Quarantine Control #131: Diabolical Tigers

DC Staff | October 6, 2022 | Features, Television | No Comments

It’s very true that COVID-19 isn’t over, but it feels like there’s a concentrated effort from the powers that be to strongly convince society at large that it is. You’ll barely hear anything about it on most news stations and websites unless you actively go looking for information, even though cases are rising yet again in certain parts of the world. Perhaps that’s part of the inevitability too, with a populace that’s accepted COVID as a part of everyday life. In other words: The people have learned to live with it, even though we shouldn’t have needed to. Sad, but it was bound to happen under the capitalist society we live in.

Geoffrey Barnes

The Boys: Season 2 (2020)
Source: Amazon Prime Video
Episodes: 8

Contains spoilers for the first season of The Boys. Not that you wouldn’t have expected that.

The first season of The Boys was a good subversion of the usual superhero tropes that have become popular these days, especially those in the all-too-consuming Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was a solid adaptation of the source material bereft of its more problematic content. The show occurs in a world where the top superheroes are the biggest assholes on the planet, largely those who are part of a Justice League-style team known as the Seven. The cleverest among them are capable of hiding how villainous they really are to most of the public at large, to maintain support of the populace and government officials.

The world and characters were all introduced and established in season one. The focus in the second season is on how these characters continue to exist in a world that’s a recognizable facsimile of our own — those who survived by the end, anyway. A significant part of the season focuses on following up the twist at the end of the preceding season, in which Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) of the anti-superhero organization (and barely anti-heroic) Diabolical discovers that his wife Becca Butcher (Shantel VanSanten) is still alive, instead of being killed by evil Superman stand-in Homelander (Antony Starr). She also has a son who is very evidently Homelander’s. Yikes. The other big plot development involves the newest member of the Seven in Stormfront (Aya Cash), who seems as if she’ll get along nicely with the other female members until it’s discovered that she lives up to her namesake. I’ll let you do the creative thinking there.

The show continues most of what worked in the first season, with most members of the Seven being in a battle of wits and occasional physical battles with Diabolical. The key drama among the latter group, outside merely surviving, revolves around revealing the way in which superheroes, “supes” for short in this series, are created. A twist at the end of the first season primarily discovered by Starlight (Erin Moriarty) revealed that it wasn’t an act of God like most of the public believed, and organization Vought has far more nefarious plans for it. Starlight, and occasionally Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott), help Diabolical and protect them from the worst Seven members, especially Homelander. There’s a lot of grey-and-grey morality, but it helps when there are genuinely good characters as part of the narrative like Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) and the aforementioned Starlight and Maeve to balance them out.

The solid acting and direction help. Antony Starr plays the asshole part so well as Homelander, and Aya Cash is so good at playing up Stormfront’s most horrendous tendencies that I was almost convinced that it was her real-life persona. Karl Urban as Billy is also a standout, especially during the drama-fueled elements he’s not known for (I mostly know him from Doom, Dredd, The Chronicles of Riddick, and Thor: Ragnarok). My favorite, though, is Karen Fukuhara as heroic-though-brutally violent supe Kimiko Miyashiro, someone who’s primarily a voice actress cast as a character who doesn’t talk. She does a great job acting through sign language (in a form made up for the show, notably) and facial expressions.

The show doesn’t have many action sequences that don’t focus on excessive violence, fine for the kind of show it is. (The Boys is indeed one of the goriest pieces of entertainment that I’ve ever watched.) The sequences included, though, could have used better direction and special effects. Now that this show is a hit, I hope the third season has improved on this front, because it sure isn’t as if Amazon can’t afford to provide it. I’ll find that out soon enough.

If there’s something The Boys’ creative team excels at, it’s how to leave viewers hanging at the end of the season. The tease for the third season isn’t on par with Billy finding out his wife is still alive with a son who very obviously isn’t his, but it’s a good one. The second season was also very good at being more topical politically, and I’m looking forward to them delving further into that in the next season… whenever I get around to it. I’m not on a fixed schedule here.

Joseph Daniels

Autumn has arrived in this Year of the Tiger, and with the changing of the seasons and the gradual cooling of the Northern Hemisphere in preparation for winter, it’s the perfect time to begin to reflect upon the year. Leaves are turning colours and falling from their trees, and the metaphor associated with them is the concept of reflecting on the past, letting go of our old selves and growing as a person. It has certainly been a year, so far. I haven’t been able to accomplish a lot of what I wanted to, especially for the blog, but then family is important and I made my choice to support them when I had to leave my job in the Spring. Having a laptop fail in the first couple months of the year also soured me a little towards my projects for the blog and made me lose any motivation I had to continue them, so throwing more of my time into supporting my family was only natural. I’d had most of the work done on one and was starting another, so it was very discouraging to think I might have to restart them both, especially the former of those two.

With reflection should also come a period of planning. Autumn doesn’t immediately transition into Spring, there is always Winter, and a season of dormancy. Some warmer climates aren’t as affected by Winter as others, but for those of us who live as far north as I, Autumn is a sign that the world will need more warmth than ever before. This month, I’d like everyone to focus on getting ready to be a light in the darkest months of the year, and to help others find their light as well. One of the things I like most about winter is that people decorate their houses with lights and colours and it offsets the white of snow and the dark of night. Let us decorate ourselves to appear bright and colourful to others, to encourage and inspire and perhaps even comfort. Things look less bleak when we let our light and our colour shine through.

We’ll see you all next week, of course. Stay safe.

At the risk of sounding cliché at this point: Everyone who’s eligible for the new COVID-19 vaccine shot should get it as soon as they can. They’re fortunately still free worldwide, but this might be a good time to imagine the hell when private insurance companies take them over in the United States. Most of the world can’t relate there, and if you live outside the US, count yourself fortunate in this regard.

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