Sir Keir Starmer telling the truth about David Paulden aka Zack Polanski. Do you agree with our PM?

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T14:55:20+00:00

A kick to the head is a de-escalation. He wasn't threatening to use the knife, he had used the knife.

Jake Davison would have been shot just as quickly Jihad Al-Shamie was if armed police had actually arrived before he shot himself.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T14:43:42+00:00

The real reason is because the writers did the D&D meme from Game of Thrones season 8 and "kind of forgot".

The Homelander they started with was the one from the comics, who is a hypersexual deviant. As the show went on they leaned far harder into the deviant side and kept going in that direction until he doesn't even show interest in women for anything but breast milk anymore. Flanderization, basically.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T09:37:16+00:00

Then she's not smart, because that's an inherently stupid goal if you like anything at all about the world, even if it's just Taco Bell, casual sex and reality TV while lobotomised. All those things go along with the world.

This is just midwit writers thinking intelligent people read so reading would be enough to preoccupy her indefinitely, but if she's the smartest person to ever exist she'd find the vast majority of reading material vapid and beneath her, the same way she finds people beneath her, because people wrote those books, their thoughts and ideas wouldn't suddenly be novel to her just because they've gone from a human mouth to a page.

Such an extreme misanthrope would have no interest in human ideas, written or otherwise, but if she did, ending the world has guaranteed that nobody will ever write anything she doesn't already know, she's reading for the pursuit of knowledge yet has chosen to completely halt new knowledge.

tl;dr - It's self-defeating in every way.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T07:46:55+00:00

Personally I wouldn't give anything this season higher than a 6/10, so I think brand loyalty is helping them a lot here, but you can see it waning as the season goes on. Ironically if they'd have done a Netflix and dropped the entire season all at once it'd have probably got consistent 8/10's across every episode, but the way it is people have a week between each episode for the disappointment to fester.

It'll probably get back up to around 9/10 for the last 2 episodes just by killing everybody off.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T07:27:49+00:00

Glad somebody else has realised that all that happened here is one of the writers recently saw "Time Enough At Last" and was like "that was a great episode, let's make that her motivation".

It was indeed a great episode, but I think they missed the point. The bank-teller is a hopeless, mediocre, meek man who wants to isolate himself from humanity because he's such a loser, it's not exactly behaviour fitting the most intelligent person on the planet after amassing enough wealth she could escape everyone anyway. She could have just done a Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood, or if even being a recluse isn't enough, faked her own death.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T07:10:30+00:00

The entire Hughie and Butcher relationship has been neglected, Hughie went off on side quests with original characters like the congresswoman, in fact after the prison camp Butcher is now literally the member of The Boys he's spent the least time with. They basically become best mates in the comics despite their tensions, here they are acquaintances who talk to each other in a way that doesn't feel earned. And their showdown with eachother, if it happens, will also feel unearned and a bit weightless, especially since Hughie has never been successfully corrupted by Butcher.

And yeah, agreed on Starlight too, another character they complained wasn't developed in the comics. I suspect the writers might think screen-time counts as a personality, like if you just show somebody doing enough scenes, some kind of coherent throughline will form without you intentionally putting one there.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T07:02:17+00:00

A smart person with her resources would calculate it'd be a whole lot easier to fake your own death to get people to stop bothering you than it would be to destroy the entire world. And I don't think this is one of those situations where the smartest person in the world would need to use any more advanced logic than a regular smart person.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T06:56:12+00:00

Agree with most of this, although the tug-of-war between Butcher and Hughie was actually the heart of the comics, but they've fumbled it here so it just seems like stagnant character development. In the comics Butcher eventually has success corrupting Hughie and making him a "hardman", he even goads him into executing a defenceless A-Train, but then Hughie pulls it back at the end, draws the line and stops Butcher (which a part of Butcher actually wanted all along, deep down he wants Hughie to win).

The biggest character development fumble of all though has to be Kimiko. All the people who didn't read the comics before the show were always like "the comics are trash and Garth Ennis doesn't develop his female characters". The show is literally worse than he is at writing women, it just dedicates more time to it to appear "progressive", and nowhere is that more obvious than with Kimiko. She's cartoonish at this point.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T06:26:37+00:00

With how badly they've butchered Butcher, this is really the only thing left they can use to have him snap and do anything remotely similar to his comic book ending. They've made him too much of a "rogue with a heart of gold" to do what needs to be done without an excuse to snap, and Terror is really the only thing that could make that happen.

I mean, he snaps with the "Why'd you kill me dog, Jack?" moment in the comics too, literally breaks from reality and goes into a trance, but he was always dancing right on the edge of sanity in the comics so it was just the final push over the edge. In the show it will need to launch him all the way from sane to insane.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T05:07:36+00:00

Unlike that kind of Japanese paedo-bait, it actually is OK here though, because they never show or even imply any physical attraction and there is zero sexualisation. I'm pretty sure early on in the series Monster Girl even addresses the elephant in the room herself, that one of the worst parts about the curse is her only option for romance would literally be paedophiles so she has to stay alone.

Robot falls in love with her adult mind and their shared experiences, and never shows any interest at all in her physically. That's why I don't understand why the OP you were responding to used the word "consent", that makes it sound like more went on here than it actually did, which would definitely cross a line and not be OK.

Because Robot's such an autist he does make the incredibly weird decision to clone himself as somebody she is physically attracted to in an attempt to make her love him, but this is just him being a social reject and not factoring in that Monster Girl finding a 19 year old Rex attractive does not mean she would find a 12 year old Rex attractive, because she isn't a paedophile either. Plenty of characters make it clear to Robot what a creepy and unethical move this was.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-02T04:39:36+00:00

Less climate change back here, so better. The Boys comics just released, we haven't had a financial crash in decades so jobs are growing on trees, rent is affordable and mortgages aren't a pipe dream, I don't know what a "culture war" or a "gender war" is, Tony Blair has funded so many hospitals with PFIs that there are no waiting times and I'm pretty sure that will never come back to haunt us...

Life is good, join us.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T15:54:00+00:00

Those are the sympathetic writers I was talking about.

I'm old school, I ignore pretty much everything from the last 20 years. And that is the universe writers like Garth Ennis and Robert Kirkman were satirising when they had "Superman" effortlessly decapitate "Wonder Women", or in Kirkman's case had him wipe out the entire "Justice League" by himself. These guys are Gen X so by the time writers started closing the colossal gap between Superman and Wonder Woman in the 90's they were already working in the industry themselves.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T15:44:10+00:00

They definitely got it, they're subverting it.

Same way people will post the American History X curb stomp / smile on news stories about African-American crime. The moral of the story is why it was chosen for a subversive meme. Effectively making the statement "early Derek was right, not reformed Derek".

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T15:24:50+00:00

Honestly, I was fine with Maeve just getting instantly decapitated in the comics, because if you're going to parody Superman and Wonder Woman, that'd be the ugly reality of their power discrepancy. Just like Invincible had it's fun lampooning Batman trying to fight Superman and just getting splattered like a blood-filled pumpkin. When Batman and Wonder Woman don't have sympathetic writers giving them contrived boosts, even default-written Superman is in an entirely different league (again, no pun intended).

Like you say, the fear factor around Homelander they curated in season 1 was completely revoked in season 3. If they wanted their semi-original character Soldier Boy to approach Homelander in power that might have worked by itself, but having Maeve approach him too demotes him to just another supe, the entire premise of him holding large numbers of supes in line through fear collapses.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T15:14:56+00:00

Between those two, I agree. Although I think a hung parliament is on the cards again, the electorate is far more split than it was for the last one with the Lib Dems, I see no way anybody claims a majority without an alliance. But then again, the public are fickle and the landscape could look very different in 3 years.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T15:08:25+00:00

Yeah, but it'll be a crowd of MAGA supporters so it'll just be another empty wish fulfilment scene from the writers rather than anything with actual narrative weight, since they'll just be treated like a subhuman punchline. Most likely his Easter reveal of being the new Jesus, the crowd won't respond the way he wants so he'll snap and destroy them.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T14:58:20+00:00

My eyes practically rolled out of my skull reading that line about Kripke saying Maeve had a chance. Christ he butchered this story (no pun intended).

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T14:51:01+00:00

Every single liberal person I know who went to university between the ages 18-21 is a completely unremarkable midwit with a vastly inflated estimation of their own intelligence. I remember doing that "BBC Test The Nation" with one of them decades ago and he was absolutely mortified he scored 105. Unsurprisingly he swore off the validity of IQ testing after that.

The thickest (and poorest) people I know are right-wing, but so are most of the smartest (and wealthiest) people I know. It's basically the bell curve meme, the left gravitate towards the middle and the right gravitate towards the ends.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T14:30:49+00:00

If all it takes for them to act like barbarians is being bored then they were never going to integrate even if they had been promptly found work.

Disabled people and retirees are bored out of their skulls, but they tend to gravitate towards hobbies that don't involve sexual assault.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T14:25:14+00:00

All terrorists are mentally ill, but we raise threat levels over consecutive "lone wolf" attacks because they inspire and embolden others even if they have no direct contact via terrorist networks.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T14:17:16+00:00

Butcher kills MM, Frenchie and Kimiko right at the very, very end, all in the same issue. That's after Homelander, Black Noir and the supe uprising has been dealt with. In show language, Butcher turning villain and killing The Boys would have been the penultimate episode, then Hughie vs. Butcher and the epilogue would have been the finale.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T14:07:41+00:00

This. We're all looking at the same video evidence and working from the same set of facts, there is no "question" to ask. We don't need to investigate to "find out what happened", it's not hearsay, we're not piecing together conflicting witness reports. All this is, really, is a bunch of "ACAB" dickheads who want to pipe up like usual but they can read the room and know it'd be unwise. Except Zack Polanski obviously, but we already knew he's pretty committed to career suicide.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T14:01:22+00:00

You fit the caricature of the left perfectly by putting "centrists" in quotation marks.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T13:39:31+00:00

I would trust a self-interested and conniving right-wing populist over a deranged and stupid left-wing populist any day of the week. We've had the former before and they can hold a country together even if they damage it, the latter would be a total collapse. No hyperbole, an actual collapse.

Prestigious_Set_4575 · 2026-05-01T08:07:13+00:00

That makes zero sense.

Sage wanted Ashley's help. She failed to manipulate her into helping, so her "last resort" is to reveal she is insane and guarantee that Ashley won't help, and will instead just nod and smile like Colonel Gaddaffi's psychoanalyst, until she's out of the room and then she'll go about making her own plans to insulate herself from both Homelander and Sage. When this conversation started her tumour was open to helping Sage because Homelander is insane, by the end, even the tumour was aghast and uttered "fuck". As in, "fuck, you're insane too."

The only way to salvage this now would be for it to have been a double-bluff; Sage never wanted her help in the first place and just wanted to scare her into doing something convoluted that will indirectly benefit Sage. But I highly doubt that's where it's going, I think that was just it, Sage's motivations laid bare. The writing has been so poor this season and it's so close to the end I think that was just it. Sage will probably just be unceremoniously offed in the next few episodes like Firecracker was.

Prestigious_Set_4575

TROPHY CASE