Review: The Boys, “Though The Heavens Fall” | Season 5, Episode 6
"Life...is 90 percent how you react to it."
There’s almost always a letdown when you’re watching a character who’s been explicitly defined as a genius—someone who’s always a few steps ahead of the others, the smartest person in any room. Especially if they’re a villain, the letdown is inevitable: Their powers of intellect must eventually fail for the good guys to win. But that’s rarely as fun as watching someone think circles around other characters. Instead, it brings them back down to earth, dispelling the aura of invincibility that builds up around a person who presents a seemingly superhuman intellect. It saps our appreciation, reminding us that they’re only human, after all.
But it’s a little more dispiriting when the intellect you’re watching is supposed to be superhuman. Sage, we’ve been assured over and over, is beyond brilliant, possessing the kind of smarts that are so far ahead of the rest of us, she may as well have precognition. And for most of these past two seasons, that’s been the rule; even when it seemed as though she was too ignorant of human emotion to account for Homelander firing her last season, we learned it was all part of the plan. She had a long con in mind when bringing Homelander to power, but now that she’s revealed her endgame (solitude, yawn) she’s suddenly talking and acting like someone who’s not even above Butcher’s level of intelligence, let alone the smartest person on the planet.
It’s tricky. On one hand, The Boys writers’ room essentially has a cheat code for Sage, in that she can simply know what they’ve written will unfold, and voila, you’ve got a genius. But then, when the story requires her to fail, it needs to be—at least to my mind, if you want effective storytelling—because of something truly unexpected, a twist so far removed from the planning and scheming we’ve watched that it almost seems like the hand of fate rebuking our overreaching savant.
By this metric, Soldier Boy giving his son the V1 compound in a moment of sentiment is awfully far from shocking. In fact, by the time it happens, there’s almost a sense of inevitability: We’ve watched Soldier Boy confront his past, and see his own love for Klara mirrored in Bombsight’s devotion to Golden Geisha. Add to that the way that Ashley said the supe’s mind was already suffused with a strange pride and affection for his unstable son, and suddenly even average brains like our own could be forgiven for watching Sage’s plan crumble and not want to say to her, “Really?! You’re shocked by that turn of events?” Maybe she came up with this plan following one of her periodic brain surgeries.
It's the one sour note in an otherwise strong episode that finally gets everything moving toward the climax. Even the table-setting for upcoming prequel series Vought Rising was relatively smoothly worked into the plot—specifically, introducing Bombsight, a supe we’ve never met before, to deliver necessarily potent emotional payoff for various arcs with only a couple episodes to go, rather than giving it to a character we already know. If the last installment could be faulted for too much treading water, “Though The Heavens Fall” is almost literally about arriving at the fireworks factory. Okay, more like overpowering eye lasers shooting from a newly immortal Homelander, but still.
