#meanwhile giant trans flag in the background of this entire thing

[barbieaiden]

2. [Doorbell rings]

3. Kell: Sam. Fuck. Uh. I totally forgot you were coming. Sorry about the mess, I was going to clean.

Sam: Were you sleeping?

Kell: Yeah, but I should've probably woken up, like, 9 hours ago so it's a good thing you came.

4. Sam: I can help you clean.

Kell: Yeah, no, that's not happening, I would die from embarrassment. Sorry if it's smokey in here, I don't want to give you an asthma attack.

Sam: No, it's fine.

5. Sam: Are you okay?

Kell: Not at all.

Sam: Did something happen?

Kell: Well, I don't know if you know this, but one of my closest friends got himself into a coma?

Sam: Very funny.

Kell: Then it's been downhill from there. How is he? Aiden?

Sam: He's, um...

6. Sam: I don't know. He's acting like the whole thing was just nothing.

Kell: To be fair, he was unconscious the whole time so it was probably nothing to him. Plus, this isn't his first drug-related medical emergency, is it? You, however, were a wreck. Like a total mess.

Sam: I'm sorry, next time my fiancé is in a coma I'll think of being more presentable.

Kell: Good.

7. Kell: No seriously, pretty understandable with the situation and all. I'm glad things turned out the way they did, I'd have no one to get high with if Aiden died.

Sam: Kellan.

Kell: I'm kidding. Also, it wasn't weed that got him into a coma, Sam.

8. Kell: Seriously, though, actually seriously this time, I get it. I mean, I was a wreck too. Honestly, I don't know what I would've done if Aiden died.

9. Kell: Especially not like that. The waiting was the worst, not knowing if he'd be okay or not. I mean, I don't know about you but I had some hope he'd live, but still.

Sam: [Shakes head]

Kell: You didn't think he'd live? Like, at all?

10. Sam: ...no.

11. Kell: In other news, my date last weekend was so bad. Unimaginably bad. Easily top 3 list bad.

Sam: You have a list of your worst dates?

Kell: Well, Sam, some of us aren't super fucking lucky and randomly meet the love of our lives one day. I have to gamify it to maintain my sanity. She was really nice, though, it was my fault. I just wanted to go home the entire time.

12. Sam: Let me know if I can help.

Kell: With dating? You might be in a long-term relationship but you're not qualified.

Sam: No? You know what I meant.

Kell: Dude, you're literally the last person I'd unload my emotional baggage on right now. I'm more likely to do it to Aiden. Aiden.

Sam: Kell, you are not making me feel better.

Kell: I'm not trying to. I'm giving you a reality check.

13. Sam: I don't need a reality check, I'm well aware I've been a mess.

Kell: You literally went straight from a mental breakdown to taking care of Aiden.

Sam: Yes? He was in a coma? He's my fiancé? We live together?

Kell: Okay, now you're just making me feel lonely. You're literally third wheeling me and Aiden's not even here.

Sam: You brought it up!

Kell: Oh. Right.

14. Kell: Have you slept in the past week, by the way? Because it doesn't look like it.

Sam: I have. This is just what I look like.

Kell: It's not.

Sam: Yes, it is. You're just insulting me now.

15. Kell: My point is, you let me know if I can help you.

Sam: You could have phrased it in a nicer way.

16. Sam: Can we talk about something else? I'm getting tired of coma related conversations.

Kell: Oh, for sure. I can tell you about my worst dates list and you can laugh at me. I have it written down and everything.

Sam: What?

Kell: Yeah, with details. Do you want to see?

Sam: ...sure.

#me: idk if i'll mention that kell's trans in the story anytime soon so friendly reminder that he is #meanwhile giant trans flag in the background of this entire thing #something happened with the lighting halfway through this but i am not interested in fixing it lmao sorryyyyyy #just read the text it's fine #ts4 story #drugs cw #lost #lost: sam #lost: kell

[abigailnussbaum]

The Boys 5x06, “The Bloody Doors Off”

I’m generally quite positive about this episode, but before I get to that, this really needs to be said: the trope of “doors open at the asylum, murder and mayhem ensue” is really poisonous to the mentally ill, and should have been discarded a long time ago. It’s particularly common in superhero stories, which are, after all, very fond of the setting of a superhero asylum. Off the top of my head, both The Gifted and Batwoman have employed it in the last two years. Which means that even as it’s patting itself on the back for skewering the tropes of superhero stories, The Boys is indulging in a particularly vile one. And while we’re on the subject of things this episode should have been above: that joke about transgender strippers. It’s not as bad as it could have been, because the gag isn’t “she’s got a penis!” (and MM’s response is immediately “I don’t care for strippers regardless of their genitalia”). But it’s still fetishizing the trans body - which, I suppose, is hardly surprising given the show’s generally judgmental attitude towards kink.

That being said, this is probably the best episode of the season, largely because it plays to the show’s strengths: tight thematic and plot coherence (finally justifying the decision to move the show to a weekly format after weeks of shapeless installments), strong characterization, and a willingness to complicate seemingly black and white situations that belies the show’s reputation as an outrage machine. So yes, this is an episode that features Homelander crushing a man’s skull while in the throes of passion (apparently we need to have at least one of those per season), not to mention a man with a giant, prehensile penis. But it’s also an episode that deepens our understanding of Frenchie, introduces us to a new character who is almost instantly compelling (while also complicating that reaction significantly), and forces us to reexamine our feelings towards Maeve without telling us anything new about her.

The common theme running through the episode is the things you’ll do for the people you love, how you live with the consequences of those choices, and what they make of you. We finally get to meet Lamplighter, the boogeyman whose murder of Mallory’s grandchildren broke the Boys apart years ago and has hung over Frenchie in particular. And we find out why that is - Frenchie was supposed to be keeping an eye on Lamplighter, whom Mallory had just recruited to her investigation of Homelander, and left his post to tend to a friend who was ODing.

Shawn Ashmore is inspired casting for Lamplighter. He’s got the sort of look that can just as easily convey sympathetic concern as selfish entitlement, and slide between the two with ease. Which makes Lamplighter both less hatable than we might have expected, given what we know of him, but also hard to trust. (To be fair, I’m reading a lot of Johnny Jaqobis into the performance, and that was Aaron, not Shawn; but honestly, those two are surprisingly similar for how solid both of their careers have turned out.) But the episode really belongs to Frenchie, who not only takes on Lamplighter’s admission that he didn’t know Mallory’s grandchildren were in the room he set on fire, but finds enough common ground with the man to confess his own part in that night’s disaster. When Lamplighter asks “did [your friend] live?”, it’s a moment of human connection that we don’t often see between the Boys and their quarry (and leads to Frenchie’s heartbreaking revelation that Jay lived, only to die of another overdose shortly after). The episode ends with Frenchie begging for Lamplighter’s life from Mallory (and also trying to make peace with Kimiko, who is otherwise sorely underused).

At the same time, the episode doesn’t encourage us to feel uncomplicated sympathy towards Lamplighter. As MM points out “I meant to murder an innocent woman, not her grandchildren” is hardly a defense. And even more disturbing is Lamplighter’s repeated refrain to Frenchie, “why didn’t you stop me?” Whereas Frenchie doesn’t want to be let off the hook even though he had a good reason for abandoning his assignment, Lamplighter is looking for someone else to blame for his own actions, even to the perverse extreme of blaming an opponent for not fighting back. And, as we see in the present, he’s still killing innocents, burning experiment subjects who don’t pan out or refuse to play along, while claiming that he’s being forced.

Which ties into Maeve, who for the first time is called to account for her part in the plane crash last season. Maeve sees the video of the crash as indicting Homelander, which is also how we’ve been trained to think about it. But when Elena watches it, she sees a woman she’s been taught to think of as heroic abandoning others to save her own life, begging fruitlessly for mercy but finally just saving her own skin. Like Lamplighter - and more importantly, like Annie earlier in this season, when she was about to kill Hughie at Homelander’s command - Maeve might reasonably say that she didn’t have a choice. But she still did those things, and hid them. Her final line to Elena - “why are you looking at me that way?” - sums up the episode’s core message.

It’s a message that is also echoed in the Annie-Billy-Hughie storyline, though it’s a bit more wobbly in that context. The idea of having Annie and Billy bond over their shared love of Hughie is a solid storytelling beat, but I’m not quite sure what to make of Annie’s “he’s too good for either of us”. Annie kills the driver to save Hughie, and the show doesn’t let her off the hook for that (her long look at the baby seat in the car once she gets in). But it’s still a choice she made in order to save someone. Hughie killed Translucent for no reason at all - or really, because he wanted to feel strong and powerful after weeks of stewing in grief and rage over Robin’s death (and Annie, though she knows the Boys were responsible for Translucent’s death, still doesn’t know that Hughie is the one who pushed the button). I’m not sure he’s too good for anyone. 

(Meanwhile, the fact that Annie was on the verge of killing Hughie to save her own life just a few episode ago seems to have been memory-holed, even though it would have been a really obvious thing for Billy to throw in her face during their fight early in the episode.)

The other big thing that happens in this episode is that we find out Stormfront’s background, and between what she says to Homelander and what Lamplighter reveals to the Boys, it seems clear that her plan is to create a superpowered neo-Nazi army and use it to take over the world. It’s good to finally have some answers (and I admit that this is a more interesting turn of plot than the one I anticipated last week, a false flag terrorist attack). But I also feel that the show is in danger of outthinking itself. Having Vought be a company with roots in Nazi Germany was a clever touch earlier this season, but making Stormfront a German Nazi herself - and making the entire genesis of superheroes a Nazi project - undercuts a lot of what the show has been saying about American racism and how much its superheroes are rooted in it. Suddenly we’re back to that familiar trope, invasion by an army of foreign and foreign-inspired Nazis. It’s not unlike the way that Winter Soldier whiffed its central revelation, choosing to focus on a fifth column of hidden traitors instead of admitting the more terrifying truth, that after seventy years there’s really no way to disentangle “good” SHIELD from “evil” Hydra, because the former has been hopelessly corrupted by the latter.

When I wrote about last week’s episode, I praised it for skewering rainbow capitalism in its depiction of Vought’s plans to “sell” Maeve’s queerness and her relationship with Elena. Since then, several people have pointed out that The Boys was speeding well ahead of the actual industry it’s lampooning - in a blockbuster market dominated by superhero movies, there are currently no queer superhero characters (though there are several on TV). Which means that the show’s satire can end up missing its mark - instead of pointing out how capitalism squeezes everything good into an easily-digested, marketable form, one can easily read this subplot as saying that a gay superhero would be bad, full stop. 

I think a similar dynamic is at play when it comes to Stormfront’s secret plot. An army of superpowered neo-Nazis is scary, but is it really scarier than the President of the United States not only refusing to condemn white supremacists on stage at a national debate, but addressing them directly in terms that can only be taken as an instruction to riot if he loses the election? Is it scarier than videos of police that repeatedly show their sympathy towards white supremacist, to the point of standing by when one of them fires into a crowd of people? It doesn’t take superpowers for fascism to take hold - it didn’t in Nazi Germany, and it doesn’t today. By pretending otherwise, The Boys is neutering its social commentary exactly where it should be most trenchant.

#the boys