Given the volume of superhero content we have available today, it takes a truly unique show to stand out from the crowd. Amazon Prime’s The Boys takes the familiar idea of a world full of superheroes and asks “what if instead of being a force for good, they were selfish assholes?” Season 2 takes this concept even further than the first season with more blood, higher stakes, and meaner superheroes – or as they’re not-so-affectionately called, supes.
After a two-year wait, Season 3 is set to premiere on June 3. So, here’s everything you need to know before the next chapter of The Boys begins.
The Boys Are Lying Low (Or as Low as They Can)
After the chaos of the Season 1 finale, Hughie (Jack Quaid), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) are taking refuge with acquaintances of Frenchie’s in the basement of a pawn shop. Butcher (Karl Urban) is being framed for Madelyn Stillwell’s (Elizabeth Shue) death and the crew has been outed as accomplices. Without Butcher or a clue what to do next, The Boys do their best to lie low. However, as Hughie and Annie/Starlight (Erin Moriarty) execute their plan to smuggle Compound V out of Vought and release it to the press, things escalate quickly.
When Frenchie’s smuggling pals unknowingly bring a super “terrorist” to New Jersey, The Boys try to work with CIA Director Raynor (Jennifer Esposito) to expose Vought’s role in the creation of these supes. However, when they go to meet with her, her head explodes, leaving them back at square one until Butcher returns. Butcher makes a deal with an old colleague in the CIA, Colonel Grace Mallory (Laila Robins) to keep them out of prison – he agrees to bring her the supe in exchange for their freedom. But of course, this isn’t a simple exchange. When The Boys go to capture the supe, they discover that he is Kimiko’s brother. Kimiko tries to convince Kenji (Abraham Lim) to help them, but once she realizes that he has been radicalized by the militant group that murdered their parents, she begrudgingly allows the crew to capture him.
The Deep and The Seven get involved after Kenji escapes and takes down an NYPD helicopter with his powers while en route to the drop-off point via boat. The Boys make it to shore – brutally killing a whale commandeered by The Deep in the process. The Seven chase them through drainage tunnels until Kenji makes a break for it. Kimiko goes after him and they are both brutally attacked by the newest member of The Seven, Stormfront (Aya Cash). Stormfront kills Kenji, setting Kimiko on a path of revenge.
Even though The Boys’ plan falls through, Mallory still gives Butcher intel on an old supe from the 1970s, Liberty, and a possible location of Butcher’s wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten). While Annie, Hughie, and Mother’s Milk follow the lead on Liberty, Butcher tracks Becca to a Vought safe house in a walled-in neighborhood that takes “gated community” to another level.
One Big, Happy Family
The end of Season 1 sees Homelander (Antony Starr) discovering that Becca is alive and has had his child, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti). He brings Butcher to see her for a brief moment before dropping him in a random parking lot. Knowing now that Becca is alive, Butcher is determined to find her and help her escape Vought. With Mallory’s intel, Butcher is able to find her and Ryan once again. However, he wants Becca to leave Ryan behind and escape with him, knowing that they won’t be able to hide Ryan from Homelander or Vought for long. Becca refuses to leave her son at the mercy of Vought and Homelander, so Butcher ultimately leaves without her.
Meanwhile, Homelander is desperate to give Ryan the support he never had as a child. He drops in on Becca unannounced and tries to push Ryan to use his powers. Homelander and Becca greatly disagree on how Ryan should be raised – he wants Ryan to be as unstoppable and powerful as him, while Becca has been teaching him how to be a well-rounded, normal boy. Once Stormfront and Homelander start dating, she convinces him to take Ryan away from Becca and into the real world, so they can be a family.
Distraught over losing Ryan, Becca escapes the Vought compound and finds Butcher at the pawnshop. Butcher and the team agree to help her get Ryan back, and use the opportunity to take out Stormfront in the process. Butcher originally makes a deal with Vought CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) to give him Ryan in exchange for where Homelander might be keeping him, but when they finally reunite Ryan with Becca, Butcher isn’t able to betray her trust so easily. When they try to run, Stormfront attacks them and nearly kills Becca. Ryan, unable to control his powers but wanting to save his mom, uses his laser vision on Stormfront. This incapacitates Stormfront, but also fatally wounds Becca in the process. Homelander arrives wanting to escape with Ryan, but Becca makes Butcher promise to keep Ryan safe, despite his aversion to supes.
Butcher does technically uphold his end of the bargain by leaving Ryan in protective custody with Mallory. After a fraught reunion with his mom and abusive father, Butcher realizes that he doesn’t want to affect Ryan the way his father has affected him. Butcher sees the best future for Ryan being far away from Vought and his own undesirable characteristics.
Girls Do Get it Done
When Stormfront joins Starlight and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligot) in The Seven, their new Vought manager, Ashley (Colby Minifie), uses their “girl power” to drive sales and boost Vought’s image with the slogan “girls get it done.” And while this is absolutely a commentary on the history of shallow representation of women in the genre, it also isn’t entirely inaccurate when it comes to how the women of The Boys truly make this season great.
Annie’s world was shattered in Season 1 when she discovered that superheroes are not born, but instead created by Vought’s Compound V serum. She continues to pretend that she’s America’s darling, Starlight, while helping Hughie and The Boys take down Vought from the inside. She blackmails an old friend into smuggling Compound V out of a lab and gets it to the press. She helps Hughie and Mother’s Milk uncover Stormfront’s racist past as Liberty and breaks into Stormfront’s trailer to gather more information on her plans. As sneaky as she tries to be, her actions put her in Homelander and Stormfront’s crosshairs. Annie eventually has her Vought tracking chip removed by Frenchie, but that doesn’t prevent them from using her mother to capture her and outing Starlight as a “traitor” to the public.
After reconnecting with her ex-girlfriend Elena (Nicola Correia-Damude), and being outed on national TV by Homelander, Maeve realizes that she’s tired of living in fear of him. She recruits The Deep to track down the black box from the plane that Homelander forced her to abandon in Season 1. He isn’t able to find it, but instead brings her a Go-Pro camera that has video proof that they left the passengers to die. Maeve recovers the footage, and plans to blackmail Homelander into leaving her and Elena alone. Before she is able to, Elena finds the footage and is so disturbed by it that she leaves Maeve. Maeve spirals for a bit. She helps Annie escape Vought by incapacitating Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) with an Almond Joy, but then refuses to help her and Hughie by testifying against Vought. Maeve comes through in the end by helping Annie and Kimiko fight against Stormfront and blackmailing Homelander into not only leaving her alone, but also letting Billy, Ryan, and everyone else go.
Stormfront, however, is not someone you want to get things done. It turns out that not only was she also an incredibly racist supe in the 1970s by the name of Liberty, but she has been alive since 1919 and is actually a Nazi. She was born in Germany and married to Frederick Vought, who was the creator of Compound V and founder of Vought Industries. Her powers are the result of the first successful Compound V injection. Despite her age, she is a master at manipulating social media and the public’s perception of her, Vought, and The Seven. She uses her position to push for not only a white supremacist agenda, but also for supes to be considered the supreme leaders. Stormfront’s interest in becoming a family with Homelander and Ryan stems from the fact that she misses her daughter. Unlike Homelander, she wasn’t able to pass her powers to her child, and she died of old age. With Ryan and Homelander at her side, she can become the racist matriarch she always dreamed of being. Thankfully, her plans are foiled by The Boys, and Starlight, Maeve, and Kimiko get to beat the crap out of her before her demise. As far as villains go, Stormfront is definitely one of the easiest to hate.
Kimiko and Frenchie’s friendship is tested after Kenji is murdered by Stormfront. Frenchie feels like he has to protect Kimiko from giving into her rage, while she is tired of being infantilized by him. If her ability to literally rip the faces off of Russian mobsters doesn’t prove that she’s capable of taking care of herself, then hopefully the fact that she was able to come back after having her neck snapped by Stormfront will do the trick. In the end though, Frenchie backs off and shows Kimiko that he trusts her to make the right decisions for herself.
The Church of the Collective
After being outed from The Seven for sexual assault, The Deep (Chace Crawford) is relegated to protecting Sandusky, Ohio. He has a breakdown and is arrested for drunk & disorderly conduct at a children’s water park. The hero Eagle the Archer (Langston Kerman) bails him out of jail and takes him to meet Carol (Jessica Hecht), a recruiter for The Church of the Collective. Carol promises that The Collective can help him become a member of The Seven once again in exchange for his loyalty. This Fresca-obsessed, cult-like “church” is reminiscent of Scientology, in that The Collective has control over almost every aspect of its member’s lives. The Deep is forced to marry a woman chosen by the church to rehabilitate his image and he even signs over his bank accounts to them.
The Deep then recruits A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) after he’s kicked out of The Seven by Homelander. The leader of The Collective, Alastair (Goran Visnjic), uses the promise of rejoining The Seven to keep The Deep and A-Train in his pocket. While A-Train is apprehensive of getting too involved with The Collective, The Deep is all in. To help his chances, A-Train steals The Collective’s file on Stormfront and her Nazi past, from when she was a member, and gives it to Annie and Hughie to release to the public. Alastair is impressed by A-Train’s initiative and advocates for him to Mr. Edgar, after Stormfront is outed. The Deep is hurt and angry by this, given his devotion to The Church, and calls out Alastair. And while Alastair is one of many head-exploding casualties this season, he threatens to oust The Deep as a “toxic personality” right before that happens – just as he did to Eagle the Archer. So far, it’s unclear if Alastair was only threatening The Deep and if his death will have any impact on The Deep’s continued involvement with The Collective.
Lamplighter and Sage Grove
Annie’s research into Stormfront uncovers emails between her and the Sage Grove psychiatric center. After she shares this info with The Boys, they sneak in and discover that Vought has been using the facility to test the reactions of Compound V when injected into adults. They’re after a more stable formula that will allow anyone who receives an injection to develop powers. Stormfront is involved because she wants to use it to create an army of white supremacist supes. However, the involvement of another supe, Lamplighter (Shawn Ashmore) complicates things for the team.
Through flashbacks, we see that Mallory, Billy, Frenchie, and Mother’s Milk once tried to blackmail Lamplighter into helping them take down Vought. Frenchie was supposed to tail Lamplighter, but had to leave him during a film premiere to go save a friend who had overdosed. When Frenchie returned to the premiere, Lamplighter had already left, and was set on taking out Mallory. Instead of killing her, however, Lamplighter set her grandchildren on fire, thinking it was Mallory in the bed. This is revealed to be the reason that Mallory stopped working with Billy and why she seems to show disdain for Frenchie today.
Back at Sage Grove, Lamplighter recognizes Frenchie and attacks. This releases Cindy (Ess Hodlmoser), a supe with the ability to make people explode with her mind, along with the rest of the patients. Chaos ensues, and Frenchie, Mother’s Milk, and Kimko have to work with Lamplighter to survive and escape. When Lamplighter doesn’t give them up to Stormfront, they decide to bring him to Mallory to use as a witness against Vought.
Off With Their Heads
Reynor and Alastair aren’t the only characters to have their heads mysteriously explode this Season. During a congressional hearing led by vocal Vought opponent Congresswoman Neuman (Claudia Doumit), there is an attack that takes out many audience members, the congressional chairman, A-Train’s replacement, Shockwave, and key witness Jonah Vogelbaum (John Doman). Vogelbaum is the former Chief Science Officer of Vought and is responsible for the creation of Homelander. He personally oversaw a number of atrocities and is key to Neuman and Mallory’s case against Vought.
While Cindy is the obvious suspect after her powers are revealed at Sage Grove, it’s revealed in the Season 2 finale that Neuman is responsible for these attacks. She’s a double agent for Vought and helping them achieve the “coup from within” that Reynor was investigating. Just as this information is revealed to us, however, Hughie arrives at her office ready to work with her, instead of The Boys, to bring Vought down.
The Boys Season 3 premieres on Amazon Prime June 3.