If you have not been watching Amazon’s The Boys, you either have not been paying attention or do not enjoy the complex criticism of superheroes and celebrity society in general. Naturally, neither of these is your fault, but if you have watched the show, you understand why we find it to be so admirable.
It creates a unique – and graphic – a piece of viewing that is at least on par with the first four seasons of The Game of Thrones by putting superheroes and superpowers into a realistic context by combining their popularity with the real-life consequences of fame. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the character’s total breakdown in Homelander, which is what Superman would turn into if he had all of his abilities but none of his morality.
Anthony Starr’s wild-eyed, manic Supe is a walking time bomb who is undoubtedly the strongest “of his kind” and seemingly invincible. Homelander is a good example of the adage “absolute power corrupts totally,” nowhere more so than in these 12 utterly horrifying scenes. The Top 12 Worst Acts Homelander Commits in The Boys TV Series – Explored are as a result listed below. Oh, and there is a spoiler alert, so if you have not seen the episode, we advise you to proceed at your own risk. You have been made aware.
Crashes A Flight Full Of People
Fans of The Boys comics will take a look at the TV show and probably scoff at the fact that they’ve kinda toned Homelander’s violence, aggression, and depravity down a notch; which is really saying something, we realize. But then again, the show has made a lot of good changes to the source material and stands on its own two feet as a truly immersive and respectful adaptation of Garth Ennis’ work.
Case in point: they made sure we knew that Homelander was irredeemable from the get-go. At the end of the very first episode of The Boys, he blows up the private jet of the Mayor of Baltimore after having signed a personal autograph for the latter’s son; more on this later. So, how do you raise the stakes after such an explosive beginning to your TV show? By making sure this time, he has an audience.
Most of season 1 of The Boys sees Vought International trying to get their Supes into the military. They try every trick in the book: they put money in the right pockets, they used their platform to bang the drum about getting Supes into the army, and they blackmailed the right Senators to get their bills into Congress.
The deal was pretty sweet already by the time episode 4 rolled around, but then a disastrous case of overzealousness struck Madelyn Stillwell and she made a decision that could’ve potentially ruined any plans of getting superheroes enlisted. And what’s worse is it wasn’t exactly even her fault; it was all because of Homelander. A civilian flight carrying 123 passengers gets hijacked mid-air by 3 terrorists and Ms. Stillwell sees a golden opportunity.
She knows that if her Supes can save the hostages, then their enlistment into the armed forces would be all but confirmed. So to make sure that happens, she sends out her 2 of The Seven: Homelander and Queen Maeve. Homie is so fast that he makes it to the plane before NORAD can even scramble F-16s, and Maeve takes down two of the terrorists in short and rather badass order.
Homelander soaks in the adulation of the crowd, telling them they’re “the real heroes”, when the pair realises that there’s a third terrorist on-board; and he’s in the cockpit of all places. Queen Maeve goes in first and discovers the most delicate situation possible; the third terrorist had slit the throat of one of the pilots and was holding the other one at gunpoint.
She tries to calmly handle the situation, but Homelander arrives and before you know it, the terrorist shoots the captain out of fear and loses his torso to Homie’s laser eyes; which also happen to hit the control panel, causing the plane to go into free fall. Now, since Homelander is a literal doppelganger of classic Superman, you’d think that stopping a plane mid-air would be easy for him, right?
Well, Queen Maeve thought so too, but we forget who we’re talking about. You really think Big Homie is going to put in all that effort for the lives of a few worthless humans? Homelander feigns being a saviour as he makes his way to the back of the plane to make an exit, even telling a little that he was going to save her, she betcha.
To be fair to him, he did have reasons: 1) there was no platform for him to stand on and save the day and 2) he couldn’t just zip around 246 times like a common civil services worker now, could he? What reveals his truly horrifying nature isn’t even the fact that he threatens to laser everyone in the plane if they tried to stop him and Maeve from escaping; it’s the fact that he manages to spin this objectively massive disaster to Vought’s advantage in the end.
Homelander gives a heartfelt speech to the media that crowds around the debris of the plane crash saying that the only reason they were dead was that Supes wasn’t kept in the loop. The magnitude of his psychopathy is revealed in this moment, and by Queen Maeve’s reaction to what she had just become an accomplice to. But this is just the beginning. Somehow, Homelander always finds a way to one-up himself in his one-man game of cruelty and oppressing anyone that isn’t him, under his bright-red boots.
One Bad Day That Turned Homelander Into A Monster
So, after everything we’ve told you so far, Homelander is a certified monster, right? I mean, he thinks of human beings like insects, he kills for fun, he’s self-centred in the worst imaginable way. So, here’s the real question: why is he the way he is? Was he always like this? Or did something happen to him to make him the walking unstable nuke that he is? The answer, as you might have guessed by now, is yes; and it might just make you sympathize with him, which is crazy, but that’s just how good Eric Kripke & Co. are at their jobs.
So, Homelander is essentially a test-tube baby; or at least he believes he is, as far as show-cannon is concerned. We’ve heard that his childhood was traumatic, especially from the mouth of his creator Dr. Vogelbaum, but in episode 8 of The Boys: Diabolical, we get to see it.
And you know what, we kind of start to see how everything might not just be entirely his fault, after all. The episode begins with Homelander giving a speech at his initiation ceremony and you can see all too clearly that he is lost; he gets asked questions about his goals and his personal life and all he can recall is the torture that Vought put him through to man him “the strongest”.
But being the man that he was bound to become later in life, Big Homie shakes it off and gives his scripted speech and even goes through getting upstaged by Black Noir with comparative grace, when you look at the meltdown he had when Starlight simply promoted her charity organization.
But as The Joker once said, all it takes is one bad day. With a bit of Oedipal persuasion from Madelyn Stillwell – we’ll get to her in a bit – Homelander takes off for his first official mission with his teammate Noir and he is under strict orders from his mommy – sorry, manager – to not let the latter upstage him at any point. As such, Homelander disregards dispatch orders to wait for Noir and goes in to take care of the problem himself.
He does relatively well initially, subduing two criminals who have taken over a chemical plant without maiming them or causing permanent damage to them. He gets to the main area where a group of heavily-armed criminals are holding hostages and manages to easily disarm them whilst even offering to support their cause the right way. You can see that Homelander is genuinely trying to be a hero here.
He even denounces violence and is sincere about it, but the criminals’ incessant ranting sends him over the edge, and before you know it, he pulls a Jake Lockley and slaughters everyone in the room with brutal effect. When Black Noir shows us, he thinks that he’s done for, so he attacks his own teammate and engages him in a battle that absolutely levels the entire planet with a bang.
In the end, Noir wins Homelander’s trust by killing the only living survivor, making him realize that he was on his side. It’s likely that Noir also coached Homelander with a bit of impromptu crisis management because the speech he gives afterward manages to skyrocket his popularity.
It is here that Homie learns that with great power comes 0 responsibility; in fact, if anything, he can do whatever he wanted to, lie about it, and get away with it, all thanks to Vought who had their fingers in every imaginable pie at the time. This incident is what shaped Homelander into one of the most-reviling living beings in The Boys universe, and they would only get worse as time passed by.
Kills Supersonic
This one is fairly simple; and that is what makes it so terrifying. On the surface, killing people isn’t something that Homelander has showed an aversion to. But Supersonic was more than just a killing; he was also a message. You see, I believe that the true superhero of The Boys TV show is Starlight. From the beginning of the show, she has taken incredible risks and put herself in frankly unnecessary danger to “do the right thing”.
For 2 whole seasons, she fought against Vought International, The Seven and Homelander from the inside, and even after she was made, she managed to somehow stay afloat, even rising to becoming co-captain of The Seven alongside Homelander. But the further she climbed up the ladder, the lower she hung herself into the belly of the beast; and nowhere is this more evident than in the brutal treatment that Homelander dishes out to the newest member of the Seven. Supersonic grew up with Annie, was a member of her childhood super-team, and was also her first serious boyfriend.
He was someone she thought she could trust, so she told him about her plan to “deal with the Homelander problem”. I’m sure she never thought he’d be dumb enough to go recruiting for this plan without her, but he did so anyway, and his target was the worst possible person as well. Supersonic saw how Homelander treated A-Train and thought he could get the fledgling speedster onto his side after hearing everything that he had from Annie. But he didn’t know how to play the Vought corporate game like Annie did.
If he had, he’d have known that A-Train only cares about himself and his own position in The Seven. He ended up selling out Supersonic to Homelander, who turned him into literal wallpaper for his treason. And as if to prove just how far down the hole his sanity had gone already, he brought Starlight to the scene of the murder and forced her to be in a relationship with him, despite having told her that their “love” was just for the cameras.
He told her that Hughie – Starlight’s actual love interest from the show – would end up just like her ex if she didn’t play by his rules, and all she could do was cry and accept because Homelander is the strongest; and if you don’t have the power to stand up to him or the resolve to die an unsightly death, better to keep the show going than to halt production and haul ass.
Rampage In Syrian Terrorist Camp
If you create a problem yourself and then go in to solve the problem you created in the first place, then are you a hero or part of the problem yourself? If you guys thought the latter, then that’s a good thing, because that’s exactly what Homelander is. In fact, he is something worse. He’s not part of the problem, he is the problem. Vought created him to become a living weapon but never once thought to instil the discipline or morality that he would need to wield the same.
To them, it was all a corporate decision; Homelander’s loyalties lay first with Vought, then with his country as far as they were concerned. Little did they realise that slowly, but surely, Homelander’s loyalties were shifting from his printed talking points to his belief in his own strength, and that sooner rather than later, he was going to do something that would be great for them in the moment but would burn them down in the long run.
Exhibit D of Homelander Does Whatever The Eff He Wants to Do is the fact that he had A-Train distribute Compound V to terrorist organizations all across the globe, creating super terrorists like Naqib, who meets a rather grisly end thanks to Black Noir. Homelander thinks he has helped out Madelyn and made her proud, when in reality, he’d just created the biggest problem for Vought International since that Soldier Boy incident.
But, at the end of the day, thanks to what he did, Supes were allowed into the military, and Homelander personally got to work on damage control for Vought. In the beginning of Season 1 Episode 8, he shows up unannounced at a terrorist compound in Syria just as US armed forces were closing in. Homelander charms them with his usual grin and tells them to “go have a smoke or something” because he’s “got this”.
5 minutes later, all that was left of that compound was burning rubble and bodies blown apart. In what was one of the best-executed and most-terrifying action sequences in The Boys, Homelander lights up an entire terrorist cell with nothing but his eyes, even killing the people that were being used as forced labour in the process.
Why, you ask? Well, this particular terrorist cell was one of the many that Big Homie gave Compound V to, and he had to clean up his mistakes no matter the cost. After all, this is the same guy who let 123 civilians die because it’d destroy his reputation if he couldn’t save them. Bisecting terrorists was probably cathartic for him, and the fact that I have just said that out loud should tell you how self-serving and absolutely nuts Homelander is as a character.
Kills Madelyn Stillwell
So far, we’ve seen Homelander crash a plane, blow up two places with indiscriminate violence, and kill one of his fellow Supes in rather gory fashion. But if you are a part of the general populace, you wouldn’t find out about any of this. Part of it is Homelander’s exceptional ability to sell himself as a saviour figure, yes, but mostly, The Seven owe their reputation to Madelyn Stillwell. The Vought Executive is responsible for keeping their public personas squeaky clean, whilst also ensuring any collateral damage that takes place in the wake of their heroic actions do not get broken to the public at large.
We’ve mentioned her once already, and if you’ve been paying attention, you’d notice that Madelyn is not the kind of person who’d be content with staying where she is. She does the things she does to get the reins of Vought International one day, and shockingly enough, her ticket to the top is also their greatest creation since Compound V. From the time he became a member of The Seven, Homelander has had a very unsettling sexual relationship with Madelyn Stillwell.
Fans of the show will know exactly why we called it Oedipal earlier, but the fact of the matter is, that Stillwell is the only motherly figure Homelander has known in his entire life. He was birthed and brought up in a lab, constantly being put through conditions that would’ve killed an ordinary person. One of the biggest motifs of Homelander’s character is that he never had a mother’s love or a father’s guidance, two things that were instrumental in ensuring Superman stayed a grounded superhero and didn’t turn into a psychotic megalomaniac.
Well, we suppose too late is too little, and no amount of kinky mommy sex can make up for the lifetime of lies that Vought fed to Homelander. In what was the first, proper mind-blowing plot twist, Homelander kills the very woman who had “raised him” by shooting laser beams straight into her face.
The practical effects work that showed just how unrelenting and gruesome Homie’s killing of Stillwell was, was flawless in that it made me want to jump out of my skin and into someone else’s. Stillwell lied, manipulated and kept Homelander on a leash like he was her pet dog. Even the way she’d seduce him would be akin to this owner-pet analogy; just watch a compilation of their scenes together and you’ll see what we mean.
What makes this so horrific is the ecstatic manner in which Homelander carries out her execution. He thanks Madelyn for finally being honest with him and even kisses her as if he’s going to let her go; before proceeding to kill her with 0 remorse right in front of her son and Billy Butcher.
Teddy Stillwell is the only other witness to this murder, but we don’t think he’s making it out of Red River anytime soon; and even if he does, it’s not going to be safe for him. After all, Homelander has already shown us how he deals with loose ends. And if Teddy recalls any of this by any chance, he’s going to have to contend with a serious problem in his not-too-distant future.
Has An Imaginary Meltdown And Kills Everyone At The Protest
Well, that is if Homelander even lets things get that far because given his current mental state, he could start mass-murdering human beings at the drop of a hat; he’s just choosing not to. Case in point, this horrific visual that perhaps serves as both a reflection of Homelander’s decline into pure insanity and as a premonition for what would happen if he was “pushed too far”.
After getting Supes the permission to team up with the army on high-priority missions no less, Homelander and his Seven get to work. Unfortunately, given the fact that they were operating in the shadows so long doesn’t help them out because on active duty, everything you do is scrutinized; and Big Homie finds this out in the worst way possible. We’ll talk about what he did a bit later, but suffice it to say that under the Geneva and Hague Conventions, Homelander’s acts basically amounted to a war crime, something Congresswoman Victoria Neuman took upon herself to protest.
She held a massive rally at Vought Square in an attempt to turn public opinion against Supes and Vought in general but got an unexpected guest speaker in the form of Homelander himself. The Earth’s Mightiest Hero tries to explain what he did he did for the people, but they reject his actions hard; one army guy in the crowd even flips him off while a chant of “You don’t speak for us” picks up.
This completely disorients Homelander and sends him into a daze, and as if to reflect just how on-edge he could get if pushed enough, his eyes light up. The superhero who had come here to take accountability for his actions and perhaps quell public towards him at the same time was now frying everyone in sight, starting with that military guy who gave him the bird. Homelander ends up cutting through at least half the crowd – hundreds of innocent civilians – before he snaps out of it and realises just how close he came to letting himself go.
Turns out, he didn’t actually laser through people’s guts; he was only imagining it. But as we said before, this scene is a reflection of Homelander’s declining grip on reality and is increasingly gaining in relevancy as he continues to spiral out of control. Soon enough, he will have no one to hold him back from doing whatever the eff he wants to do; that’s why we called this atrocity a premonition as well.
Because if Homelander loses all concept of control and just goes berserk, then this is what awaits the entire world. He will burn everything on-sight, literally, just to satisfy his own ego and drown out the voices of the haters. He hasn’t done anything of this scale so far, but given the fact that Anthony Starr has to get horrifically blood-soaked at least once every season, who knows how far we are from getting something similar? What we do know, is that it’s coming; and when it does, we don’t know who will be powerful enough to save us all.
Cripples Blindspot
If there is one thing we can give Homelander credit for, is the fact that he has something resembling standards in his modus operandi. Despite his Machiavellian cruelty, Homelander does think of the team as his “family”, and only wants the best to be on it. That logic extends to any other Supe Vought might want to get into the team, and Homelander really doesn’t care how great things might be for capturing demographics and increasing stock prices.
At the end of the day, he values power over everything else, and that is why despite his gifts, Blindspot was never going to be taken seriously by him. But the way he treats him is what shows us just how rotten to the core he truly is. Ashley brings him in to watch the rookie train. Mind you, Blindspot isn’t even officially in The Seven yet; he’s just training. Now, as his name suggests, Blindspot is blind.
But while he cannot see, he possesses superhuman hearing, which effectively makes him the Daredevil of The Boys universe. And judging by his skills on the training course, he’s also on par with him in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat.
Homelander is impressed by Blindspot’s flashy moves at first, and even beckons the new recruit to come closer so he could give him some advice; before he uses his superhuman strength to slam his palms into Blindspot’s ears, instantly bursting through his eardrums and leaving him in a heap of blood and pain before firing off on Ashley for even suggesting that a cripple could join The Seven.
The irony is that Homelander contributed to Blindspot’s handicap status even further by effectively making him deaf as well; because we’re not sure that he will ever recover his hearing after a blow like that. And if he does, we’re sure Homelander would make it so it doesn’t happen again.
The only “new” member that The Seven end up getting in the 3 seasons that The Boys has been running for is Supersonic; and we’ve already told you what happened to him. Since Translucent’s death, no one has been able to infiltrate The Seven, and that’s because that is exactly how Homelander wants it to be. Perhaps if Blindspot had had a different, “more useful” set of powers, he wouldn’t have had to become the latest person to realize that you should never meet your heroes; but that’s not gonna do any good to him now, is it?
Takes Down The Flight Of Mayor Of Baltimore
Coming back to something we mentioned at the start of this video, The Boys does a great job of conveying the subtlety of its characters’ nefarious intentions. For example, at no point do we see Homelander in the same room with Stillwell and the Mayor of Baltimore. And yet, he is able to figure out exactly what is happening anyway, thanks to his super-hearing. And what was happening, was basically Vought getting shaken down by a public figure for their actual most-valuable asset: Compound V.
In the first episode of The Boys, we hear Compound V getting mentioned by none of the characters who are aware of its existence. Instead, it comes from the aforementioned Mayor of Baltimore, who is at Vought Tower for a meeting with Madelyn Stillwell concerning the price of acquiring the services of Nubian Prince; who is voiced by the hilarious Don Cheadle in the Amazon exclusive prequel series The Boys: Diabolical.
In accordance with Vought’s newest goal of stationing a Supe in every major city in America, Stillwell offers the Mayor a $300 million per year contract for Nubian’s services, but the latter negotiates her down to 230, thanks to his awareness of Compound V’s existence. Stillwell is clearly taken aback by this, so much so that she chooses to negotiate instead of copping to the accusation; but if you know anything about her relationship with Homelander, you’d know that he doesn’t take people who threaten his loved ones lightly.
In fact, it’s the total opposite; it’s as if he acts on a self-preservative instinct because without clearing it with anyone at Vought, not even Madelyn, Homelander simply flies up to the Mayor’s private jet and cuts it in half with his laser eyes, watching coolly as the flight and all its occupants plummeted towards the ocean. And just to put the crap cherry on top of this unnecessarily bloody cake, he doesn’t even see it as a hasty or a bad decision.
When Stillwell confronts Homelander about what he has done, the latter simply claims he acted up when he heard the Mayor threatening Stillwell. He fails to comprehend how his actions might just have gotten Vought under the eye of law enforcement because in his mind, his power allows him to do absolutely anything he wishes to do.
Sure, his actions were motivated by the intent to protect Vought’s interests and thereby his own, but he puts as much thought into them as a 10-year-old at a buffet; which is to say none. This was the first glimpse of the ruthlessness that Homelander was capable of when he felt like he was being backed into a corner; and we’re honestly surprised more people haven’t met such an end at his hands already on-screen.
Threatens To Kill Starlight
They say you never forget your first, and we’re sure we’re using it in the wrong context here, but given the fact that Homelander has threatened to kill Starlight at least 3 times now, it only seemed appropriate to circle back to the first. And boy, was it a scene that delivered as advertised. Anthony Starr truly deserves an Emmy for his portrayal of Homelander because he is re-defining what it means to be a superhero/supervillain through his sheer acting prowess.
The man has managed to convey debilitating psychosis with facial twitches, blowing his eyes wide open and the fact that he’s basically turning into the comic book version of Black Noir on-screen, especially when you see his jump-scary grin. At the end of season 1, The Seven discover that Billy Butcher’s Boys are the ones who are after them. They killed Translucent, and had seemingly targeted every other member of the team, when in reality Homelander knew he was Butcher’s “real target”.
What he didn’t know was that Hughie, who was dating Starlight, was also on his team; and once he found out, everything started going downhill for the only real superhero in The Boys. Homelander commanded Starlight to take care of Hughie to protect The Seven – something we’ll get to in a bit – but she refused to do it.
Not explicitly, of course; she just didn’t follow through on what Homelander asked her to do; only she hesitated while answering him and that was enough to set him off. He gets her alone in an elevator and takes his gloves off before hitting the stop button and pressing Starlight against the elevator by her throat. Homelander places his free hand right at her abdomen in a piercing position, and Starlight becomes keenly aware of just how much jeopardy her life was in.
He questions her as to why was Hughie still alive – more on that later – and throws her relationship with him in her face, but she manages to talk her way out of it by using her real feelings and her understanding of his powers to her advantage. Starlight screams at Homelander that Hughie had simply used her for her status and that she was the one who got taken advantage of.
She tells him that she and Hughie are not together anymore, but just because Homelander has a problem with him, doesn’t mean she’s going to turn into a murderer. She then taunts him by asking him if she’s lying, knowing all too well that what she had just said was the real truth about how she felt about everything. And Homelander has to leave her alive and exit the elevator frustrated by her naivety, telling her on his way out that she wasn’t lying.
The whole thing lasts all of 3 and a half minutes, barely, but it shows you just how willing to go off the rails Homelander is. The fact that he took his gloves off meant that he intended to kill her then and there; it’s a universal symbol for “no half-measures”, after all. If Starlight hadn’t managed to use her brains to tell him off, she’d have found herself missing an abdomen, a spot on The Seven, and most importantly, her own life.
Lasers Stormfront Where Nobody Ever Wants To Be Lasered
The entire Homelander-Stormfront – or Homefront, for short – was a ticking atomic bomb from the beginning. Stormfront is secretly a Nazi who has taken her views on Aryan eugenics and adapted it to the 21st century. Homelander has blonde hair and “really effing blue” eyes – Stormfront’s words, not ours – which makes him pretty much the “model Aryan”. So it was only a matter of time before this lethal seductress worked her magic on The Boys’ weakest character, but even then, Homelander managed to prove that he was more depraved than we could’ve ever given him credit for.
After getting help from Stormfront in cleaning up his image due to that war-crime-level act he committed – more on that in our next entry – Homelander ends up in her room in Vought Tower, where the pair engages in what can only be categorized as consensual hate-sex.
That, or extreme sadomasochism, given the fact that they started whooping each other’s asses while going at it, which sounds like a category that is exclusive only to the super-abled. But while they were engaging in this property-destructive kink-play, Homelander’s insecurities started acting up. Stormfront hurled Homie across her room like he was a toy, and he doesn’t take such demeaning affronts lightly.
Homelander’s eyes light up with his heat vision and we see, clear as day on his face, his killing intent laid bare. Even Homelander is shocked by this, because here he was, having the time of his life with someone who wouldn’t break under his might. To his hedonic surprise, however, Stormfront taunts him into lasering her right in her cleavage by yelling at him to “do it”. Homelander confirms if she wants this by telling her he could cut her in half, but she tells him she’s “not that easily broken”.
He tests it out first, giving her a quick zap, but after he realises that she can handle it, goes to work on her with sheer glee. The couple proceeds to have perhaps the most disturbing sex scene committed to film, and we’ve seen our fair share of Serbian Films, thank you. The visual of Stormfront’s charred skin is simply inhumane, and the fact that she actually enjoyed it is crazier still.
But the craziest thing is Homelander glossed over this obvious red flag as if it had blue, white and 50 stars emblazoned across it. He actually fell, head over heels, for someone who went on to admit that she was a Nazi, just because she stroked his ego and made him feel better. Even after Stormfront is left with one good eye-and-arm, all Homelander can care about is that in a world filled with sheep, she was his equal; in strength, we mean, not race.
As far as Big Homie is concerned, he is the master race, and everyone else is pretty much open season for him, including white people. His relationship with Stormfront is the epitome of a toxic relationship, and the fact that he lasered her where he did is a testament of their collective and individual insanity. But why did he even get on her radar like that? What did he do that he needed to go to her for help, in the first place? Remember that war crime we were talking about? Yeah? Well, just keep watching, then.
Accidentally Kills Innocent Boy Trying To Kill Supe-Terrorist
Okay, so we’re going to connect the dots for 2 entries and give you an overall idea as to how blissfully ignorant Homelander is of his own atrocities; and how they always come back to bite him in the ass, regardless of what he tries. You remember the entry where we spoke about Homie imagining killing everyone at a public rally organized by Victoria Neuman? Well, that protest started after Homie and Queen Maeve met their new teammate – Stormfront, whom we’ve spoken of already – on the set of The Dawn of The Seven. #ReleaseTheBourkeCut Ashley ran up to Big Homie and told him they had a problem.
She shows him a clip of his take-down of a Super-terrorist – or super villain, as he likes to call them – and makes him realise how callous he had been lately. Turns out, Homelander being Homelander, took the easiest way out and simply lasered through the Supe-terrorist instead of bringing him forward for any kind of formal proceedings.
But his lasers penetrated that terrorist’s body and burnt an innocent boy who was standing right behind him, something that he didn’t even notice at the time because he just came in, killed the dude, and left. Homelander failed to see how this was a problem for him, until Ashley brought up the fact that his popularity points were down and that the media was labelling his actions a war crime.
This is the catalyst for Homelander’s inevitable descent into madness. Homie is essentially a man-child with some majorly twisted mommy issues. He doesn’t know the first thing about proper procedure, and can’t tell good from right because he has been taught neither. All he has been taught is the fact that he is the strongest, and that has led him to the conclusion that he can do whatever the eff he wants.
He takes this public backlash as a sign of them rejecting him, and lashes out at Ashley by saying that everything he does is for them, which cannot be more of a tragic oxymoron even if he tried to make it one. Homelander cares only about himself, but his self-esteem is directly-proportionate to the adoration of the masses. So when he commits this war crime, he fails to understand why people are behaving the way they are, and this opens him up to radicalization.
Stormfront preys on his emotional vulnerabilities and nearly turns him into the face of the neo-Nazi movement until she’s exposed. And the scariest part is, we think he would’ve gone along with it as long as he felt like he was on top of things; and her as well, we might add. Much like Starlight, Homelander can’t put a price on the lives of innocents; but unlike her, he just considers them to be sacks of meat and bone, and doesn’t even think twice about having killed a child until it directly affects his fame. That is all you need to know about the kind of man that he is.
Asks Starlight To Kill Hughie
We know that diabolical is Billy Butcher’s catchphrase, but there is no other way to categorize what Homelander asked Starlight to do to Hughie; live and in the flesh, no less. We’ve already mentioned that Homelander threatened Starlight in a rather unsettling fashion because she refused to take care of Hughie. Well, now you know he wasn’t asking her to buy him chicken soup and tuck him in bed at night.
In season 2 episode 3, we find out that Vought International has finally decided to allow The Seven to take on The Boys head-first. Butcher and Co. have managed to nab 2 Supes – including The Female – who can expose Homelander’s elaborate conspiracy in a millisecond if they got into the hands of the FBI or the CIA.
So, the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes set out to “do their jobs”; meaning to capture or kill The Boys, preferably the latter, given what we know of them. Keep in mind, Starlight at this point is still feigning allegiance to The Seven, so she has to do whatever it takes to keep them unaware of what she’s up to.
A-Train knows, but he’s got bigger problems on his plate at that moment; namely, his heart. And we mean that literally. The Boys enter a drainage system and split up to make sure their mission is successful even if they all don’t make it to the other side safely. Sadly for Hughie, he gets noticed in all the commotion and Starlight is forced to take action because guess what; Homelander has decided to personally oversee her during this mission.
And you best believe he brought only the craziest of his smiles for this particular job. Starlight knocks Hughie flat on his butt with her powers and corners him when Homelander shows up behind her shoulder and mocks him by saying, “Hands in the air just don’t care!” His face instantly turns to stone as soon as he asks Starlight to kill him, though, and you can see that he is testing her loyalty in that moment.
Homelander knows that Starlight and Hughie are more than “just friends” and he fully suspects that she is in on it with The Boys but he decides to play the game Vought has taught him to play and gives her the chance to prove her loyalty. Starlight visibly hesitates to do it even though she is legitimately pissed at Hughie herself, and this is what leads to the confrontation we spoke of a few minutes earlier.
What makes this scene even more terrifying is the fact that you can see on Homelander’s face that he was ready to kill them both in an instant if Starlight didn’t do what he was asking her to do; if Billy hadn’t distracted him from the pair, who knows where the story might have gone? And that, Marvelous viewers, is the stuff of our nightmares.
Marvelous Verdict
Homelander is the worst Supe in existence without a shadow of doubt as far as the TV show is concerned, and we have just given you 12 instances that prove that fact. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, which is honestly surprisingly restrained for a Supe. But what he lacks in vices, he more than makes up for with violence. And, well, it appears he isn’t above pleasures of the flesh, either; though his type is certainly one that would make any normal person throw up in disgust.
He is somehow the embodiment of an oxymoron, because Homelander is by far the strongest being on planet Earth. If anything, these 12 entries are proof of that. He has access to god-like powers and can do things people literally dream of. But at the same time, his personality is so weak that all he can think about is himself, and even then, his self-image is such a distorted one that he is never happy for long enough for it to matter. Homelander is the personification of a man stewing in his own craziness way past boiling point; and these 12 instances were just a horrific taste of what is to come in future seasons.