I get that they are always surrounded by death and destruction but, you would think that at least one of them would check to see if the 30 year old teenager survived being incinerated in Kate’s dream world.
Great unexpected guest apperance this episode.
I was also surprised that this guy seemingly disappeared and nobody cared.
You mean Soldier Boy? Interesting way to insert him in the story.
Well, sorta. More of a cosplaying Dean Winchester to me, though.
I think the “person with mind powers drags everyone into a simulated world in their brain” thing is (a) comically overdone, and (b) never made any sense to begin with. I mean, what part of Cate’s powers allows her to be a subconscious holodeck, including simulation of gravity, providing a shared interactive experience for everyone else, etc?
That said, as such episodes go, this wasn’t bad. Soldier Boy was a definite highlight.
We finally got some clarification on what the villains are doing… Vought wants them to science up a way to control supes, but what’s-her-face is secretly working on a way to kill them. Which is, as these things go, not bad. Plausibly-sensible motivation on both sides. What does seem ridiculous to me is why this is happening in the basement of a supe college. Hmm, let’s see, we’re doing horrific illegal experiments which we have repeatedly said need to be kept secret. How about we do them (a) right next to hundreds of unpredictable and difficult-to-control superheroes, in a public place where people are constantly coming and going, and also your evil project leader has to also assume a public facing role where she might be unavailable for long periods of time; or, (b) basically anywhere else?
Not to mention she has to touch people with her hands on their bare skin. I fast forwarded thru most of the “this is only a dream” sequence.
Agreed on it being overdone. Right before she sucks them in though, it’s revealed that she’s also a telepath and doesn’t require skin contact to activate her powers. I think it’s meant to indicate that her powers are way different from what people thought and the question is whether she’s always had these abilities and was hiding them all along or if this is a new development for her.
Where else would you suggest housing a facility that would allow them to constantly mindwipe Luke, bring him there, inject him with a bunch of his brother’s blood and bring him back before he woke up? The indications are that the school and the woods are deeply intertwined, faculty (Brink, Polarity) and students (Luke) need to be able to be shuttled back and forth. The hints at the start of the show were that God U was designed more as a prison than a school and it’s possible that God U was started solely so they could create The Woods.
That makes sense in this particularly context, only because Luke and Sam are siblings. Are there lots of cases where there’s a pair of supe siblings, one of them in The Woods and one at the U? And, furthermore, where blood transfusions/matching/whatever are necessary?
It definitely feels to me like “school with an evil research establishment underneath it” exists far more to be a setting for tv storytelling than it does for any actually plausible reason… just like (The Boys spoiler upcoming in case anyone hasn’t watched it) fake-AOC is actually the head-exploder.
Eventful finale. Good thing season 2 has already been greenlit.
I was a little unclear what Cate’s plan was aside from killing a bunch of people. And I hope that the cliffhanger ending will be resolved sooner rather than later. But overall I liked the show.
I like about half of the show. The finale was good. I wonder if Homelander got headsploded. Glad to see Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) is back.
Overall, I enjoyed the season a lot. Almost all of the main characters were interesting, well acted and well written, and it had a lot of the same go-for-broke crazy charm of The Boys.
I thought some things about the last few episodes and the worldbuilding in general were a bit unclear:
(1) Last time we see Cate and Shetty interact, Cate seems to have forgiven her. Then later she kills her. Why? Just as a fake out?
(2) Didn’t both “sides” of super students want to free the students from the Woods? Did they have some reason to think “these are super dangerous reckless baddies” rather than “these are innocent students being experimented on?”. That seemed abrupt
(3) Since when can any supe be disabled by a speaker playing a sound? How has Butcher never heard of this? Does it work on Homelander? Is it a secret? Because that seems like pretty relevant information that vastly changes the overall balance of power in the world.
(4) Cate and Sam being anointed the new “Guardians of Godolkin” seems pretty ludicrous, for a couple of reasons:
(a) zillions of people were livestreaming everything that happened, which certainly did NOT include those two “saving the day”
(b) Sam has literally never been heard of before. Isn’t someone going to wonder why he wasn’t, you know, enrolled as a student, or whatever?
Still, overall a fun time, eager for season 2.
From a dramatic point of view, it was certainly a fake-out. Cate’s point was that even if Shetty truly loved her (which she did, apparently), she was still a horrible person who deserved to die.
Butcher used high-frequency sound in the last episode of season 2 of The Boys. Clearly he knew that it would hurt Ryan’s ears because he sent his wife over with a pair of headphones. No, it didn’t particularly bother Homelander. Maybe it’s like how older people lose sensitivity to high-pitched noises in real life?
Cate was out there doing something and she wasn’t obviously killing people, so you could probably argue she was saving the day. Not sure about Sam, though.
Agreed, The Boys et. al. have always been pretty terrible about temporary plot induced dumbness. Remember, we’re supposedly living in a universe where thousands of parents for multiple decades knew that superheroes were made using chemicals but this was amazingly top secret information that the government just figured out and would be a major scandal if it ever got out.
The same sound has been used earlier in Gen V and also I think some episodes of The Boys. They presumably want to treat it like the British did with breaking German codes during WWII, if you use it too often, then the secret leaks and it stops being useful. It’s very much for emergencies only.
Uh yeah, a zillion people watched live as insurrectionists stormed the capitol and you have people now claiming it wasn’t violent or that certain people never said the things they said. As social commentary, it’s in the 20th percentile of most on the nose things this show has done.
Season 2 has hit a snag…
I might not label someone’s death a “snag”, but yes it’ll certainly delay things.
They are not recasting, so time for heavy rewrites.