In the previous episode of The Boys, Sage Grove Center was revealed to be a testing facility, inside of which Vought is attempting to find a surefire way to inject adults with Compound V in order to create Supes on demand. The Boys managed to escape the building, bringing Lamplighter along with them. Meanwhile, Stormfront revealed her true colors to Homelander … drumroll please … she’s literally a Nazi. Fantastic, wonderful, great. Keep reading to find out what happened in episode 7, “Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker.”
WARNING: The Boys contains mature subject matter, potentially triggering events, vulgar language, violence, and gore. Those themes may appear in the following recap.
We open with a montage of a man going through the motions of his daily life — wake up, coffee, go to class, stop at the gas station, look at memes before going to bed and doing it all over again. This is fine, until we realize that it’s all laced with a deep-seated obsession over Stormfront, because his house is filled with her memorabilia, he watches her television coverage nonstop, and the memes he spends all night looking at are of her. His obsession reaches a breaking point one day when he seems to see something flash in the eyes of the gas station worker serving him at the counter, and he pulls a gun on him. He demands to know, “I saw the light in your eyes, are you a Supervillain?” before shooting the man and killing him. How’s that for a metaphor for the terrifying power of media propaganda?
At Grace Mallory’s house, congresswoman Neuman has come to visit with Lamplighter, because they want him to speak against Vought at the upcoming hearing.
Annie is meeting up with her mom at a coffee shop. Their conversation is cut short when they’re ambushed and kidnapped by Vought, because her mother had made the mistake of calling Ashley earlier. Vought places Annie in a Supe-proof room, devoid of any power that she could funnel in order to blast her way out.
Worried about congresswoman Neuman, Mallory assigns Frenchie and Kimiko to keep an eye on her. Butcher, assessing Hughie’s rough state, puts him on Lamplighter babysitting duty before heading outside to take a phone call from his mother. She tells him that she’s in New York and she needs him, because his father is dead.
Hughie’s babysitting job turns out to be far less PG than one might expect from the job title, as Lamplighter has posted up in the living room with some very awful Supe porn — his current selection featuring a knockoff Homelander, whose eagle pauldrons are … dick-shaped. Huh. A collection of more terrible DVDs sits on the coffee table, one that would likely scar wee Hughie forever.
Stormfront and Homelander are holding a pro-Supe and pro-Compound V rally. The latter announces to the crowd that Starlight was found to be a mole in The Seven, but she’s since been apprehended.
Sick of the porn, Hughie — much to Lamplighter’s annoyance — changes the channel. He catches the coverage of the rally and is horrified to learn what has happened to Annie. Since Butcher isn’t answering his phone and everyone else is gone, Hughie convinces the Supe to help him break into Vought. “This is your last chance to be a hero again. Do you want to be the cuck or the guy who fucks the wife?” How’s that for a motivational speech?
Butcher arrives at a hotel, obliging his mother’s request. She opens the door and … oh, like mother, like son … an Aloha shirt! Whatever happiness Butcher may have felt to see his mother is quickly vanquished as she asks him not to hate him and leads him out to the balcony, where his very much alive father is waiting. The two bicker, throwing biting remarks back and forth at one another as the conversation gets heated when they begin to discuss Lenny. Butcher’s father accuses him of abandoning his little brother, and Butchers throws him against a wall.
Back at the rally, Homelander catches Stormfront staring at a baby, and he realizes that she’s feeling nostalgic over her daughter. He decides that it’s a brilliant idea to bring her to Becca’s house to meet Ryan.
Homelander introduces Stormfront to Becca as his girlfriend (gag), and Stormfront takes it upon herself to tell Ryan that he’s the first natural born superhero. Meanwhile, Homelander takes a jab at Becca, stating that she doesn’t like to talk about his powers or let him use them. He then lets her know that he and Stormfront will be around a lot more because, “I want us to be a family.”
Maeve comes home to Elena with dinner, but her girlfriend drops the news on her that she’s going to stay at her sister’s for a while because she can’t stop thinking about the plane footage. It’s haunting her to wonder what else Maeve has done and who else she has killed — she knows it’s not her fault, but she’s not as strong as her and she needs time.
M.M. and Mallory are off to pay Dr. Jonah Vogelbaum, the former CSO of Vought, a visit. They’re on a mission to persuade him to testify against Vought in front of congress. Mallory reminds Vogelbaum of the fact that they had a deal, and she dropped involuntary manslaughter charges for him. To top it all off, they both know that Vought screwed him over, they’re likely the ones that put him in the wheelchair. To Mallory and M.M.’s dismay, he refuses. M.M. calls Butcher after they leave to let him know that Vogelbaum said no, and Butcher says he’ll take care of it.
Frenchie and Kimiko are up on a rooftop, keeping an eye on congresswoman Neuman with a sniper rifle. They begin to have a heart to heart, which leads to Kimiko finally agreeing to teach him the sign language that she uses.
We cut to Alastair’s birthday party, which has a Fresca bar … because, of course. The man of the hour tells A-Train and The Deep that he has a meeting with Stan Edgar next week, and things are looking good for their chances to get back into The Seven.
At Vought tower, Lamplighter and Hughie are making their way inside. Upstairs, Ashley enters Maeve’s apartment to find her in bed with two men. She flips out, because what she’s doing “isn’t on brand,” and she needs her to be ready for congress with Elena sitting behind her. Maeve, absolutely and completely done at this point, snaps, “Ashley, for once in your life, be a fucking human being.”
Meanwhile, at Becca’s house, Ryan is showing Homelander and Stormfront a LEGO version of the film The Blind Side that he made (spoiler alert: they’re not impressed). Stormfront, ready as ever to stir the pot, asks Ryan if he’s into any things that kids are into or if he’s seen his dad’s movies. Things get a bit messy as Becca and Homelander’s disagreement over the matter leads to Stormfront assuring Ryan that he’s certainly old enough for those movies, as well as sleepovers, baseball games, and even visits to Vought Land. Becca reaches her last straw when Ryan asks to go to the attraction and she tells him that they’ll talk about it, only to be overruled by Stormfront’s assuring response, “Whenever you want.”
Becca makes Homelander step outside for a parental chat, and the Supe tells her that he believes Ryan is going to panic when he sees the outside world, and he doesn’t want his son to go through what he went through. Becca, however, argues that his life is different because he has a mother. Homelander reminds her that she’s lying to him, but Becca begins to plead with him as she states that what’s best for him is to be there with his mother.
Butcher, true to his world, arrives at Vogelbaum’s, opting to drive right across the front lawn of the fancy estate. Taking on a slightly different tactic than his colleagues, Butcher threatens to kill Vogelbaum’s family if he doesn’t agree to testify.
In a not-so-shocking turn of events, Lamplighter has tricked Hughie. He leads him to the conference room instead of where Annie is locked up, and the Supe makes a point of expressing his disappointment that his statute was removed. “I wanted to do it in front of my statue,” he exclaims, before he burns himself alive. Thanks to the fire alarm that’s begun to go off as a result of Lamplight’s suicidal pyrotechnics, Annie is able to funnel power from it in order to escape from the powerless room.
Hughie realizes that he literally can’t leave the Tower without Lamplighter’s handprint, and so — with but a moment of hesitation to contemplate all of his life choices that have brought him to this very moment — Hughie proceeds to saw one of the hands off of the charred remains of the Supe. I mean, I guess he certainly has some experience with disembodied hands (too soon?) If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and start a GoFundMe for the lifelong therapy that Hughie is going to need after all of this.
Annie and Hughie just manage to miss one another, the former of which is attacked by Black Noir once she reaches the conference room. Maeve shows up just in time to save her, and she takes Black Noir down with … an Almond Joy? Ah, yes, a tree nut allergy. She savagely kicks his EpiPen away. Annie, stunned, asks Maeve to come with her, but she declines.
Hughie manages to find where Annie’s mom is locked up, and then they finally run into Annie. The two have a brief but soft moment as Annie realizes that Hughie came to save her.
Becca is met with an unfortunate surprise when she heads out into the backyard to tell Ryan that dinner is ready. Her son is quick to accost her, calling her a liar and explaining that Homelander just flew him up into the air to show him that the house and the neighborhood they live in are fake. He tells his mom that he hates her before running to his father, and then Homelander and Stormfront take off with him.
And finally, the Vought hearing has begun. The Boys, Annie, and her mother are settled in at the hideout, watching on the television.
“The testimony that you’re about to hear today will prove that Vought is guilty of corporate malfeasance and multiple felonies.”
It’s a surreal moment as Dr. Vogelbaum enters the room; Vought may not stand a chance after all. However, the victory is short-lived, because the heads begin to roll … er, explode. It’s a bloody firework display as the heads of attendees all around the room begin to burst, Vogelbaum and the Supe Shockwave included. Mallory quickly shuffles out of the room with congresswoman Neuman as people are scrambling to escape, slipping and sliding in the pools of blood.
In the words of Hughie, “What the fuck do we do now?”
Episodes 1-7 of season 2 of The Boys are now available on Amazon Prime Video. And don’t forget to watch Prime Rewind: Inside The Boys, the official after-show. The season 2 finale will premiere on Friday, October 9. Check out all of our recaps for this season here.
