(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 204 of “The Boys,” titled “Nothing Like It in the World.”)
Billy Butcher’s (Karl Urban) long-awaited reunion with his recently-found-out-is-still-alive wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten) did not end with the happy-ever-after Butcher was probably dreaming of, one where he rescues Becca from the clutches of Vought and leaves her supe kid behind. That lead to a devastating scene — which made even showrunner Eric Kripke shed tears — where Becca upends everything Butcher ever thought he knew about himself.
“Part of the story this season is we’re ripping away everything Butcher thought he knew, and he needs to build something else in its place,” Kripke told TheWrap. “And what he thought was: ‘This woman saved me, and then when she was taken away I’ve been on this just mission of vengeance to get payback for her.’”
Except that, as Becca put it, that was never the case. “And it turns out she’s not dead,” Kripke continues. “She says, ‘You imagined all of these times of me saving you. You put me on pedestal after I was gone. I became this somehow angel who saved you, when I’m a real woman who wants to get high and eat Cheetos and you put me in this impossible position. And your incredible amounts of rage have happened since you were a kid.’”
That realization for Butcher — that not only is Becca perfectly happy with keeping her supe kid, but that his anger was not solely because he wanted revenge against Homelander (Antony Starr) for raping his wife — drives the rest of Butcher’s narrative this season, says Kripke.
“I like the idea of poking at that trope and saying that’s not actually a thing. You were a piece of s–t long before you ever met her. And so he needs to now, now that he’s realizing that, he needs to decide what he’s going to do with that information. And he’s not going to handle it well, but it does lead to some really interesting places and we dig deeper. And as the season goes on, we’ll go deeper into Butcher’s past and how he came to be this way.”
TheWrap has more on Friday’s episode, the fourth of “The Boys” second season, including that big Liberty reveal and Kripke’s response to angry reviewers upset about the Amazon Studios’ series decision to switch to a weekly roll out this year.
Leave a Reply