‘The Boys’ – ‘We’ll Keep The Red Flag Flying Here’ – Review
It’s getting downright messy in Season Four of The Boys, and we haven’t even mentioned the violence, as the Supes are angling for world domination, and our favourite group of ill-tempered vigilantes look for all manner of new measures to chop them back down to size.
Homelander inducts two new members into The Seven: Sage and Firecracker. Meanwhile, Butcher and his old war comrade and CIA contact, Joe Kessler, hatch a plan to bring Ryan to their side in the fight against Homelander. Annie confronts Firecracker over her anti-Starlight rhetoric, but Firecracker gives Annie a painful reminder about her own past.
Episode Three, ‘We’ll Keep The Red Flag Flying Here’, picks up in the immediate aftermath of Ryan’s ‘save’, and well, the choreography didn’t go according to plan. And that’s where The Boys is right: if you’re expecting something to go one way, it’ll definitely go the other, and showrunner Eric Kripke is having a boatload of fun with the extremities of just how far he can push not only the gore but the drama with Season Four. And there’s a lot of it on display. In ‘We’ll Keep The Red Flag Flying Here’, it seems like everything is going to hell. Not just for Ryan, but Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) stake out their own mission on the side, and due to Frenchie’s compounding guilt and love for psychedelics, the action gets all kinds of crazy! Then there’s the grand clusterfuck of Vought on Ice, and it’s a hilarious and utterly bloody catastrophe in every sense of the world.
While gore and guts are an equal measure of the make-up of The Boys, ‘We’ll Keep The Red Flag Flying Here’ places a whole heap of focus on its heavy drama, and this brings us back to Hughie and his mother, Daphne (Rosemarie DeWitt) who has finally returned back into his life, and in Episode Three we finally get an explanation. This insight into Daphne’s life with Hughie and the mental anguish that she suffered through brings a lot of clarification into Hughie’s motives and actions, and there’s a deep sense of resolution between the two of them that is showing.
Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher is, for the first time, also experiencing a heavy dose of emotional weight, and with his death likely imminent, he’s looking for a way to mend his relationship with Ryan, along with trying to find some way to remove him from his father’s grip. While audiences have always seen Butcher in a single light as that of a hulking, brute man, he’s, in essence, an incredibly multi-faceted character whose one redeeming characteristic is his enduring love for his wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten). While his desire to rendevous with Ryan stemmed from ulterior motives, coached in part by his CIA buddy Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), we see in ‘We’ll Keep The Red Flag Flying Here’ Butcher opening up for the very first time and this moment gives the episode a sense of much-needed sentiment.
But if there’s one person who doesn’t take kindly to Butcher and Ryan’s heart-to-heart, it’s Homelander…. and he’s NOT happy about it! Over four seasons, Antony Starr has shown a talent for playing up the neck-twitching narcissism of Homelander to utter flawless perfection, and it seems like Ryan’s return to Butcher might have finally pushed this already psychotic predator a little too far. We all know that this ruthless Supe has been hanging onto his sanity by a thread, but it looks like he’s finally ready to go nuclear, and it doesn’t bode well for humans or Supe kind. His murderous ticks are worked overtime in the episode, and stuck in the middle of it is the considerably stressed Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie), who, despite being the ‘girl boss of girl bosses’, is put in her place in a very mean way.
With Homelander mere moments away from finally snapping and Butcher getting in touch with his humanity, we’re in uncharted waters in The Boys, and what comes next in this fiendishly freaky series is anyone’s guess.
The Boys streams every Friday on Prime Video.
Image: Prime Video
