TV Review: THE BOYS: Season 3, Episode 8: The Instant White-Hot Wild [Prime Video]

The Boys The Instant White-Hot Wild Review

Prime Video‘s The Boys: Season 3, Episode 8: The Instant White-Hot Wild TV Show Review. The darkness that surrounded the season finale of The Boys: Season 3 was not just physical carnage but mental carnage as well. In a way, it was more heartening and far more disturbing than last season’s final episode.

Trauma, Abuse, and the Past

William “Billy” Butcher (Karl Urban) has the opportunity to be the father figure to Ryan Butcher (Cameron Crovetti) that his father never was or could have been to his brother and himself. He threw that away with hurtful, mean words while in emotional pain in Barbary Coast. That damage to Ryan Butcher reverberates and culminates in The Instant White-Hot Wild with the boy’s interference in the episode’s final fight and in ‘The Smile. When Homelander (Antony Starr) kills a rowdy protester in broad daylight, receives a round of applause, and Ryan smiles at a.) the killing, and b.) Homelander not obeying laws, rules, and doing whatever he pleases, that is possibly the moment when a second Homelander, as A-moral as the original, is born.

The new Ryan is the creation of two fathers: Homelander and Billy Butcher. Billy destroyed the normal personality that Ryan could have had thanks to his late mother’s efforts. That mental chasm torn open by Butcher, that need for love, acceptance, and not blame, is now being filled by Homelander.  Unfortunately, Homelander’s brand of love and affection is corruption, self-loathing, narcissism, and destruction.

The Buddies

Friendship with Homelander? The viewer most-likely never thought that Homelander and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) were friends, buddies. Seeing the hearts emit from Black Noir when he hugs Homelander is cool and touching. It’s intriguing to see these two damaged tough guys express genuine affection for one another, to know that they are capable of normal feelings and normal reactions.

The Killing of the Trump Card

Homelander is one of the stupidest people in The Boys. He knows that he may be forced to fight a superhero, his father, who is at least as strong as he is, and Homelander kills the only other person on his team that is as strong and resilient as he is before that confrontation. Two against one is always better odds. Homelander was never blessed with intelligence but even someone with normal intelligence can see the benefit of keeping Black Noir alive until after the confrontation with Soldier Boy. After that fight is won, then kill Black Noir if Homelander is still angry about Black Noir not being forthcoming about Homelander’s lineage.

It is classic Homelander i.e. emotion and immediate gratification over the sensible, logical move.

The Final Battle

The final battle in The Instant White-Hot Wild is all over the place. Narratively, the final battle is more than a little sloppy. Combat in TV series and on film sometimes does not happen in a straight line. Sometimes it is convoluted, the unexpected happens, something breaks, things don’t happen as planned, etc. All of this occurs in the final battle. It seems like the screenwriter couldn’t make a decision about which way to take the battle so they threw everything into a bag, shook it up, and threw it on-screen, screaming “melee” as they did so. “Disarray” would have been more apt.

For all of the throws, kicks, and punches, the only person to get hurt during the final battle was Queen Maeve (not that more people getting hurt would have made it substantive). The rest of the battle, pyrotechnics, almost death moves, almost this, and almost that was The Boys attempt at a Marvel final battle or a battle from Zack Snyder’s Justice League. The aforementioned battles were cohesive. They had purpose. A clear villain. A clear goal.

In The Instant White-Hot Wild‘s final battle, there are competing motives and goals, which could aggrandize the battle, creating inter-battles (like the final battle in Spartacus: Gods of the Arena), but all The Instant White-Hot Wild‘s final battle shows is a lack of finesse, actual combat skills, and naked brute force with everyone nearly invincible, creating more crash dummy boxing bout then pivotal climax with real stakes.

Maeve’s Last Fight

Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) bravely, and futilely, engages Homelander in single hand-to-hand combat in The Instant White-Hot Wild. One question – where is her sword? Why practice with a weapon that you don’t use in combat or in the pivotal fight? The only reason I can think of is that the blade won’t cut through Homelander’s skin. But if Homelander is powerful enough to push his hand through Black Noir, why isn’t Maeve strong enough to push the blade of a sword through Homelander?

Regardless of the presence of Maeve’s sword, her unleashed rage is present in The Instant White-Hot Wild. No word by Homelander or act can deter her on her quest for revenge and her mission to kill him for all his abuses and previous actions. She is tried of equivocating to him, kowtowing to him, being afraid of him, suffering because of him, and seeing others suffer because of him. She has enough and seizes her opportunity to destroy him.

The viewer is surprised that she is able to hold her own with him. Homelander is supposed to be the most powerful yet Maeve goes toe-to-toe with him and, for the most part, holds him at bay. One would think one punch from Homelander would be lethal but not so – Maeve’s bones do not shatter. There are other surprises during the fight, but skilled combat would be far more entertaining, especially if Maeve entered the arena with a well-devised plan instead of just uncorked hate.

Maeve The Hero

“No good deed goes unpunished.”

Earlier in The Instant White-Hot Wild, Queen Maeve announces that she is not a hero. When the time comes to act in a moral way to save people in need at the possible expense of her own life, Maeve bravely acts. She proves herself wrong – she is a hero. It was her last superhero act, her hero-in-tights swan song.

Now Queen Maeve is Maeve The Normal, stripped of her powers and one of her eyes. Having danced and collaborated with Homelander for so long, it may have been impossible for her to break free of him unscathed. Her price came at half of her vision, and the kicker, she couldn’t be happier.

Like John Hartigan said at the end of Frank Miller‘s That Yellow Bastard – “fair trade.”

Soldier Boy back on Ice

Putting Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) back on ice makes absolutely no sense if Homelander is still alive. The point of finding the ultimate weapon to kill Homelander was to kill Homelander. Soldier Boy is: an anti-hero, self-centered, a drug-user, a liar, violent, vile, and a ticking time-bomb but he pales in comparison to Homelander. Homelander is a threat to humanity. He is a villain in disguise.

Why not keep using Soldier Boy until Homelander is dead or de-powered? Then put Soldier Boy back on ice.

I get the government’s logic though, in part – Soldier Boy’s chest blast while falling out of a building in the third act of The Instant White-Hot Wild proves he is an extremely volatile commodity, possibly too volatile to be used surgically aganist Homelander.

If that is the case, why is the government keeping Soldier Boy on ice? For what purpose? Just in case? Just in case of what? Why not kill Soldier Boy?

If Homelander, an ever-present threat to the United States and the world, does not warrant Soldier Boy being used offensively, what crisis does?

How else is the United States government going to kill (or neutralize) Homelander? With hope?

The Trump Theme brought to Fruition

The writers of The Boys, to the chagrin of some, have been pouring in more and more allusions to Ex-United States President Donald Trump. That came to fruition in The Instant White-Hot Wild – Homelander kills someone in public and gets applause (President Trump once joked that he could kill someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it).

No one is horrified in The Instant White-Hot Wild. Homelander is acting manly, a man’s man. Masculine, alpha, unapologetic. Homelander appeals to and has been cultivating an ‘unusual’ base of supporters in America for part of Season 2 and Season 3 of The Boys. That base cheers their patron saint, their superhero, their murderer after his public kill, as a new normal dawns in this increasingly twisted comic book world.

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