The latest episode of The Boys Season 3, "Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed," opens with a scene of Vought CEO Ashley (Colby Minifie) on the Cameron Coleman Hour as she feverishly dispels Annie (Erin Moriarty)’s video posts revealing the truth about the company. These real-life denotations to the political media wars of today are elevated in this week's installment, with an increasing number of explicit references and unflinchingly obvious parallels. Ashley tells Coleman (Matthew Edison) that Annie’s ties to Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) link her to the Shining Light Liberation Army. Of course, this is all accompanied by the headline “Human Traffickers Tied to Starlight?” Later on, at a rally for presidential candidate Robert Singer (Jim Beaver), Homelander (Antony Starr) plays up these claims and alleges that Starlight had been using her Starlight House for Runaway Teens as a front for a human trafficking ring. Homelander then has a brief hallucination of Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) in the audience, reiterating the legacy supe's looming presence in Homelander’s mind as he seeks to twist the story in his favor.
The Legend (Paul Reiser) also returns via the post-cold open, as the Boys hunker down at his house while plotting their next move. He informs Hughie that Soldier Boy never actually fought on D-Day, as well as implicating his involvement in hosing civil rights protesters, the Kent State Shooting, and the J.F.K. assassination. The Legend then goes on to deliver a monologue that so accurately encompasses the M.O. of The Boys: “The thing is, to be American means knowing you’re the hero. So what do we do? We sweep all our filthy shit under the rug, and we tell ourselves a myth like Soldier Boy. And I get stinkin’ rich selling it.”
Hughie (Jack Quaid), Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), and Soldier Boy follow a lead to Soldier Boy’s next target: The mind-reading supe Mindstorm (Ryan Blakely). The Legend tells the team of Mindstorm’s bipolar disorder, which sparks Hughie to search for lithium prescriptions in the area to find him. They pinpoint the location and set out in the forest to find Mindstorm’s cabin. Soldier Boy issues a prescient warning: don’t make eye contact with Mindstorm. Shortly after, Soldier Boy trips a smoke bomb, and Mindstorm “eyes” Butcher. Butcher passes out and relives parts of his rough childhood, chronicling the frightening abuse he and his younger brother Lenny (Bruno Rudolf) experienced at the hands of their father Sam Butcher (Brendan Murray). Lenny and Billy are playing three-card Monte in one of their rooms when Sam starts yelling for Lenny, accusing him of leaving his bike on the front lawn. Billy hides under the bed while Lenny hides in the closet. Billy takes the hit for Lenny by coughing when Sam is about to check the closet. Sam pulls Billy out from under the bed and proceeds to beat him with his belt in a scene interspersed with adult Butcher’s fatal beatdown of Gunpowder (Joel Gagne). First introduced in Season 2, Episode 7 (played by John Noble), Sam’s influence on Billy is eerily shown in this sequence. Complete with his use of degrading profanity and fits of extreme violent rage, Sam represents Billy’s tragic shadow self, albeit one that he has embraced more than suppressed.
This week’s arc also sees the return of both Maeve (Dominique McElligott) and A-Train (Jessie T. Usher). Maeve is revealed to be alive, held in captivity by Homelander. In a (previously rare yet unprecedently common this season) moment of vulnerability, Homelander expresses true fear over the threat of Soldier Boy. Maeve delights in this, declaring “This is still a top 3 day in my life. Because today is the day that I saw you scared.” Before he leaves, Homelander explains his rationale for keeping her alive: to harvest her eggs. Meanwhile, A-Train awakens in a hospital bed as Ashley recounts the Vought-abridged version of events that led him there: Soldier Boy attacked him and Blue Hawk (Nick Weschler) at Herogasm, murdering Blue Hawk right in front of A-Train. Ashley reveals that he received a heart transplant from Blue Hawk, and that he’ll be back up and running in no time. She also outlines his next film: Training A-Train, a “gritty biopic” featuring Tom Hanks as A-Train’s trainer.
After Butcher is left to ruminate on his traumatizing past, Soldier Boy convinces Hughie to move on to infiltrate Mindstorm’s cabin. After Soldier Boy chastises Hughie for caring about Butcher, Hughie confronts him about his lack of actual involvement in “storming the beaches of Normandy” and “fighting the Nazis.” It’s just another entry to a long line of scenes that accentuate Hughie’s swift rise in confidence. Soldier Boy proceeds to punch Hughie. Butcher’s vision continues as he watches his young self (Josh Zaharia) get in trouble for selling marijuana. His headmaster (Michael Ripley) remarks that he doesn’t want Butcher to turn out like his father. Young Billy then grins and grabs a stapler, bashing his headmaster’s head in with the same twisted fervor that his father displayed when beating him. His hits are also cut with shots of Butcher’s many punches and beat-downs throughout the past few seasons. Afterward, Sam takes Billy and Lenny to a pub to celebrate what Sam dubs the moment Billy “swam” (“You either sink, or you swim”). Adult Butcher leans in to tell his young self not to listen to his old man, to reject the notion that one must thrive off violence and drunken power.
Hughie and Soldier Boy encounter a nun and a priest on the road, supposedly on their way to a “Samaritan’s Retreat.” Soldier Boy agrees to take a look at their broken-down car, then immediately shoots the priest in the head. Soldier Boy claims that Mindstorm has influenced everyone in the area to come after them, which Hughie denies until the nun jumps on his back and bites his neck. Soldier Boy shoots the nun and tells Hughie, “This is what I’m talking about. This is being a soldier.” Soldier Boy and Hughie enter Mindstorm’s lair before Hughie teleports Mindstorm back to Butcher in an attempt to convince him to wake Butcher up.
The tragic finale of Butcher’s mind-cinema commences when a teen Billy (Luca Villacis) leaves for the military, leaving a teen Lenny (Jack Fulton) with Sam. Lenny pleads with Billy to stay, saying that he can’t leave him alone with his father. Billy remarks that “it’s not my job to look after you” while adult Butcher begs him to stay. The sequence is a culmination of fleeting visions of Lenny throughout the season, such as the television sequence from Episode 2. The significance of this sequence is revealed when six months later Lenny opens the kitchen cabinet to grab a gun as he accuses adult Butcher of leaving him to fend for himself. Lenny accuses Butcher of being just like their father: “…because anyone who’s ever loved you, you end up getting them killed, don’t ya?” and Butcher is only able to watch helplessly as his brother shoots himself. As Butcher finally wakes up, Soldier Boy attacks Mindstorm, who reveals that Vought gave Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) the green light to move forward with the attempted murder of Soldier Boy. Soldier Boy then beats Mindstorm’s face in with his shield.
Yet Butcher isn’t the only one treated to a surreal archeological mind-excavation in this episode. In one of the series’ most creative sequences to date, the details surrounding the attempted murder of Soldier Boy are finally revealed. Black Noir is shown to be bunkered in an abandoned Buster Beaver’s Pizza Restaurant, surviving on baked beans in the theater section in which Buster and his pals likely delivered some riveting animatronic musical performances when the restaurant was up and running. Black Noir is greeted by a cavalcade of cartoon animals, including Buster Beaver (Eric Bauza) himself. It becomes apparent that Buster is Black Noir’s conduit for processing his past, and Black Noir’s ruminations play out in cartoon animal theater. In the cartoon sequence, Soldier Boy is played by an Eagle while Black Noir is portrayed by a black sheep (Fritzy-Klevans Destine). Black Sheep Noir enters a training session with Payback and expresses his anger at Eagle Soldier Boy for jeopardizing his role in Beverly Hills Cop by spreading slander to producer Don Simpson. Soldier Boy claims that Black Noir wasn’t funny enough for the role and brutally attacks him, telling him, “You’re not a movie star. You’re not shit. I see you getting out of line again, trying to move on up, I will put you in the fucking ground. Understood?”
Played by an almond-munching Meerkat, Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) tells Black Noir of Soldier Boy’s transfer to the Russians. He informs Black Noir that there is a replacement in order, referring to Homelander. During the battle in Nicaragua, Payback confronts Soldier Boy and attempts to take him down. Soldier Boy bashes Black Noir’s head in, revealing what actually happened to him in Season 3, Episode 4. Soldier Boy tries to get away, yet a version of Mindstorm (played by a cartoon horse) scrambles his brains while a cartoon fox Crimson Countess (Laurie Holden) drugs him. The curtains close, and Buster assures Black Noir that he must face Soldier Boy.
As Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) recovers from the fight to save Frenchie (Tomer Capone), she asks Annie to retrieve some Compound V for her. As Annie infiltrates the Vought Lab and grabs a vial, she finds a notebook detailing a long list of deadly Temp-V side effects. Annie calls Butcher, informing him that Temp-V can cause lesions in the brain and that three to five doses are fatal. Butcher is about to tell Hughie, yet at the last second switches gears, proclaiming that they’ve “gotta swing by the office to get some more. And then you, me, and granny fucker are gonna finish this fucking job.” Butcher’s actions at this moment reinforce the true nature of his character all along: one who is determined to finish what he started, no matter what takes. Showcasing the cracks in his emotional armor was necessary to build up to the “final battle,” whatever that might be. However, the waters are muddied when Homelander receives a call from Soldier Boy, who unexpectedly reveals that he is Homelander’s father. The converging factors of Soldier Boy possibly sparing Homelander’s life and Black Noir being en route to kill Soldier Boy provide a fascinating penultimate kerfuffle, promising an explosive ending to The Boys Season 3 that just may rival its beginning.