The popular Prime Video series The Boys returns with a third season on June 3rd.
Prime Video unveiled a new red stripe teaser for the third season of their hit series The Boys during the SXSW panel on Saturday. The show is based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. There are a couple of new faces among the cast, as well as a teaser scene that definitely takes place in THIS infamous plot from the comic book series.
(Spoilers for the first two seasons below.)
The Boys is set in a fictional universe where superheroes are real but corrupted by corporate interests and a toxic celebrity-obsessed culture. The most elite group of superheroes is called the “Seven” and is run by the Vought corporation, which created soups with a substance called Compound V. The Seven are led by Homelander (Anthony Starr in a career play), a violent and unstable psychopath. disguised as an All-American hero. Homelander’s doppelgänger as head of the titled “boys” is Billy the Butcher (Karl Urban), a self-proclaimed vigilante intent on stopping the Seven’s misbehavior, especially Homelander, who brutally raped Butcher’s late wife.
The S1 finale ended with a major cliffhanger: Butcher, who had intended to blow himself up and take Homelander with him, changed his mind when a psychotic superhero told him that he had discovered that Butcher’s ex-wife, Becca (Chantelle VanSanten), was still alive. – and is raising her son (heavy duty) Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), born from being raped by Homelander. This is pretty much where the S2 has risen.
At the start of the season, the Boys were on the run as they were framed for the murder of S1, actually committed by Homelander. Their attempts to cleanse themselves were thwarted by a mysterious assassin who kept blowing up anyone who could give them useful leads. They were also charged with tracking down a telekinetic terrorist, who turned out to be Kimiko’s (Karen Fukuhara) younger brother, Kenji (Abraham Lim). Butcher struggled to accept Becky’s son Ryan, while Homelander tried to become a father and teach Ryan how to use his powers.
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Enlarge / Homelander (Anthony Starr) must deal with the aftermath of the S2 finale, as well as a possible new super-strong opponent.
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Homelander’s dominance over Vought was also called into question when CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) brought in a new member, Stormfront (played by Aya Cash, who stole scene after scene). The two became lovers and Stormfront helped Homelander recover from the PR disaster. Of course, Stormfront ended up being the Nazi-connected superhero formerly known as Liberty and the first superhero to be created with Compound V. And Homelander faced his first moral dilemma, torn between the woman he loved and a general hatred of anything Nazi.
In the S2 ending, Homelander and Stormfront kidnapped Ryan, causing a showdown between Butcher and Becca. Ryan crippled Stormfront with his laser eyes when she threatened his mother, but accidentally killed Becca as well. Ryan was taken into CIA custody after a heartbroken homelander was blackmailed into letting them go. A-Train (Jesse T. Usher) and Starlight (Erin Moriarty) joined the Seven, but The Deep (Chace Crawford) was once again eliminated. Meanwhile, Huey (Jack Quaid) has left the Boys to work for Congresswoman Victoria Neumann (Claudia Dumit), who, unbeknownst to him, is a mysterious assassin.
What will S3 bring? One useful clue is that the first episode of S3 is titled “Payback”. In the comics, it is the name of one of Vought’s original superhero groups, the successor to the Avengers Squad, which was destroyed in the Battle of the Bulge in the 1940s. Payback is based on Marvel’s Avengers. It includes Eagle Archer, who appeared in the series’ second season (played by Langston Kerman). He is the one who recruited Deep and A-Train into the Church of the Collective before the cult turned against him. A fictional news report from Seven on 7 told us last summer that Eagle had quit the superhero show after being publicly abused by the Church and is now trying to become a rapper.
Enlarge / Jensen Ackles plays a boy soldier, a former member of the Stormfront during World War II, also known as Liberty.
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Two other members of Payback join the cast in season three: a boy soldier (Jensen Ackles)—whose name is briefly mentioned in season two as a colleague of Stormfront when she left Liberty—and the Crimson Countess (Lori Holden), who has powers related to with heat. . There’s no word yet on whether we’ll see other Payback members like Tek Knight, Swatto, and Mind Droid (who is romantically linked to Crimson Countess in the comics), but the odds seem good.
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We also know that the third season will include one of the comics’ most shocking storylines: Herogasm, a standalone comic mini-series in which the Boys infiltrate Vought’s annual party for their superheroes on a secluded island that turns out to be just one long weekend. . perverted sex and drug use. Fans dared to show showrunner Eric Kripke this storyline on screen, and he confirmed on twitter Last January, the sixth episode of S3 will indeed be titled “Herogasm”.
Enlarge / Laurie Holden joins the cast as the Scarlet Countess.
YouTube/Prime Video
How far will the series go in the Gerogasm storyline? It’s hard to predict – the comic panels are pretty explicit – but the concept itself should push the boundaries of what Prime Video has allowed The Boys to bring to the screen so far. I mean, on top of all the gore and guts, S2 had a hilarious one-shot scene where the boys run into Love Sausage (Andrew Jackson), whose Compound-V exposure gave him a stretchable, prehensile penis that he can use as a weapon. It played out exactly as you would expect. All we see in the teaser is a snippet of Deep looking longingly at a starfish while having sex – and that’s Deep. (We’ve already seen him fight off an excited dolphin in S1.)
As for the rest of the teaser, the biggest revelation is that Butcher decides to even the odds by taking Compound V himself, thus gaining his laser vision superpowers. Given that the substance has serious side effects, won’t the Butcher become even more unstable? (Yes, probably.) We catch a glimpse of the Boy Soldier and the Crimson Countess, as well as many exploding heads and bodies. In other words, the series shows no signs of curbing the deliciously brutal absurdity that has become its trademark.
The Boys S3 will debut on Prime Vido on June 3, 2022.
Listing image on YouTube/Prime Video