The Boys Season 2 Moment With The Most Meaning For Billy And Hughie
With superhero movies and TV shows now more popular than they've ever been, the pop culture landscape is ripe for a subversive story in the genre. One of the shows that has delivered in that department has been the Amazon Prime series The Boys. Set in an alternate universe where numerous people, or "supes," have superpowers of varying degrees, the show has taken superhero stories and added several corrupting elements like Vought, a corporation that will cross any line to make a profit, and Stormfront, a supe who turns out to have been in the Nazi inner circle in Germany during the '30s and '40s. The combination of such factors has led to several intriguing questions, chief among them the issue of how superheroes can be held accountable when they're all-powerful and have no moral compass.
With Vought's supes on one side, a team of individuals hurt by them is on the other, led by Karl Urban's Billy Butcher. One of the key members of said team is Jack Quaid's Hughie Campbell, whose girlfriend, Robin, dies in front of him in the pilot when speedster A-Train runs through her and kills her. A-Train, however, suffers no consequences for his actions. The relationship between Butcher and Hughie has been fraught, as the two have often not seen eye-to-eye on things, but there's a season 2 moment that has been the most meaningful in their relationship so far.
When Hughie is injured, Butcher opens up
In season 2, the team gets caught in the midst of a supe prison break while investigating Sage Grove, a site Vought is using for illegal human experimentation. Hughie gets grievously injured by an escaped supe, causing Butcher and Annie January, aka Starlight, to spring into action to get him to a hospital. While watching over him in the hospital bed, Butcher and Annie bond over their shared love for Hughie, gently ribbing his shampoo choice before talking about his positive character traits. Annie finally says that Hughie's a better person than either of them and with a sigh, Butcher agrees.
This is a particularly poignant moment because it's the closest Butcher has come to revealing his true feelings about Hughie. Butcher is notoriously closed-off emotionally, seemingly driven only by anger toward Homelander for what he did to his wife, Becca, and rarely expresses affection toward anyone else. As such, his agreement on Hughie's character is a key moment in their relationship. Even though he's unconscious through it, the fact that Butcher is willing to speak about Hughie in an endearing manner at all shows how close the two have grown. It also shows how far Butcher has come, as this would be unfathomable from the season 1 Butcher who abandoned his allies to the mercy of Vought to go chase down Homelander.
Butcher went through a lot of emotional growth in the second season, and this moment where the audience sees how far he and Hughie have come is not the only example. With the two men going their separate ways at the end of season 2, it remains to be seen how their relationship will change when The Boys returns for its third season on Amazon Prime.