In Season 3 of The Boys, there are a lot of similarities between Karl Urban’s character Billy Butcher and his biggest enemy, Homelander (Antony Starr). When the season starts, neither man is in the best shape. Homelander’s relationship with Stormfront (Aya Cash) and Starlight (Erin Moriarty) making her co-captain of the Seven has made him unpopular with the public. Butcher, on the other hand, feels limited by the new deal the Boys have with the Bureau of Superhero Affairs and hurt that Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) left the Boys to work for the Bureau. They will soon both go down a slippery slope. Homelander takes over Vought after getting rid of its CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito). Along the way, he puts the other members of the Seven through physical and mental torture. Butcher, on the other hand, starts to take a temporary version of Compound V by mouth. This gives him superpowers, but it also makes the other Boys dislike him. And the most recent episode, “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed,” ties them together even more by showing that they’ve both been hurt in the past.
Throughout the season, Butcher has been looking for the weapon that can finally kill Homelander. This leads him and the Boys to find out that Homelander’s predecessor, Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), wasn’t as dead as everyone thought. After some very painful experiments by Russian scientists, the patriotic superhero can now fire a radioactive beam that takes the Compound V out of someone’s bloodstream, making them powerless. Butcher and Hughie make a deal with Soldier Boy: if they help him find and kill the members of his old superhero team, Payback, who sold him to the Russians, he’ll help them kill Homelander. In “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed,” the three friends are trying to find the hero Mindstorm. However, Mindstorm traps Butcher in a psychic nightmare where he remembers his childhood. Mindstorm also shows why Payback betrayed Soldier Boy: Vought wanted to make a new hero out of Soldier Boy’s DNA to replace him. So, the big news is that Soldier Boy is in fact Homelander’s father!
Most of “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed” is about how that relationship came to be, as well as Butcher’s problems with his father Sam (Brendan Murray). Sam would beat up young Billy and his brother Lenny (Jack Fulton) all the time, and he would always put down Lenny for being more in touch with his feelings. This made Billy act out at school: when confronted by a teacher for selling weed, he attacks the teacher, and when Lenny begs him not to join the SAS, Billy snaps, “You can’t be a poof all your life!” — basically saying the same thing his father said to Lenny. This leads to Lenny killing himself, which has been a problem for Butcher ever since.
Butcher has to deal with the fact that he may be killing Hughie the same way he killed his younger brother, as if that wasn’t bad enough. In Season 2, Butcher’s aunt Judy (Barbara Gordon) says that Hughie looks just like Lenny, and Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) says that Hughie is Butcher’s “canary,” or more accurately, his conscience. But Hughie seems to be going down a slippery slope of his own. When he finds out that his boss, Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), is the superhuman who has been popping people’s heads, he rejoins the Boys and even takes some temporary V. Even though Hughie starts to like his powers, Starlight tells Butcher that the temp-V will kill him. Butcher doesn’t tell Hughie this, and even offers to get him more temp-V. Lenny’s psychic self says it best: Butcher is following in the footsteps of his father and leading Hughie to his death.
Homelander has his own father issues because he was made in a lab. Unlike Superman, his inspiration, he has never known the love and warmth of a parent. This changed when he found out that his sexual assault on Butcher’s wife Becca had given him a son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) (Shantel VanSanten). The goal of Season 2 of Homelander is to push Ryan to use his natural powers, even if that means pushing him off the roof of Becca’s house. All of this comes to a head when Ryan uses his heat vision to hurt Stormfront badly, but in the process, he kills Becca. And Ryan picks Butcher instead of Homelander, which hurts the superhero’s pride. In “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed,” he continues to be obsessed with making a son that looks like him. He threatens Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) by saying he will take her eggs and make a child that looks like her. For Homelander, family isn’t about unconditional love, but about making the best superhero there is, no matter what.
Soldier Boy also has this quality. In “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed,” Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) talks about how Soldier Boy hurt him and the other members of Payback in different scenes. This shows not only how Homelander treated the Seven, but also why the silent ninja and the rest of Payback betrayed Soldier Boy in the end. They had had enough of his abuse. And now that Homelander knows that Soldier Boy might be his father, the stage is set for him to either follow in his father’s footsteps if his allies turn against him or do something even worse if they work together.
