In Review: The Boys (S5 – EP6) Though the Heavens Fall

Synopsis: The Race to find Bombsight and his supply of V1 begins. Billy and his Boys have a lead that Homelander doesn’t have.

The Story

The race to find V1 gets underway. Thanks to revelations from last week’s episode, we learn that the remaining dose of V1 is in the possession of Bombsight, who has held onto it for decades in the hope that his true love, Golden Geisha, will one day take it and join him in immortality. While Soldier Boy and Homelander hit a dead end in their search, Mother’s Milk has the inspired idea of tracking down former Vought hero Legend, who has apparently slept his way through an entire harem of supe babes, including Golden Geisha. Yup, there is no such thing as discretion in the world of The Boys.

Legend ultimately points Mother’s Milk, Billy, and the rest of the gang toward a Vought OAP home, where they find Golden Geisha living out her retirement years. While Billy, Mother’s Milk, Kimiko, and Frenchie formulate a plan to kidnap her and use her as bait to lure Bombsight out of hiding, Hughie and Starlight set about planting their virus inside the Vought auditorium, where Homelander is due to deliver his weekly sermon. Unfortunately, their mission is interrupted by Oh Father. Suffice to say, Hughie winds up distracting the supe long enough for Starlight to escape.

Meanwhile, Deep is sent on a mission to save an oil refinery after a disaster kills millions of fish, only to later discover that Black Noir caused the refinery damage as revenge for Deep murdering his theatre-director friend. Elsewhere, Billy and the gang successfully kidnap Golden Geisha and, thanks to some unexpected help from Sister Sage, manage to lure Bombsight into the open.

Acting

Paul Reiser puts in an amusing performance as Legend, who boasts about his sexual conquests with a majority of the female supes from his generation of Vought movie stars and powered beings. I found it both amusing and somewhat ironic that Legend has gone from being a Hollywood-style big shot to working in a Vought cinema during his later years. The scene that introduces him, where he first meets Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), does a brilliant job of establishing exactly who this gloriously sleazy old relic is within seconds.

Naoko Mori also delivers a great performance as Golden Geisha, whose memories of her time with Legend are very different from his own rose-tinted recollections. Geisha’s scenes discussing the value of living a mortal life are genuinely poignant and provide a perfect contrast to the absolute chaos and black comedy that The Boys thrives on. I also thought Geisha’s final scene with Bombsight (Mason Dye), before he heads off to confront Soldier Boy, was particularly well handled and gave the episode one of its rare moments of emotional sincerity amid all the blood, madness, and exploding egos.

Overall

This was a solid episode that pushed the story forward nicely while ending on a cliffhanger that will likely keep fans guessing until next week’s instalment. In short, after rendering Bombsight mortal in exchange for the V1, Soldier Boy hands Homelander something, but we are never quite shown exactly what it is. Given that Soldier Boy’s allegiances throughout The Boys have been, shall we say, extremely flexible, there is every chance that he is playing a far more complicated game than anyone realises.

The final moments leave the audience with a deliciously uneasy feeling, like a live grenade rattling around inside a popcorn bucket. You just know something catastrophic is coming, but the show smartly holds back enough information to keep the tension simmering right up until the credits roll.

Either way, it sets things up brilliantly for next week’s episode and leaves the season poised on the edge of complete and utter carnage. In true The Boys fashion, the show balances its shocking violence, dark humour, and character drama with a lingering sense that absolutely nobody can be trusted.