The Boys – The Female of the Species review – S1 E4
The Boys is making me feel pretty terrible about myself. This is what happens from an episode like The Female of the Species that has me uncontrollably laughing at dolphin manslaughter and awful Spice Girl analogies. Thankfully Homelander is around to remind us exactly what a crappy super is supposed to look like.
One of the great aspects of an eight episode season is there’s not a lot of time to waste on time-filler episodes. Everything that happens in these episodes has a purpose whether to advance the main story, flesh out characters or set up some future subplots. Storytelling has to be quick to keep things rolling.
For Hughie the timing of his growing bond with Annie couldn’t be worse. He’s been on Operation: Robin’s Revenge since the series started, but Annie is incredibly cool, cute and compliments him well. Too bad then that Hughie is having visions of Translucent exploding or an angry Robin seething from beyond the grave. I admire the showrunner’s restraints here in not having nightmare Robin without any arms. And yeah, I do want to see Hughie and Annie together, but not as a rebound deal so the slow burn here is fine.
Butcher, Frenchie and MM spend the episode chasing after a mysterious woman (Karen Fukuhara, Suicide Squad), who quickly kills her captors after Frenchie frees her and savagely murders another woman at a nail salon. When MM threatens to quit again, Butcher pulls out his Spice Girls analogy, which would have been the episode’s comedic highlight if not for The Deep’s ill-fated dolphin rescue.
Deep is feeling inadequate around the rest of The 7 and wants to do something meaningful. He proposes to Madelyn he help the dolphins at OceanLand since they’re being treated terribly. Madelyn has (ahem) bigger fish to fry as she sends Homelander and Queen Maeve on a rescue mission of a hijacked plane. If The 7 save the hostages, there’s no way the military would be able to refuse their participation in conflict.
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With no oversight, Deep straps a dolphin into a van and tries a daring rescue, but failed to understand the physics of the dolphin restraint and a high speed chase. The disastrous payoff was obvious right from the start and it was every bit as terribly funny as I pictured. Too bad Deep sexually harassed Annie in the first episode as he would be a pretty sympathetic comedy character.
A-Train has his own problems as he tried to track down the escaped woman from his Compound V connect. Naturally, he finds her before The Boys and quickly starts smashing her head in, but Frenchie’s quick thinking sends a crowd over and gives the woman an escape route.
Homelander and Maeve track down the plane with no problem and take out the terrorists with ease. The one in the cockpit proves to be a lot more problematic as he kills the pilot and Homelander zaps the control panel in killing him. Recognizing a lost cause, Homelander smiles down the aisle as he prepares to peace out. Maeve pleads with him to try and save the passengers, but Homelander doesn’t even bother with a token effort. He takes Maeve and they watch as the plane crashes. Maeve clearly isn’t going to just go along with this for much longer and it’ll be interesting to see how quickly it’s Homelander vs. Maeve for control of The 7.
Just when it seems he can’t reach a new low, Homelander speaks to the media at the plane wreckage and spins the story that they could save everyone if the military included them earlier. This dude is good. Scary, but good. The cast as a whole is great, but Antony Starr is really putting in a multi-layered performance as the Americana hero Homelander with a sinister and twisted side just lurking below the surface.
You know if this were the season finale, we definitely would have seen that little girl on a piece of floatsam getting rescued by some fishermen.
The Female of the Species was the strongest episode of the season so far with a terrific blend of action, dark comedy and character development.
Rating: 9.5 out of 10
Photo Credit: Amazon