The Disgusting Hughie Trend You Never Noticed On The Boys
Spoilers for the first and second seasons of The Boys to follow.
You've got to hand it to Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid). He's come a long way since audiences met him in the first episode of The Boys, living with his dad, working at an A/V store, too timid to even ask his boss for a raise.
But after his girlfriend Robin (Jess Salgueiro) is obliterated in a collision with the super-speedster A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), he takes his revenge into his own hands, linking up with Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) of the anti-Supe vigilante group the Boys in order to help take down the Seven and their enablers at Vought International.
One Redditor has found a parallel that highlights Hughie's growth through the first two seasons, and a possible hint at what's on hand for the third season of The Boys. The post is titled "Wonder [whose] hand he's gonna hold in season 3?" and shares screengrabs to contrast a pair of incidents, one from the first episode of the first season and one from the penultimate installment of the second, each finding Hughie hand in hand with a severed hand.
Who wants to hold Hughie's hands?
In the first example, Hughie is left covered in blood and holding both of Robin's hands after her collision with A-Train vaporizes everything about her forearms. It's shocking and horrifying, and Hughie is shocked and horrified and completely lost, until Butcher comes to him looking for an extra pair of hands for the Boys.
In the second season, his work with the Boys has so toughened him up — or desensitized him to violence, depending on how you want to look at it — that after Lamplighter (Shawn Ashmore) self-immolates in Vought Tower, Hughie cuts the former member of the Seven's hand off himself in order to use the fingerprints to bypass the tower's security. He still has it on hand when he rescues Starlight's mother (Ann Cusack) in the tower. When she asks him whether that's a human hand he's holding, he just asks her to hurry up. That's good character development.
Naturally, this observation has fans wondering whether the trend is going to continue, and if so, whose severed digits are going to end up in Hughie's safe hands in the third season. His fellow members of the Boys are the most common guesses — particularly Kimiko, who might be able to use her healing factor to regrow a hand. Or, as one commenter guessed, it might be an even bigger name. "Butcher's," the poster writes. "He's gonna die in S3. Hughie is becoming independent, and Butcher took off his protection charm." Given their complicated relationship, it's anyone's guess as to how Hughie will respond to that one. If the first two incidents are anything to go by, it won't be the same reaction.