The Boys

Amazon has premiered the first three episodes of The Boys season 3 today, and it plans to launch the rest of them weekly to extend the conversation about ...

You’ll see. You’ll see. Amazon Prime Video has had fewer hits than its high profile competitors, but they’ve landed a few knockout punches.

What does peacetime look like for The Boys? A recap of 'Payback,' episode 1 of the third season of 'The Boys' on Amazon Prime Video.

But perhaps the peacetime that both Vought and Neuman are so keen to maintain isn’t peacetime at all; it’s just stasis. For all his high-and-mightiness about the work he and Neuman have been doing — and, to be fair, they have contributed to a steep drop in “suit collateral” — the rich and famous still rarely face any repercussions. Of course, Butcher refuses to pass along Becca’s son Ryan’s location to Homelander; he’s bonded a lot with the kid over the year of Ryan’s isolated stay with Boys founder Grace Mallory. For all Butcher’s fears of becoming his father, he’s becoming a surprisingly good one himself. The two men agree to commit to their own favored brand of warfare: scorched earth, with only one left standing at the end. Neuman is complicit in sweeping the first death of the episode under the rug. “Think about what that would mean to millions of girls,” she tells Hughie, momentarily forgetting the real end goal here. It’s nice to see the big secret about Hughie’s new boss come out so early on, instead of after a few episodes of wheel-spinning. Creative violence is this show’s bread and butter, especially as it intersects with sex, so you can imagine the writer’s room laughing their asses off coming up with each beat of this scene. There’s no point in putting it off, so let’s dive in (no pun intended): at his boyfriend’s request, Termite shrinks down and squeezes through his urethra, stroking the inner walls of his dick as he meanders toward the prostate. Only two people die in the episode (a low body count in this show), and neither character was featured before this episode, anyway. It’s clear from the beginning of the episode that this ceasefire is temporary (if it even exists at all). In fact, much of “Payback” feels like the calm before the storm. What has happened in the last twelve months, and can an uneasy truce be sustained based on the threat of mutually assured destruction alone?

The Boys is back for eight more blood-soaked episodes in Season 3. Billy Butcher, Homelander, Hughie, and more are back for more fun.

The Boys Season 3, like Seasons 1 and 2, will be eight episodes in total. The cursing. It's the violence. Season 3 picks up right where Season 2 left off; Billy Butcher ( Karl Urban) and Hughie Campbell ( Jack Quaid) have both gone legit in their fight against the Supes, with Butcher's crew working under the CIA umbrella and Hughie working as the right hand to Victoria Neumann (Claudia Doumit)—who may or may not be the mysterious figure who can make people's heads explode whenever the hell she feels like it. It's been a while since the last blood-soaked, gut-filled season of Amazon Prime Video's superhero send-up The Boys, but man are we glad to have it back. Not good at all!

The Boys season 3 cast: who stars in the Amazon Prime superhero epic with Anthony Starr and Jensen Ackles? Your guide to the cast of The Boys season 3, where ...

You might want to check out this little show Ackles starred in called Supernatural… Timeless, though a very different style and sensibility to The Boys, is a lot of fun – worth checking out for Goran Višnjić and Paterson Joseph in particular. Neuman is a senator opposing superheroes in her public identity, but privately she has powers herself – and uses them to assassinate anyone who speaks out against superheroes. Moriarty received particular acclaim for her supporting role in Captain Fantastic (not, as it sounds like, another superhero film, but a movie about a family forced to reintegrate into society after years of isolation). In private, he’s an egotistical sadist. Jack Quaid voices Ensign Brad Boimler in Star Trek: Lower Decks. He’s really funny in it!

The Boys Season 3 premiere sets up the potential for an all-new, all-terrifying version of Homelander. Here's what it means for The Boys, Starlight, ...

What he might do next is a chilling thing to ponder, but, as in the real world, the scariest part is asking ourselves how the “good guys” will redirect a monster that has grown much, much bigger than any one person. Other options may include the many other unstable supes that exist in a secret government bunker, but perhaps most likely is the chance of a partnership with Soldier Boy, “the first superhero.” Referred to as “Homelander before there was Homelander,” it should be clear that his politics are dicey and he’s not exactly a team player, but his well-earned hostility toward Vought could entail him allying with The Boys. At this rate, it looks like they’re going to need all the help they can get. This is disturbingly reminiscent of his interactions with Queen Maeve in the first two seasons, and as with Maeve, he’s keeping Starlight off-balance in order to keep the upper hand. Homelander’s increasingly public revelations of his rotten core have only led to a surge in his ratings, putting the rest of The Seven and The Boys in similar positions attempting to navigate his ever-escalating bad behavior. Having already gone above and beyond to make an enemy of Queen Maeve, he’s moved on to attempting to break Starlight while continuing to bully the others. Nowhere is that more true than Homelander, whose anger at being “subdued” has encouraged bolder acts that go beyond cruelty and into outright fascism.

New and crazy adventures await William Butcher (Karl Urban) and his team in their attempt to eliminate Vought's Supes. Plus, Billy seems more relentless than ...

Let us know in the comments section below. The task to portray the first live-action adaptation of Soldier Boy has been entrusted to Jensen Ackles. 44-year-old Ackles is coming off a fifteen-year run as Dean Winchester, the demon hunter in The CW’s Supernatural. His credits also include voicing Bruce Wayne in the Batman: The Long Halloween animation movies. In the comics, Soldier Boy was introduced in 2009’s Herogasm miniseries created by Garth Ennis, John McCrea, and Keith Burns. Soldier Boy’s role and powers mock pretty much the ones of Marvel’s Steve Rogers, including his shield as a melee weapon.

As Amazon Prime Video's diabolical superhero show returns with Karl Urban, we look at newcomers including Jensen Ackles and Laurie Holden.

As well as the distinction of having played the titular character in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Flaney has been in The Dead Zone, Dexter and The Bay, for which he won a Daytime Emmy Award. A character in the comics, he is a firearms enthusiast and is able to manipulate projectiles and conjure weapons from thin air. Also on Dexter, Winter played Katrina Crane on Sleepy Hollow and appeared in The Catch and Agent Hamilton. He is based on the original comics’ character of Drummer Boy. She is a member of the Payback superhero team. Supernatural star Jensen is Soldier Boy, the first-ever superhero, and a parody-style figure of Captain America.

The Seven are some of the most powerful "supes" on The Boys. But who's the most powerful of them all? We rank them here.

As the wife of Frederick Vought, she became the first known superhero, and she is by far one of the most powerful. Just a few of the powers we see from Noir, but his main ability is his high martial arts prowess. The only other supe we see with this ability is Homelander, and he is clearly impressed by this as he falls for her. The ability to turn completely invisible is his trademark power, but it's arguably his carbon skin that makes him so formidable. One of the few on this list that is a consistent member of The Seven, Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) is a great all-rounder. He is able to send a girl in the tunnel flying through the wall, and is also to send Starlight flying through the air, which is very impressive considering she's pretty strong herself. After spending years as a local hero, she is attracted by the glamour of The Seven, but quickly discovers the dark reality of being a member. Noir is definitely one of the most feared in the group and is highly reliable, but he has one unfortunate weakness that lets him down: Tree nuts. Her alliance to The Boys massively helps them in their pursuit of taking down The Seven, providing them with intelligence and working from the inside to bring them down. One of the earlier members of The Seven, Lamplighter (Shawn Ashmore) was replaced by Starlight, with not much being known about him in the first season. One of the first heroes we meet, The Deep (Chace Crawford) finds himself sinking toward the bottom of the rankings. Kicking things off, we have Shockwave (Mishka Thébaud). Although he never really made it to The Seven, he was all set to join as the replacement to A-Train after the latter's forced retirement.

Mad Max: Fury Road actress Charlize Theron makes a cameo appearance in the first episode of the season, playing Aya Cash's Stormfront in a film they're making ...

"I just saw the Doctor Strange thing," he added. I think she was under the assumption it was going to be like, 'Oh, you need me to come in for two hours, and do a thing.'" It turns out, Theron had no idea just how big the cameo was going to be.

Prime Video's action-packed satire asks, "What do the good guys do when the bad guys just keep winning?"

What makes The Boys’ approach to this familiar territory stick—like a speedboat plunging straight into the innards of Lucy the Whale stick—is its unrelenting winks to the world in which we actually live. But generally speaking, The Boys remains one of the more in-touch satires in streaming, putting a fine point on a metaphoric dagger too many other shows wield like a blunt butter knife. So to get what they want, The Boys have to decide what parts of themselves they’re willing to lose. (If there’s an argument to be made for a The Boys movie, then it’s seeing those cruel, icy orbs on the big screen.) So, in a painful action-packed dramedy of errors that never lets up, The Boys season three takes aim at a daunting question: What do the good guys do when the bad guys just keep winning? Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), Frenchie (Tomer Kapon), and even Butcher (Karl Urban) try to do the same.

Showrunner Eric Kripke explains how that explosive scene from the Season 3 premiere has a surprising practical effect.

That tunnel inside is really the urethra inside that giant penis. What was supposed to be an act of pleasure turns into a bloody mess. The Boys has never been shy about its gratuitous violence or sexual exploits ever since it first premiered on Prime Video back in 2019.

The first three episodes of The Boys: Season 3 introduce a new super-drug called V24. Let's explore what makes this drug so different from Compound V, ...

Fans of the comic will know that Billy is anything but the hero of this story, and is instead a prime example of how a person can become every bit as twisted and evil as the monsters they hunt. All of this suggests Billy is careening down a self-destructive path that puts him more in line with the comic book incarnation of the character. The introduction of V24 could very easily lead to a scenario where the number of superhumans in this world balloons almost overnight. We still don't know what exactly V24 is doing to Billy's body chemistry, but it's enough to wonder if this disgusting moment of bonding will lead to Hughie gaining powers of his own. In the TV series, only Kimiko has thus far been given a permanent power boost courtesy of Compound V. One injection granted him super-strength and heat vision, more than enough to make quick work of Gunpowder. We don't know if V24 bestows the same powers to every person or if the effects are completely random (as is the case with Compound V). However, Billy's heat vision could be a clue V24 is derived from Homelander's DNA. In more ways than one, the series seems to be putting Billy and his team on a path that more closely mirrors the original comic book series. By the time those children have endured a decade or more of being prodded in a lab and molded into walking, talking brands by the most powerful corporation on the planet, they've almost surely grown up to become self-absorbed sociopaths. And whereas the comics revealed Vought has a secret failsafe against Homelander in the form of Black Noir, Season 3's Iran-Contra flashback has finally confirmed this isn't the case in the TV series. Compound V has transformed him into a godlike being who can decimate entire cities in the blink of an eye. The first three episodes reveal that Vought America has developed a new experimental drug called V24 that can give anyone superpowers for 24 hours. If you haven't already, be sure to check out IGN's review of the three-episode season premiere.

Amazon's adaptation of The Boys remains just as violent and over-the-top in season 3. New this season is Soldier Boy (played by Supernatural's Jensen ...

This straightforward throughline makes the season’s highs hit harder and its lows easier to ride out — particularly when The Boys is riffing on current events that, in our incredibly rapid news cycle, will feel stale by the time it airs. But in 2022, our disasters are more diffuse, and our leaders less prone to forcing the same arguments ad infinitum. After all, the series, which kicks off its third season with three episodes this Friday, isn’t best read as a takedown of superheroes — or as a violent satire on current events, even as the show lambasts celebrity culture, right-wing media, and yes, the Trump presidency.

The Boys season 3 begins with the long-awaited blockbuster hit of the summer. Release the Bourke Cut!

“Dawn of the 7 is a very sneaky way to reset all of the story actually,” Kripke says. It kind of gives you the opportunity to kind of do bad acting. In the real world events of The Boys season 2, Homelander was unbothered by Stormfront’s ideology and had every intention of living out his days with the powerful woman who properly appreciated his god-like status. The fictional film was apparently part of a Snyder Cut-like movement to “release the Bourke Cut,” a gag that Zack Snyder himself appears to have appreciated. Dawn of the 7 is an Avengers or Justice League-style superhero teamup film starring the superpowered members of Vought’s premier team. The Boys season 3 opens in a place where the show hasn’t dared tread before: the cinema.

“The very first 15 minutes of episode 1 is by far the craziest thing we've ever done…like, by a mile.” Naturally, when we had a chance to speak with Kripke ...

Of course, The Boys had already pulled off one instance of sudden rectal violence when they dispatched Translucent with an ass grenade in season 1. Ah, the magic of artistic creation! The case presented in the opening moments of season 3 episode 1 “Payback” is by far the most extreme and gruesome example yet. “It starts with ‘well we haven’t done Ant-Man yet’ and then someone says “you know that meme of Ant-Man climbing up Thanos’s butt? It’s a bold, grotesque opener to a season that no one could possibly have predicted. Unfortunately for that human penis, Termite sneezes, accidentally enlarging himself and exploding the penis owner’s body to smithereens.

This article contains spoilers for The Boys season 3. As we're fond of pointing out around here, no other show on television understands superhero culture ...

Mother’s Milk alleges and Grace confirms that the CIA sold all of that excess cocaine into minority neighborhoods in the U.S. to disrupt and destabilize them. - Operation Charly, or the reason Grace was in Nicaragua in the first place, is basically completely real. - Mother’s Milk calls out Grace for another unsavory part of her role in Nicaragua – the purchase of the Contra’s plentiful cocaine. Here are all the references to the “real world” that we spotted in The Boys season 3. Does this mean thatCharlize Theron is also a part of the MCU in The Boys‘ universe? There are still many references to the church and its veiled comparisons to Scientology though. Finally! Confirmation that Amazon exists in the Boys‘ universe. Good to know that Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner exists in The Boys. Is the existence of Amazon canon in The Boys universe? - Fictional director Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne) had to reshoot the whole film after Stormfront’s true nature came to light. This season finds Homelander making good on Antony Starr’s promise to become a “homicidal maniac” and in the process the world that Vought created begins to resemble our own more closely than ever before. The Boys season 3 opens up with one hell of a homage.

Roxana Hadadi is a TV critic who also writes about film and pop culture, with the closed captions on and motion smoothing off. Photo: Amazon Prime. Dicks ...

The fight scenes continue to be well-blocked and well-staged, in particular a few in the season’s back half that are less about splashy choreography and more about brawny brutalism between their participants. Whatever can happen will happen, and whatever can go wrong will go wrong — but not wrong enough to leave a lasting impact in the world of The Boys. Sadism is still there: brain matter splooging out of a skull, the sticky smear of a body dragged along pavement, a supe punching through another person’s abdomen (a scene that happens twice with two different sets of characters). Fatherhood as a burden is still there: more memories of Butcher’s abusive father, and two more story lines with the same dynamics. But whatever wounds these men inflict upon each other are wiped away by The Boys’ unwillingness to genuinely change the structures in which its characters operate: Vought is still untouchable, the American government is still duplicitous, the criminal underworld is still full of Russians. There’s a rinse-and-repeat quality to both the heroes and the villains that means nothing much changes by the end of this season, as The Boys settles into the same cyclical narrative patterns as the cinematic universes it claims to be mocking. That American freedom is a myth and that the country’s gung ho ideology is built on propaganda and lies? Combine those decades of political awfulness with the concurrent superhero monoculture takeover of movies and TV, and certain patterns of stasis begin to emerge.

It's Homelander's party, and he can go Nazis if he wants to. A recap of “The Only Man in the Sky,” episode two of the third season of 'The Boys' on Amazon ...

Could he actually develop some empathy for the supes he’s always thought of as inherently wrong? But it’s hard to know how Kimiko could’ve avoided the public violence, especially since it’s a Countess fireball that makes the biggest mess. Poking and prodding him with the suggestion that Soldier Boy routinely molested him, Butcher winds up provoking a gunfight that he barely escapes. He gets the information he wants — whatever happened to Soldier Boy happened during a mission in Nicaragua, working under none other than Grace Mallory! (Oh, and Soldier Boy did slap him around a little, but it never went further than that.) He tries to resist Butcher’s invitation back — he can’t abandon his family again — but we know it’s only a matter of time. She knows that he does want to be with his family, but he can’t be at peace when he still has unfinished business. After getting shot by Gunpowder (more on that later) and watching Ryan’s emotional stop-motion animation of Becca’s voice-mail, he realizes Grace Mallory might be right, it might be time to get out of the game like Mother’s Milk did. Thankfully, the fight ends with an honest admission: Hughie thought things were finally going his way, but the Neuman revelation has shown him how blind he was to the truth. But the couple’s fake fight is organic enough to morph into a real one, tied to Hughie’s awareness of his relative physical weakness. While Annie is preoccupied with the birthday boy, Hughie is too impatient — and too insecure about his reliance on his superhero girlfriend — to wait for her to investigate Neuman further. But as soon as he hears the news, he pivots from bored obligation to actively encouraging the woman to go through with the suicide. He pays a visit to the Red River Institute, a group home for the super-abled owned by Vought, where it turns out Neuman (and her latest victim, Tony) grew up.