Episode 7: Christmas Bloodstains and a Traitor’s Epitaph
The red bow decorations from Vought’s 1984 Christmas party, in Billy Butcher’s (played by Karl Urban) memory eight years later, transformed into the timestamp—19:47:23—of the surveillance footage showing his wife Becca (played by Shantel VanSanten) walking out of an office in disheveled clothes. This video tape, labeled "V-X37" by Agent Mallory (played by Laila Robins), formed a cruel intertext with the fetal red-light scan image in Becca’s medical report; the 27-week gestation period shown in the report exactly matched the time span of her disappearance. When Homelander (played by Antony Starr) saw the baby’s ultrasound in Dr. Vogelbaum’s (played by John Doman) lab, the skull outline perfectly aligned with the energy trajectory map of his laser eyes. Dr. Vogelbaum’s testimony that the baby "died of maternal blood asphyxiation" received a violent response in the bloodstains on the sink where Billy smashed Mesmer’s (played by Haley Joel Osment) skull.
In the aquarium at the Ohio comic con, the ink from "Timothy"—the octopus The Deep (played by Chace Crawford) was forced to swallow—formed a pattern on the glass that was surprisingly similar to the doodles he drew when bullied as a child. The real-time monitored decibel level of the audience’s laughter (89dB) by Vought’s PR team resonated eerily with the warning value in A-Train’s (played by Jessie Usher) bone density report. When Hughie (played by Jack Quaid) traded the Compound V in the syringe with A-Train, the fluorescent green of the drug contrasted with the bruises left by A-Train’s intravenous injections. And at the moment Kimiko (played by Chloë Dunn) dropped from the air vent, the grain structure of the broken baseball bat exactly replicated the crack pattern of the glass when Translucent died.
The parallel editing in this episode is filled with symbolic violence: the fabric fibers of the new uniform Starlight (played by Erin Moriarty) tore apart are identical to those of Becca’s Christmas party dress; the coordinates of Damascus marked on the world map in Mallory’s office precisely match the location where the Navy SEAL team was attacked; the "palm tree and full moon" illusion Mesmer saw before his death has an identical pattern in Kimiko’s sketchbook. At the end of the episode, the metal lock number "V-24" on the evidence box handed over by The Boys forms a loop with the number of the experimental cage at the beginning of Episode 7. Moreover, the edge angle of the coffee cup fragment crushed by Homelander perfectly matches the fold of the paper in Becca’s missing person case file.
Episode 8: A Laser Will and an Undead Lie
The American flag lapel pin in Madelyn Stillwell’s (played by Elisabeth Shue) office melted under the heat of Homelander’s laser eyes. The hole left by the molten metal dripping onto the "Super Soldier Act" document exactly corresponded to the fetal position in Becca’s medical report. The stock index shown in Vought’s monitoring room (a 17% drop) and the number of votes in favor of the military bill passing formed a cruel economic metaphor. Additionally, the body temperature reading (1897°F) of the fire-wielding supe the Navy SEALs encountered in Damascus had a mathematical proportional relationship with the peak body temperature of A-Train after his intravenous injection. When The Boys watched the footage of the super-terrorist on the news, the firelight reflected in the coffee cup Billy held overlapped spatially and temporally with the cigarette butt firelight in the surveillance footage of Becca’s office eight years ago.
The batch number on the Compound V production records Starlight discovered is identical to that in her blood test report. During her confrontation with Hughie in the church, the shape of the light spots cast by the stained glass windows exactly matched the pattern of the burn scars on Kimiko’s arm. The truth about the plane crash that Queen Maeve (played by Dominique McElligott) revealed while drunk was immediately contradicted by the "hero saving the day" news footage playing on the bar TV; the scrolling speed of the news subtitles was synchronized with the sound wave graph of the final 30 seconds of the black box recording.
The sound and visual design of the climax is full of destructive aesthetics: the bone-conducted sound (83 decibels) of Homelander crushing Madelyn’s skull forms an acoustic counterpoint with the heartbeat frequency of Becca’s fetus in the ultrasound; the sound wave pattern of Becca’s recording "He’s watching" in Billy’s phone perfectly matches the energy pulse of Homelander’s laser eyes; the metal friction sound when The Boys’ evidence box is sealed off forms an auditory montage with the rotation sound of the bearings in A-Train’s wheelchair. At the end of the episode, on the mysterious photo Billy receives—showing Becca holding a baby—the grid pattern of the background window completely overlaps with the cage lines in Kimiko’s sketchbook. Furthermore, the date stamp in the corner of the photo—2019.07.24—is exactly the same day Mesmer died in Episode 7.
