This is a pivotal episode, but we don’t know it until the very end. I love a good twist – hey, I’m good friends with M. Night Shyamalan – and this was a good twist. Maybe one we all started to suspect along the way, but that’s part of the fun of it.
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 6 AHEAD
Butcher: Crisis of Conscience
Butcher ain’t doing well. He coughs more and more as time goes on and he wrestles with his conscience (in the form of Becca) and his opposing desire to just do whatever the fuck it takes to get the job done no matter the collateral damage (as Kessler keeps urging him). He’s sliding closer and closer to Soldier Boy levels of the-end-justifies-the-means and ignore-the-collateral-damage every day.
Honestly I had a hard time watching what happens with Sameer. Just looking at his hastily and brutally amputated leg makes me queasy, more so every time Butcher tries to convince Sameer to make more virus. Every time Butcher might soften just a tiny bit, Joe is there to push him onward.
Joe: Or we could just send you back in a fucking bucket if you don’t do what we say.
Becca appears and questions what he’s doing, but Joe keeps overruling her.
Becca: Are you even trying to get Ryan out anymore, or is it the same old bloodlust all over again? You’re gonna kill one Homelander and just end up with another.
Butcher claims he’s trying to save the world, and can’t do what needs to be done and “keep you happy,” dismissing Becca’s concerns in an awful parallel to how people really do push the nagging sense of guilt from their conscience aside to allow them to do truly horrific things in the real world.
The next time they meet up, Joe comments that Billy looks like shit. Billy tells him to go fuck himself (which he says he already did today – twice).
Kessler allows that he too has struggled with a dual identity, with opposing parts of ourselves – the theme of this season. How after his last tour, Joe came home and tried to be a family man, help his son, go fucking towel shopping. Be normal.
Kessler: But everywhere I looked I saw the ruined faces of those men that you and me tortured and killed. I couldn’t square up who I was at home with the shit I’ve done. That guy taking out the trash and watching Sports Center, that wasn’t me. The real me likes to hear ‘em scream. So tell me, Billy, who’s the real you?
It’s the theme of this season. Who, indeed, is the real you? The real any of us?
When Billy tried to be “normal” with Becca, did it all just feel like an act? Like the darkest case of imposter syndrome?
Too Close to Reality Once Again
Another hard-to-watch story line in this episode belongs to Hughie. Fresh from sprinkling his dad’s ashes around the city he loved, Hughie infiltrates Tek Knight’s Federalist Society big money party to get some intel. This is accomplished by MM incapacitating a minor supe named Web Weaver (by shooting something up his butt because this show is fascinated with butt stuff, seriously – and with MM getting squirted in the face with substances, this time some web when he “puts it in the wrong hole”.) You can’t make this stuff up.
MM: There ain’t enough Purell in the fucking world.
(Nor enough mindfulness apps, which MM keeps desperately using).