"If we think back to Episode 1, Season 1 ... we all know that that would have not been a feasible thing for her at all."
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[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for The Boys, Season 2, Episode 6, "The Bloody Doors Off.”]
Erin Moriarty has already had a number of standout moments as Annie in Season 2 of The Boys, but Episode 6, “The Bloody Doors Off,” delivers a major game-changer for the character that solidifies that she’s not the same Annie we met at the beginning of the series.
Most of the episode takes place at Sage Grove, which turns out to be a Vought controlled facility for creating and testing super terrorists. While Frenchie (Tomer Capon), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and MM (Laz Alonso) head inside, Hughie (Jack Quaid), Butcher (Karl Urban), and Annie stay with the van. When the Sage Grove patients break out of the facility, Hughie, Butcher, and Annie are attacked and the encounter leaves Hughie with a deadly looking wound. They’re forced to flag down an approaching vehicle to rush Hughie to the hospital, but when the driver (Jason Gray-Stanford) becomes reluctant to give up his car, Annie uses her powers and kills him.
Image via Amazon
While on an episode of Collider Ladies Night, we got the opportunity to dig into this particular scene with Moriarty. Where exactly is Annie's head at in the moment? Did she do what had to be done to save Hughie or did she cross a line? Here’s what Moriarty had to say about it:
“That episode is a really important one because it makes her realize how far she’s going in keeping herself safe, maintaining her objective to take down Vought and also it really wakes her up to realize - I think she’s kind of been in denial about how much this world and being in Vought has changed her, you know? If we think back to Episode 1, Season 1 of Annie or Starlight, we all know that that would have not been a feasible thing for her at all, and I think the way she digests the death and that she causes it and what’s going on in that episode is, it’s a really hard pill for her to swallow.”
Moriarty also pointed out how pivotal this moment is when it comes to how her behavior here reflects what she went through in Season 1:
Image via Amazon
“I think a lot of this season is about her building up that facade to go covert, but also, she’s got a wall up in terms of Hughie and her mom because she’s had her heart totally broken and I think when you have someone who is young and ignorant merely because they’ve not yet been exposed to certain aspects of our world and they have their trust betrayed, it can put up a really thick wall. I know that happened for me personally and I know that, often times, you compensate with a wall that’s too thick and you have to slowly find yourself again and your trust in other people. And I think that that episode and the death she causes makes her realize how far she’s strayed from herself. I think that she knows that certain things have to be done. I think she thinks that it did have to be done, but I think that it’s the beginning of her starting to find herself again after all of her deep heartbreaks in Season 1 and her exposure to this immensely dark world; her facade and walls have become excessively thick and she sets out to find the in-between, between being not naive or ignorant but also being her true, good self.”
