TAGGED AS: Amazon Prime Video, Comic Book, superhero
Spoiler alert: The following article contains details about the final episode of The Boys season 2.
Apparently, girls get it done on The Boys after all. The second season of the darkly hilarious Amazon Prime Video series wrapped up Friday with an explosive and fiery finale — literally — as the Boys took down the evil Nazi superhero Stormfront (Aya Cash). The win was mainly thanks to Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) and her powers, of course, plus a little help from gal pals Starlight/Annie (Erin Moriarty) and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott).
Rotten Tomatoes chatted with some of the women from the series about the implications of the action-packed finale and what it was like to film that memorable final Stormfront scene. Below, we break down the episode and Cash, Fukuhara, Moriarty, Shantel VanSanten (Becca Butcher), and Colby Minifie (Ashley Barrett) share their thoughts on the ending.
(Photo by Courtesy of Amazon Studios)
While our heroes were all completing their own mini-missions separately for some of the episode — including Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Annie leaking photos proving Stormfront was a literal Nazi (she’s over 100 years old) — they all came together in a big showdown. Billy (Karl Urban) and Becca saved her son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), from his sadistic father, Homelander (Antony Starr) and his even more diabolical white power–spewing girlfriend, Stormfront.
(Photo by Amazon Prime Video)
Hughie, Frenchie (Tomer Capon), and Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) all ineffectively shot at the super-protected, super-powered Stormfront with guns until Maeve showed up and the women stepped in — Starlight/Annie, Kimiko, and Maeve kicked the crap out of her until she launched herself away to safety.
Unfortunately, Stormfront ended up finding Billy, Becca, and Ryan, and despite Becca stabbing her in the eye they couldn’t overpower her. As Stormfront strangled Becca, Ryan’s eyes lit up and everything exploded. When everyone came to, Stormfront was burnt to a crisp, missing limbs, and muttering in German, and Becca was mortally wounded. She made Billy promise yet again to protect Ryan, and also to make sure he knew that her death wasn’t his fault.
(Photo by Courtesy of Amazon Studios)
Enter Homelander, who obviously did not take Stormfront’s injury well and was not pleased that Billy was about to flee with Ryan. Before anything terrible could happen, Maeve saved the day again by blackmailing Homelander with the video of him not saving people on the airplane.
Meanwhile, the higher-ups at the culty church decided it was OK that A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) stole the Stormfront photos from their archives and used their influence to let him back into the Seven, leaving the disgraced Deep (Chace Crawford) extremely pissed.
(Photo by Courtesy of Amazon Studios)
A congratulatory call from church bigwig Alastair Adana (Goran Visnjic) to congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) revealed that the two were in bed together somehow, which was a head-scratcher until they hung up, Alastair cracked open a Fresca, and his head exploded. Cut to Victoria staring menacingly into his window. So SHE was the one popping people’s heads like grapes! This will probably not be great for Hughie next season, since the episode ended with him asking for a job so he could fight against Vought “the right way.”
(Photo by Amazon Prime Video)
The image of a burned, broken, limb-less Stormfront is probably the most haunting scene from a season filled with some pretty messed-up stuff. Cash said that the disturbing look was achieved via gray sleeves to cover her limbs (which VFX artists later covered), and some very talented makeup artists.
“On the day, I’m wearing gray sleeves to do the missing limbs and stuff like that. But I have all the prosthetics on me, which took six and a half hours to put on. And then I have Homelander coming down and snotting on my face,” she said. “I have like this much of my actual face visible, and I’m trying to get away from the snot and I’m like, ‘The snot should land on the prosthetic, please.’ [Laughs] I mean, it’s a very intense thing on the day. And then to watch it back, it’s the magic of being on a show like this, seeing all the crazy VFX change it into something else and seeing how like sad and pathetic and ridiculous she looks at the end, as Homelander comes down to find her.
“It’s cathartic also,” Cash continued, “because as much as an actor you want to find some sort of humanity in a role, Stormfront is bad, and I want her to be punished just as the audience does.”
(Photo by Jasper Savage/Amazon Prime Video)
While Stormfront was more evil than anyone could’ve predicted, her rise to prominence was certainly aided by Vought executive Ashley’s “girls get it done” corporate PR campaign.
“Ashley’s job is is to deal with optics, to make the optics look as good as they possibly can,” Minifie (pictured above in episode 202) said. “And I think it was her really brilliant idea to be like, Yeah, ‘Girls get it done.’ OK, Stormfront’s been dropped on my doorstep, and I’m gonna serve it up some good, capitalistic feminist spin, here we go. She will do anything for those optics.”
But, as Cash added, “Stormfront’s trying to control the optics for obviously a different reason. It’s not monetarily based. She wants to use them to create the genocide that she so desperately would like. But it’s all about manipulation and her outward feminism in the beginning is both a misdirect and a manipulation. I think that she understands how to real people in in order to get [what she wants]. She’s the YouTube algorithm. She knows what to show you next to bring you down the rabbit hole.”
(Photo by Courtesy of Amazon Studios)
VanSanten shed so many tears over Becca’s death, in fact, that she felt like a weirdo for caring so deeply about her character. But she always wants the best for the people she’s playing.
“As the human being who pours her heart and her soul into Becca, all I ever wished for was to have healing and love and redemption and all of these things. I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty tough to have a finality of a character and that be the end no matter what, for a story to end,” she said. “It’s just like one of your closest, best friends — because this person lives in you in your heart and through you — and their life is now gone. How do I process that? And I can only do that by watching season 3 and being like, please, please, please! Let it not be in vain.”
(Photo by Courtesy of Amazon Studios)
VanSanten trusts that creator Eric Kripke will do right by Becca, however. And she’s heartened by the fact that although Billy resisted taking responsibility for Ryan, he did the right thing in the end and realized that Ryan is an extension of his wife, the woman he loves so much.
She is happy to watch how the stories continue to play out in the third season, because she knows Kripke and the writers are good at following up on seeds they’ve planted. In the first season, some people online were concerned that Becca explicitly said that Homelander raped her, arguing that maybe it was a gray area. But VanSanten knew — and Kripke confirmed — that there was no gray area, a point that she was able to drive home in season 3; in fact, nearly all of the major female characters’ storylines address some form of sexual discrimination and assault.
“When I watch the women on our show, it isn’t like we just shine this flashlight in the closet and we’re like, ‘Let’s see, there’s monsters in there. Oh, but look at this flashy pretty thing!’ We’re like, ‘No, you know what, we’re gonna step in, and we’re gonna fucking confront it. We’re gonna call attention to it, and I don’t care if it makes you uncomfortable, if you don’t want to hear the ‘R’ word. Too fucking bad. It exists.’ We need to talk about it, whether it’s racism, whether it’s rape, whether it’s sexual assault, whether it’s white supremacy — however many issues the show actually confronts, and not only confronts, but actually deals with while still being entertaining.
“Tiptoeing that line is something really important in TV for me to be a part of,” VanSanten continued, “to be able to have a bigger narrative where we get to have conversations that aren’t just like, ‘So who played the biggest joke on set?'”
(Photo by Amazon Prime Video)
The fact that all the women characters are so multi-dimensional and strong while also being vulnerable at the same time is something that most of the women on the cast are proud of. They’re not just strong female characters, they’re also scared and tough and curious.
Kimiko had a very isolated upbringing (you know, thanks to the fact that she was kidnapped by a terrorist organization).
“When she meets Starlight she’s a little bit like, Oh, she’s kind of like me, she’s a woman, but she’s so different from who I am. I think she has the same kind of reaction when Becca comes into the story and Becca visits the Boys’ hideout,” Fukuhara said. “She’s kind of in awe of how they do certain things, their movements. It’s feminine, but they also have their own will and they have their own agendas going on, especially Annie does, and it was really fun and exciting to get to play with that side of Kimiko for those themes, because it’s such a new experience for her.”
(Photo by Courtesy of Amazon Studios)
And like VanSanten, Moriarty is also proud that the show is tackling such important issues in such an impactful way. Sexism, racism, white supremacy, radicalization of youth via YouTube — all things that the show takes on that many other series would be afraid to touch at all.
“I mean, the darkness of the season, yeah, it is really dark. But then again, this year has been darker in a way that none of us could have anticipated,” Moriarty said. “But what’s been brought to light this year is things that have always been around, they’ve just come to the surface in a way where everyone is jumping on board to believe in these things and fight these things. But I think the darkness of season 2 is kind of realistic. And it’s refreshing to me, because I’m really sick of things that should be addressed being taboo, and being in denial of certain aspects of our society. Because when you’re in denial, nothing will be improved upon or addressed.”
And that’s really the message of The Boys: That although sometimes the good guys aren’t the ones dressed up as the good guys, we should always be rooting for goodness to win.
“At the end of the day, I’m not a politician,” Moriarty added. “I don’t know that much. I try and educate myself as much as I can, but I think we’ve got to keep trying to have the good guys win. And I think it’s a worthy fight for the remainder of our lives.”
