No, Eric. No, you did not.
Anyone who has watched the first 15 minutes of The Boys season 3 now knows that the show has outdone itself in terms of pure shocking sexual depravity and violence once again. Kripke likes to describe the beginning of each Boys season as a sort of James Bond opening setpiece. For three seasons in a row, the show has featured a moment early on that is seemingly unconnected from the rest of the season’s main plot and instead establishes what life is like on the ground for Billy Butcher’s Boys as they try to take down errant supes day-by-day. The case presented in the opening moments of season 3 episode 1 “Payback” is by far the most extreme and gruesome example yet.
Butcher (Karl Urban) and his two remaining Boys teammates, Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) have a lead on a sure-to-be wild party thrown by the shrinking superhero named Termite. As Kimiko and Frenchie infiltrate the party, they find all the usual signs of Vought hero degeneracy: copious amounts of cocaine, simulated sex with Barbie dolls, the whole nine yards. But they also walk in on something that they, nor anyone else, could have ever wanted to see.
After a generous bump of cocaine, Termite shrinks down to the size of an insect and then…well, he crawls into a human penis, you see. Unfortunately for that human penis, Termite sneezes, accidentally enlarging himself and exploding the penis owner’s body to smithereens.
It’s a bold, grotesque opener to a season that no one could possibly have predicted. But of course, the internet hive mind already did kind of predict it, just in a different, not Boys-related context. Kripke confirms that Termite’s mishap was partially inspired by the Marvel fan memes generated before the release of Avengers: Infinity War that mused as to what would happen if Ant-Man shrunk down, entered into Thanos’s butt, and then expanded.
“We wanted them to fight a superhero and (that concept) just evolves organically, weirdly,” Kripke says. “It starts with ‘well we haven’t done Ant-Man yet’ and then someone says “you know that meme of Ant-Man climbing up Thanos’s butt? We should do that.’”
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