There’s something seriously wrong with Homelander in The Boys S3 trailer

[Karlston]

"I may be a superhero, but I'm also just a man who fell for the wrong woman."

An uneasy peace will be shattered in The Boys S3.

 

The Boys is coming back to Prime Video for its third season, and the streaming platform has released the official trailer. Our crew of misfits had arrived at some closure in their battle against the "supes" and gone their separate ways at the end of the second season. But it looks like that uneasy peace is about to be shattered, given the number of exploding bodies and glowing laser eyes showcased in the trailer.

 

(Spoilers for S2 below.)

 

As I've written previously, the show is based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The Boys is set in a fictional universe where superheroes are real but are corrupted by corporate interests and a toxic celebrity-obsessed culture. The most elite superhero group is called the Seven, operated by the Vought Corporation, which created the supes with a substance called Compound V. The Seven is headed up by Homelander (Antony Starr), a violent and unstable psychopath disguised as the All-American hero. Homelander's counterpart as the head of the titular "Boys" is Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), a self-appointed vigilante intent on checking the bad behavior of the Seven—especially Homelander, who brutally raped Butcher's wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten).

 

The second season ended with a bloody showdown that saw the demise of Becca as well as the mutilation of Homelander's supe squeeze, Stormfront (Aya Cash), who turned out to be a Nazi disguised as a "patriot." Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) and Starlight (Annie Moriarty) successfully blackmailed Homelander into loosening his bullying stranglehold on the Seven. Meanwhile, the government cleared the Boys of all wrongdoing after they were publicly smeared as terrorists. A disillusioned Hughie (Jack Quaid) decided to try to fight the Seven through politics rather than violence and went to work for Congressperson Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit)—but he doesn't know she's actually a super-powered assassin with her own murderous agenda.

 

There's something seriously wrong with Homelander—well, more wrong than usual.

YouTube/Prime Video

 

So what can we expect from the third season? We already knew that the first episode is entitled "Payback"—the name of an earlier Vought group of superheroes, loosely based on Marvel's Avengers. Payback members include Eagle the Archer, who appeared in S2 of The Boys (played by Langston Kerman). He's the one who recruited the Deep (Chace Crawford) and A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) to the Church of the Collective before the cult turned against him. A fictional Seven on 7 news report last summer informed us that Eagle had quit the superhero gig and is now trying to become a rapper.

 

Expect Payback to play a major role this season, since two other members are joining the cast: Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and Crimson Countess (Laurie Holden). We also know that the third season will incorporate one of the comic's most shocking storylines: Herogasm. In this standalone comic miniseries, the Boys infiltrate Vought's annual superhero party, which turns out to be just one long weekend of kinky sex and drug use on a secluded island.

 

Jensen Ackles joins the cast as Soldier Boy.

YouTube/Prime Video

 

Per the official premise:

It’s been a year of calm. Homelander’s subdued. Butcher works for the government, supervised by Hughie of all people. But both men itch to turn this peace and quiet into blood and bone. So when The Boys learn of a mysterious anti-Supe weapon, it sends them crashing into The Seven, starting a war, and chasing the legend of the first Superhero: Soldier Boy.

Prime Video released a red band teaser in March, in which we got our first glimpse of Soldier Boy and the Crimson Countess. We also saw Butcher decide to even the odds by taking Compound V himself, thereby gaining his own laser-eyed superpowers. There were the usual exploding heads and bodies and a brief shot of Deep gazing longingly at a starfish while engaged in sex (likely from the Herogasm episode).

 

Looks like a scene from the rumored musical episode?

YouTube/Prime Video

 

The full trailer has even more blood and gore and footage of a laser-eyed Butcher on the rampage, but the focus is on Homelander's continued unraveling. The stresses of losing Stormfront, not being able to see his supe son by Becca, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), and being forced to go on a national apology tour for dating an actual Nazi have taken a major toll. "I may be a superhero, but I'm also just a man who fell for the wrong woman," he says during his PR spiel. "Out of crisis comes change. So I spent the last year really slowing down and reconnecting with myself. And I am very excited for everyone to meet the real me."

 

Starr has always been brilliant at showing us the cold-eyed psychotic killer behind the radiant all-American smile, and here the actor dials it up even more to show us a psychotic superhero fast reaching a breaking point. Homelander's fragile mental state seems to be the rationale behind Queen Maeve's plan to resurrect Soldier Boy. That latter plan is definitely going to backfire since it looks like Soldier Boy is suffering from some serious destabilizing trauma himself as we watch him frenetically beat someone to a pulp with his shield.

 

Meanwhile, Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso) is back with his family, and Butcher has been under Hughie's supervision—which has to sting his pride, but it's the only way he'll still be able to see Ryan, whom he considers to be his son, not Homelander's. It's clear that something will drive Butcher to take the Compound V from Maeve to get his temporary superpowers, thereby becoming everything he's vowed to fight. "The whole point of what we do is that no one should have that kind of power," Mother's Milk says.

 

We also see Hughie admitting that his nonviolent approach might not be working because "it's all rigged," so he and Butcher likely will re-form their unlikely alliance. The trailer doesn't tell us much about what Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kumiko (Karen Fukuhara) are up to, but we see them dancing in what seems to be a psych ward—perhaps a scene from the rumored musical episode.

 

The first three episodes of the third season of The Boys will premiere on Prime Video on June 3, 2022. After that, there will be a new episode each week until the season finale on July 8.

 

 

There’s something seriously wrong with Homelander in The Boys S3 trailer