WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Prime Video’s The Boys Presents: Diabolical, available for streaming now on Prime Video.
The Boys Presents: Diabolical is a mishmash of what feels like a hundred different styles, even if it’s only eight. The last episode in its first season (“One Plus One Equals Two”) dives into the backstory of a character fans know all too well, deepening the lore of The Boys‘ universe instead of broadening it like so many other episodes of Diabolical do. It whisks viewers back years into the past, before Homelander was even better than Superman. It starts with his first day “on the job” at Vought International.
Initially nervous about how he’ll perform in the real world, The Homelander shown in Diabolical is a world apart from his future self in The Boys proper. He’s anxious, haunted by the past memories of the horrifying laboratory he was raised in, and even a bit cheerful. He’s less like a swaggering, arrogant parody of Superman and more like the wonderous superhero himself. Of course, this is swiftly corrupted as his handler Madelyn Stillwell eggs him on over frustration of his upstaging by Black Noir. She even starts up the disturbing sexual dynamic the two share in The Boys, trailing a finger down his chest and whispering sweet nothings to him.
After his press conference, the episode continues to Homelander’s first actual mission. He flies to the site of a hostage scenario: a chemical factory taken over by insurgents protesting its pollution and poisoning of the surrounding population. He’s told to wait for Black Noir as his backup, but Stillwell’s words ring in his ear and he dives in regardless. He effortlessly dispatches a few patrolling subversives, yet doesn’t use lethal force and makes sure to restrain them before moving on towards the actual hostages. When he gets there, he tries to talk the bad guys down, once again showing off a lighter side to his character.
He disarms two of the criminals — but everything begins to go horribly wrong when he uses heat vision on the last one’s gun and it explodes, killing a hostage. Both the hostages and hostage-takers look at him with horror, and viewers see the fatal flaw to his character. Plenty have speculated on the amount of restraint Superman must exert when using his incredible strength (one thing that separates him from his evil counterpart Bizarro), but Homelander doesn’t have that same iron will. He makes mistakes and with his powers those mistakes mean deaths. It’s demonstrated again in that scene when he rips out a woman’s jaw after she calls him a murderer. That’s the same instinct an ordinary person might have — to want someone to shut up when they say something cutting — but paired with a lack of impulse control and the capacity for incredible violence.
Homelander kills all but one of the witnesses to his crimes in a fit of blind rage, just as Black Noir stumbles in. Once again flashing back to Stillwell’s words, he tries to kill Noir — chasing him throughout the plant until he accidentally blows it up with his laser vision. Black Noir puts himself between Homelander and the last remaining hostage. The two square up for a fight… until Noir snaps the hostage’s neck. This is another example of The Boys acting as a grimly accurate mirror to reality. Those in power don’t debate the ethics of using it. They abuse that power, and others help them cover it up. It’s not just one bad actor, but a system of bad actors working in concert to benefit one another.
With the last remaining hostage dead, Black Noir explains via notepad to Homelander what they’ll do. Claiming there was a bomb, the two give a report to the local news, who lavishly proclaim them as heroes for how they tried to “prevent” the explosion. Homelander later remarks to Stillwell that he learned something from Black Noir after all, and that’s validated by his actions in Season 1 of The Boys, where he and Maeve try to save a plane full of people but actively make things worse. They also cover that up, leaving no witnesses and then claiming they tried their best to stop it. The Boys Presents: Diabolical shows a younger, more innocent Homelander — but also explains exactly how he became the monster he is today.
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