'The Boys' Boss Breaks Down Season 3's Cameos and Homelander's Revelation

Warning: This story contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Season 3 of The Boys,

streaming now on Prime Video

. Read at your own risk!

The Boys is back and it's more explosive than ever.

Literally. The third season began with Termite (Brett Geddes) shrinking down so he could get intimate from inside his partner's body — only for his cocaine-stuffed nose to fail him, causing him to sneeze, which destroyed his partner.

"Obviously the Termite sequence is huge, but Season 1 was Robin, Season 2 was this Black Noir sequence set to the Rolling Stones, and part of it is, I'm sure, my training is a network showrunner [that is], 'Entertain people and hook them in fast.' And so, I like to start my seasons with something that is undeniably big and wild," creator and showrunner Eric Kripke tells Metacritic.

"There's madness in every episode!" he continues.

The first three episodes of Season 3 also included Homelander (Antony Starr) changing the narrative about his relationship with Stormfront (Aya Cash) in public (while attending the premiere of the latest Vought film, The Dawn of the Seven, but visiting her in private. (Homelander's son Ryan lasered her in the second season finale, but she did not die and Vought was keeping her alive via hospital machinery.) A shell of the supe she once was, Stormfront could barely even blink in response to Homelander's questions, and she ended up killing herself (or so we're told), which led Homelander, who was supposed to be saving a young woman from jumping off a building, to push her to do it instead. He also dropped the perfect, All-American act on stage at his birthday celebration, letting a fraction of his true rage and narcissism shine, which led to his approval rating within his usual demographic to rise.

Meanwhile, though, Starlight (Erin Moriarty) was a star on the rise herself, asked to co-lead the team alongside Homelander and supposedly given full power to select the next member of The Seven, who would come from a Vought-produced reality show. Homelander couldn't allow her to usurp him, though, and ended up bringing back The Deep (Chace Crawford), but telling the public it was Starlight's idea and forcing the Deep to prove his loyalty by eating his friend Timothy. Homelander also created a narrative that he and Starlight were in a relationship now, leading her to have to temper her own rage momentarily.

Obviously, Homelander, who was already a problem, was going off the rails and would need to be dealt with as soon as possible.

But first, things were even busier on the vigilante side of the story, as Hughie (Jack Quaid) was working with Victoria (Claudia Doumit) to take down supes, but he soon witnessed her exploding a man's head (and soon after that learned she's Stan Edgar's sort-of adopted daughter) and rejoined Butcher (Karl Urban) and the rest of the titular boys more officially.

Butcher had been on his best behavior for awhile, including looking in on Ryan, who was living in a remote area with Grace (Laila Robins), but after an offer from Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) to try Temp V, which gives a person supe powers for 24 hours, he gave over to his darker impulses, including taking out original Payback member Gunpowder (Sean Patrick Flanery) — and lasering a car in half while doing so.

After some time with his own family, Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso) also returned to the team. Now back together, the mission became to get answers about what killed Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) because it might be able to take out Homelander, too.

Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) tracked down Soldier Boy's ex Crimson Countess (Laurie Holden) where she was performing at a Vought theme park ("The spotlight is a fickle thing!" Kripke says), and that went as well as you might expect, with her causing more carnage than help.

But eventually Grace explained what she knew: The Russians, as told to her by Crimson Countess, had "some kind of gun or weapon" that killed Soldier Boy. They took his body, leaving behind bloody destruction that killed more than 100 soldiers and made Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) so disfigured he suddenly wanted to wear his mask (and he hasn't taken it off since). The Russians took Soldier Boy's body and their weapon, and the trail ran cold as to exactly where they were hiding them.

So, there's obviously already a lot to unpack in only a few episodes.

To help with that, here, Kripke talks to Metacritic to answer several The Boys Season 3 burning questions (so far).

The death of Stormfront was such a big deal for Homelander, but can we trust that what the news reported happened really happened, let alone that she's dead at all? And why did you want to remove her from the story at this point?

Here's what I would say: I would say she's dead for now. [Laughs] We thought it was important as a step to Homelander's breakdown. After a lifetime of successfully keeping a mask on in the public, he needed something very extreme to happen to let that mask slip in front of millions and millions of people. And that was a big enough event that could do that. Believe me, I want to be in the Aya Cash business for the rest of my life — I would work with her every day if I could — but Stormfront's story was by and large told; there wasn't much more for her to do, except to give Homelander horrible hand jobs from her hospital bed, as one does.

There's a moment where Homelander tells Starlight he will be just fine being feared if he can't be loved, which feels like a big departure for a man who kept that mask on for so long. Why did you feel that was an important departure to make here?

One point I would make is I wouldn't totally trust him yet, though he is definitely heading in that direction. The big meta story of the show is this slow unraveling of Homelander as we wonder, "Can Butcher stop him?" That's the center of gravity. So, if we know that inevitably we're building towards a guy who has had a full sociopathic break and is an apocalyptic threat to the planet unless Butcher can stop him, just working backwards from that, we started looking at, "OK so where are the guardrails that keep him from tearing down the planet?" One really important one is his completely naked desire to be loved. But if you start playing with that, and you start peeling that back, and you're starting to get him to realize maybe he doesn't need it, what he does learn this season is, "Wait, I can show them who I really am and they love me even more." That's an amazing revelation for him. He still needs their love. He just needs it in the way that Trump needs it from the MAGA people.

And it feels like, more than ever, there are very deliberate parallels between Homelander and Starlight to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Not the fake romance, but many of the other public-facing pieces. What made now the right time to lean harder into that?

I don't try to overthink it. In general, the writers write the thing that they're angry about or frightened of as it's going on, and we wrote this in early 2020. This was before January 6 — that happened while we were writing. The build up to the election was happening when we were writing, COVID happened when we were writing. So, all of these things just bleed into the show. It's interesting, I will admit to thinking about Trump quite a bit; we didn't think about Hillary that much, at least in terms of Starlight or any metaphor about Hillary.

It appears that Butcher turning his back on Ryan is going to have a big impact on both of them. How much of Butcher's actions in that moment was to protect the kid, given him taking Temp V, versus doing so because of his fear of mimicking his own poor paternal role model?

It's both and it's a pretty complicated issue. In terms of Ryan, I think the really big difference between Butcher and Homelander is Homelander really wants to raise Ryan to be him and Butcher is terrified of raising Ryan to be him. Unfortunately Butcher is completely ill suited to be a parent because of the way his own father raised him; so much of the season is about this generational trauma between fathers and sons. And so, he doesn't know any better but to say, "I'm bad for this kid, and I'm going to push this kid away." And then a certain amount of it is he's riled up from this Temp V, and I don't think he's totally acting himself. It's triggering things in a way that maybe he had more sense not to say. But I think the thing that's the most painful about all that is there is a part of him that means it. How can you not be angry at the kid, logically or not? And I think he really does, in that moment, want to push the kid away. But the scariest and most horrible thing someone could say is something that has a little bit of truth in it. And I think it has a little bit of truth in it for Butcher.

To end on a lighter note, there are a couple of really fun cameos in the first few episodes: Charlize Theron as Stormfront in TheDawn of the Seven and the return of Billy Zane, now in the movie about The Deep. How did those come about?

For Charlize, it was the rigorous process of whoever would return [executive producer] Seth Rogen's calls. [Laughs] I think in the original draft we were like, "And then Stormfront turns around and it's a huge movie star." We just wanted to see that, "Oh they would have recast Stormfront and it would be this huge movie star." And we were trying to think of who it should be, and someone in my office — Lisa Donner — said, "Just so you know, Charlize just made a movie with Seth and is in the Fast and Furious movie that Neal [H. Moritz] another one of our producers [does], is that someone that we should ask? And so, we had Seth and [executive producer] Evan Goldberg reached out to her and she agreed. I was as stunned and amazed and grateful as anybody. And it was a lot! It was more than just like, "Hey, I'm gonna come in for an hour as a favor." She has to get fitted for the super suit, she has to come in for a full day of production, she has to commit to the most ridiculous line that an Oscar winner has to say. [Laughs] She was such an incredible sport, I just give her all the credit in the world for doing that. 

One thing about the first episode [is] we premiered in Paris, which is amazing, and we got to sit in the audience and watch it, and I'm sitting next to Anthony, and we achieved a level of meta that is impossible. I'm watching Antony in a movie theater watch himself on a screen, and on the screen is Antony in a movie theater watching himself on the screen at a premiere. So, the layers of it broke my brain.

And Billy's the best and he has such a good sense of humor. And Billy first appeared on the show in Season 1; he's in that Popclaw Cinemax movie. And we just loved that Billy Zane is playing himself in this Cinemax movie. And so when it came time [to] need an actor who might credibly show up as the person who is swallowing up most of the budget of a Lifetime movie [Laughs] — like F. Murray Abraham comes out for a day or two — it occurred to me that what would be a really funny running joke is if we brought back Billy. He's a good dude, so it was really easy; we just called him, and he was excited and ready to come back, and is amazing and so funny in that part.

And what about that Termite opener and death of Timothy? If you missed the links above, click here for our sister site TV Guide's breakdown of the former and click here for their memorial for the latter. 

The Boys

.