser-beam scorch marks on the highjackers and cockpit. At least with the first Homelandered flight it's implied that Deep hid or destroyed the black box and the wreck is on the ocean floor, not so with the highjacked plane.

 

[karaddin]

But

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Wasn't the flight almost halfway over the Atlantic? I guess that would make the flaw how fast the wreckage washed up which is still a bit weird yeah, but the cockpit was at the bottom of the ocean

 

[Kalbear]

My assumption is that the superheroes are at least as corrupt and at least as covered up as any police organization or military organization. I'm sure there are plenty of conspiracy sites out there that say what REALLY happened to flight 37 or whatever, but people in general know not to talk too much shit about the superheroes, and no one bothers to prosecute them. 

[john]

Talking about the plane

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What does Homelander mean “I can’t lift it there’s nothing to stand on?” How does that work? He’s propelling himself through the air somehow. How does he lift Maeve then?

 

[Leofric]

8 hours ago, john said:

Talking about the plane

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What does Homelander mean “I can’t lift it there’s nothing to stand on?” How does that work? He’s propelling himself through the air somehow. How does he lift Maeve then?

 

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Super hero physics are always subject to suspension of disbelief.   One way to rationalize it is that since Maeve weighs less than Homelander,  he can use his own body weight to push off of to hold her up, but the plane weighs so much more than him, he would need something to push off of to move it.

 

[PetyrPunkinhead]

I remember meeting Darick Robertson at a small convention in New Orleans back in 2010. I was a big fan of the comic and he mentioned they were "in talks" to turn it into a movie. Nearly a decade later we get a pretty good TV adaptation.

My biggest complaint about the adaptation is how The Boys are handled. Hughie is great. Love how they handled Wee Hughie being a 6" American as opposed to a 5"5' Scotsman. Love that Simon Pegg stayed true to his word from ages ago and played Hughie's da'. They even got him to say, "Jings!" once. Magic. Frenchie was also well cast and I like how they've handled him so far. I love Karl Urban as an actor, but I'm really just not buying him as Butcher from the comics. MM I also expected to be much bigger physically, but the actor does a decent enough job in the part. I also ain't such a fan of how the team isn't an officially sanctioned unit in the TV show. There's enough good action and story from the comics without adding the element of The Boys being on the run from the law and Homelander/Vought/The Seven. Also wish they would've kept The Female's name a secret for a bit longer like in the comic. But that's just a small nitpicky complaint.

As much as I dislike the changes for The Boys from the comic, I conversely really liked the different directions the show took Vought & The Seven form the comic. Casting is great all around and I dig the twist they put in with The Homelander and Butcher. Looking forward to seeing where they go in S2 and hopefully some more worldbuilding.

[red snow]

I just watched 'brightburn". It could almost be a prequel movie for "the boys" and is definitely worth checking for fans of a darker take on superpowers and superman.

[WarGalley]

Staying out of this thread for fear of spoilers but omfg.. I just watched the part where the Marketing guys tells the story of the Ice Capades and I'm fuuuucking dying of laughter..

[Iskaral Pust]

I really enjoyed this show.  The central premise is excellent: super powers don't guarantee or confer moral authority; if anything, power and celebrity would be corrupting influences leading to megalomania. 

But they also did a great job in telling this story through lots of current, relevant allegories like police brutality & cover-ups, sexual assault & #metoo, PED abuse, cult of celebrity & social media, real world actions are only valuable if they can be monetized via a brand maintained in media, Christian fundamentalists, private contractors in the military, pageant circuits and the future possibility of in-vitro enhancements (already speculated to be under experimentation in China).  It also addresses things like grief, vengeance, moving on, survivor guilt and manipulating all of those.

It definitely has some holes, and not just Butcher's accent.  It seems impossible that the central conspiracy could have been kept quiet for so long, even if assisted by the religious overtones.  It also seems impossible that the bad behavior by supe's could be kept secret either, especially in an era of TMZ and smart phone videos.  It's great to watch Homelander shift from boy scout to menacing in his sociopathic way, but that would definitely have been leaked eventually.

I think the next big theme to explore is the people's need to believe in super hero's (just like the need to believe in god), which will probably make them disbelieve or ignore any of the negative revelations.

[Martini Sigil]

I like Hoover from Preacher as the marketing dude... it's like he's on a little Garth Ennis streak....lol

I also don;t get that so many people think that Karl urban is not cutting it.... I think he's  terrific....

The only nit pick I have w/ the show is that they seem to have bypassed some of the other supe groups like the teenage Kix, and G Wiz and just gone right for the feud w/ the Seven... but maybe they've just re-sequenced the books for this iteration

[dooog]

29 minutes ago, Martini Sigil said:

I like Hoover from Preacher as the marketing dude... it's like he's on a little Garth Ennis streak....lol

I also don;t get that so many people think that Karl urban is not cutting it.... I think he's  terrific....

The only nit pick I have w/ the show is that they seem to have bypassed some of the other supe groups like the teenage Kix, and G Wiz and just gone right for the feud w/ the Seven... but maybe they've just re-sequenced the books for this iteration

Agreed on Urban, he's been excellent and his accent isn't half as bad as people here are making out. It's unmistakably London east end and is a bit ott at times, but I think it's supposed to be.

[Iskaral Pust]

2 hours ago, dooog said:

Agreed on Urban, he's been excellent and his accent isn't half as bad as people here are making out. It's unmistakably London east end and is a bit ott at times, but I think it's supposed to be.

You thought he sounded Cockney?!?  I thought he was meant to be NZ/Aussie all the way, until some mystifying references to Britishness popped up.  

The best I can say is that it’s a muddled non-American English hybrid with some definite Antipodean notes.  But it doesn’t really matter to the character or plot so I just didn’t worry about it. 

[Kalbear]

10 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

 It definitely has some holes, and not just Butcher's accent.  It seems impossible that the central conspiracy could have been kept quiet for so long, even if assisted by the religious overtones.  It also seems impossible that the bad behavior by supe's could be kept secret either, especially in an era of TMZ and smart phone videos.  It's great to watch Homelander shift from boy scout to menacing in his sociopathic way, but that would definitely have been leaked eventually.

See, if anything I think that the show is actually even more realistic. We've heard rumors of Weinstein for 20 years, and it took that long for SOMEONE to come forward and claim something. How long did Larry Nassar get away with molesting literally hundreds of pre-teen and teenage girls? How many people contributed to both cover ups? 

Epstein was put in prison and was allowed to continue his bullshit for 11 years after his prison, and before that he was active for another 15. 

The allegations against Bill Cosby went on for more than 30 years. The allegations against R Kelly also went on nearly that long, and he's JUST getting charged with something. 

The sad fact is that if you're popular, people will bend over backwards to give you the massive benefit of the doubt. Superheroes would be like a combination of the police, movie stars and politicians, and everyone loves them. Everyone wants to be them. So no, I don't think it's something that they keep particularly secret; I'm sure there are plenty of shakycam footages of them here and there, rumors on the darkweb and infowars and the like. Some of them are probably true. But going up against the most popular people on the planet who are backed up by the world's biggest and most lucrative corporation is not an easy thing. Rich people get to make a lot of rules just for them. Superpowered ones even more so. 

[dbunting]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

The sad fact is that if you're popular, people will bend over backwards to give you the massive benefit of the doubt. Superheroes would be like a combination of the police, movie stars and politicians, and everyone loves them. Everyone wants to be them. So no, I don't think it's something that they keep particularly secret; I'm sure there are plenty of shakycam footages of them here and there, rumors on the darkweb and infowars and the like. Some of them are probably true. But going up against the most popular people on the planet who are backed up by the world's biggest and most lucrative corporation is not an easy thing. Rich people get to make a lot of rules just for them. Superpowered ones even more so. 

Added to the popularity and corporate backing is the fact that this guy appears to be invincible and could kill thousands instantly. Kind of hard to punish him unless he agrees to it.

[red snow]

Don't forget sporting celebrities, which the show often has the heroes emulating (most obviously with A-train). It's amazing how someone can be a drug user, wife beater or rapist yet if they score a winning goal in the next game the fans forget/excuse it.

[Alarich II]

I know nothing about the comics, but I really liked the series and how it treats the themes of power and abuse, loss, grief etc. Very well done.

However, I don't get the last scene, it's so completely out of the blue. Total WTF???-moment. Can someone enlighten me?