Superhero shows are a weird subgenre of sci-fi. The super-powers and how the superheroes use them in pursuit of their world-saving goals are often the point, and so often skimp on the sci part of sci-fi. The Amazon original The Boys is no different, where the core novum is a chemical (compound V) that gives people superpowers.
I love the show. Though it’s definitely for adults with its violence and psychopathy and depravity, I think it’s closer to what would happen if humans had superhuman powers in a world of late-stage capitalism, enshittification of everything, and wannabe fascists. I’ve been a fan since it first aired. (And can’t wait to dive into the comics after the show wraps.)
It hasn’t really had many interfaces of note across the series. And the one I’m going to talk about in this post isn’t a “big” interface. But it was bad, so I’m coming out of my hiatus to talk about it, and then to make an appeal similar to what I did when I reviewed Idiocracy in 2019.
In the Season 4 finale—hastily renamed “Season 4 Finale” instead of “Assassination Run” after the July 13 assassination attempt of Donald Trump—co-founders of The Boys, Grace Mallory and Butcher, invite the young supe Ryan to an underground bunker with three goals in mind.
- Give him some time with Butcher who, as a kind of stepfather to Ryan, wants to see him before he dies. (Butcher is dying from a “sentient tumor” that developed from his overuse of “Temp V”.)
- Convince Ryan to turn against his father, Homelander.
- Entrap Ryan if he refuses.
It’s this last goal that involves the interface, because sure enough, Ryan is highly conflicted at the idea of killing his father after Butcher explains “You’re the only one who can stop him.”
“You’re the only one who can stop him.” —Butcher
As Ryan tries to leave to think things through, Grace blocks his way, saying “You can’t leave.” Ryan uses his super vision to observe that the walls of the room they’re in are 6 feet thick. Grace tries to explain, “This is the CIA Hazlet Safehouse, designed to hold people like you. I could seal us in here, flood the room with halothene, and we’d all take a nice, long nap.” As Ryan gets more agitated and threatens to leave anyway, she reaches out to a big, red momentary button mounted to the concrete wall beside her, presumably to release the aerosolized anesthesia.
And that’s it. That’s the interface. Because in a show that is very compellingly written, this is bad design.
It’s obvious
Being a big, red panic button, it might as well have a spotlight on it and a neon sign blinking “Press here to suppress.” Any supe worth their salt will recognize it as a threat and seek to disable it. I trust it would have a Normally Closed circuit, so that ripping the button out of the wall or severing the conduit would trip it, but a supe with Ryan or Homelander’s x-ray vision could just follow the circuit back to discover the nature of the halothane system and work from there. Much better is a system that wouldn’t call attention to itself.
It’s hard to get to
It’s hard to tell the complete room layout from the scene. It looks half hospital recovery room, half storage room, and I suspect is a converted supe prison cell (with windows, though?) The button appears to be just inside…the bathroom? Out of sight of the main part of the room, sure, so kind of hidden unless the supe needs to ever pee, but also harder to get to. A single button at around elbow-height works when a near-average-height person is upright and able to reach out to press it. But if you’ve just been knocked down, or had your arm laser-severed, or I don’t know, been body slammed across the room away from that button, you’re screwed. Even a ceiling-to-floor crash bar doesn’t work because it still requires your being within arms reach of that one spot. Better is a system that does not depend on where anyone is in the room for activation.
It works at human response speed
This is world with fast and mind-control supes. It doesn’t make sense to rely on human response times to activate it. Better is a semi-automated system that monitors everything and can respond in microseconds when data trends suspiciously.
Between its being obvious, hard to get to, and requiring manual activation I think nearly every single supe in the show would find it trivial to stop that button from being pressed if they wanted.
The scene could have been written more smartly—without sacrificing the efficiency of the beat—with something like this…
- Grace
- This is the CIA Hazlet Safehouse, designed to hold people like you. If you try to leave…
- Cut to an arc shot of a supe-monitoring display. On the side, a live transcript of the conversation types out Grace’s words as she speaks them. In the center, infrared video of them in the room with overlays for each of them labeled SUPE or human, live vital signs, and a line showing their AI-predicted movements.
- Grace (voiceover)
- …or any of our vital signs crash…
- Cut back to the actors
- Grace
- …the room is flooded with halothane and we all take a nice, long nap.
- Zoom in to Ryan’s face as his eyes dart around and his breathing intensifies.
- Cut to interface reading “escape prediction” and a number rising to 75, 80, 85. At 90 it turns red and a soft alarm goes off.
- Cut to an extreme close up of Ryan’s ear to show he hears this alarm.
This isn’t obvious to the supe, works faster than a human could, and doesn’t rely on a human being in a specific spot.
Now instead of this, we could have Ryan brag about what a bad-ass he is and escape before the system can react, but this moment is constructed in the original to show that Ryan isn’t just an arrogant mini-Homelander. He’s a conflicted adolescent with an adolescent’s poor impulse control, and he panicked seeing her reach for the button. Having an alarm sets that same stage for him to panic. Note that I don’t think it’s good design for a system to tip its hand before it enacts control measures—as this does with the alarm—but it would be more forgivable than the dumb button, which just paints the CIA as incompetent and undermines the diegesis.
OK, that said, this next bit goes out to my fellow Americans:
One of the reasons I have wanted to talk about this show is not just the fascism of the villains, but how it illustrates the corrupting effect of power, and that’s directly related to the coming American election.
With Biden dropping out of the race yesterday, and the Democratic National Convention a month away, I can’t yet formally lean on the merits of the Democratic candidate to make a case for weeks to come. (Though, go go go, Kamala!) But the case against the Republican party almost makes itself.
What we are facing as a nation with this election is existential. The Supreme Court has outrageously ruled that a president is unaccountable for his actions while in office. A dictator’s wet dream. And Trump has declared publicly that he will be a dictator “on day one,” but it’s easy to see that he means “as of day one”. What malignant narcissist willingly gives up power once he has it? His many ties to the wretched Heritage Foundation and its deeply, deeply disturbing Project 2025 (see this video and this one where he directly praises this group and their plan) tell us that if he is elected and his cronies have their way, we fall towards an extremist religious-nationalism that puts The Boys to shame and spells the end of the ideals and institutions that were the reason the United States was invented in the first place. The American Experiment is on the brink.
But to quote the ACLU, despair and resignation are not a strategy. We have to America-up and enact a strategy. Please, please…
Expose the Extremism
Get familiar with the extremist plans (the Christianization and militarization of public school, cutting overtime protections for 4.3 million people, banning labor unions, privatizing Medicare, replacing a million experts with loyalist lackies, putting the DOJ under presidential control, close NOAA and end free weather reports, categorizing LGBTQ+ folks as pederasts and instating a death penalty for it, trying to pass a constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal, and much more) and share those often and loudly on your social media platforms of choice. Especially reach out to anyone on the fence, in a swing state (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), or who thinks they should just sit this one out because the (current) candidates are so old or not doing enough of what they want. We cannot afford “protest votes.”
Volunteer
If you don’t have money to spare (and with the current income inequality plaguing the nation that’s likely to be most of us) you can donate time and effort. If you’re in a solidly-colored state, you can join texting and letter-writing campaigns to those in swing states. If you’re in a swing state (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), you can help canvas directly to voters still deciding. (How they’re still undecided is utterly alien to me, but here we are.) Here are just a few places you can opt to volunteer.
Donate
If you do have money to spare, spare it. Give to progressive and Democratic causes that will use that buying power to get ads, get the word out, and support the vote. Dig deep because I know we’ve heard it before, but this one is critical.
Vote
Most importantly, have a plan to vote. Register if you’re not. If you are, double-check your voter registration status because they are purged just before elections, often bumping democrats for the most trivial of reasons. Vote by mail if you are overseas or if getting time off on the day of might be a problem. Find your polling location. Make a plan with others to go vote together. Charge your phone and bring water in case there are long lines. (And many bastards have worked very hard to ensure there will be long lines.) Get calendar reminders for voting deadlines sent directly to you.
If everyone gets out there and activates the vote, we can avoid giving the absolutely wrong people the power they should not have. You’re the only one who can stop him.
