With The Boys finally back in town (or on television) for Season 3, there are certainly still mysteries hanging overhead when it comes to specific questions that were raised in the second season’s finale? What will be the exact fallout from Homelander’s (Antony Starr) relationship with Stormfront (Aya Cash), and not just in a PR nightmare sense? What does that mean for the rest of the Seven, including Starlight (Erin Moriarty), whose approval ratings seem to have eclipsed even that of her teammate’s? And how will Hughie (Jack Quaid)’s dynamic with Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the rest of The Boys change now that he’s actually working in a government-acknowledged job wrangling supes as part of the Federal Bureau of Superhuman Affairs — unbeknownst to him, underneath an actual supe in Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Dourit)?
Well, as of Season 3’s premiere, the secret about Neuman is out — and it happens in what’s possibly the most grisly fashion. After Hughie discovers that his boss is actually a supe, it doesn’t take long for that news to be passed on to Butcher and the rest of the gang, but what might be most shocking is how quickly that revelation takes place within the season itself. As part of a long-spanning interview about Season 3 with Collider, showrunner Eric Kripke says it was always the intention to pay off that Season 2 shocker sooner rather than later:
“Part of the answer lies with like my own particular sensibility as a writer and mileage varies, but to me, whenever you’re holding one of those secrets over a character’s head, like we were holding over Hughie’s, there’s some good tension to mine from it, and I feel like we mined it. Then the audience, after you have a couple of scenes about it… just starts marking time until it’s revealed. When one of those secrets is over one of the character’s heads, the audience is ahead of you, and they’re ahead of the character because they know what’s going to happen eventually.”
If anything, Kripke says, he wanted the twist about Neuman to come to light earlier in Season 3 because, from a narrative standpoint, it would leave the audience questioning what could happen next in the episodes to come rather than already knowing about one potential bomb that could drop. In Kripke’s words:
“I like having it happen way earlier than anyone’s counting on, because one: it’s surprising… but more importantly, it catches the audience up to where the character is so now they’re in the same position and neither knows what’s going to happen next. I think that’s a more exciting position to write from dramatically. Like I always say to the writers when they’re like, ‘But if we give that away, what happens then?’ I always say to them, ‘If you don’t know, that means that the audience sure as shit doesn’t know, and that’s a good thing.'”
The Boys Season 3 premiered with its first three episodes on June 3, with subsequent episodes released weekly every Friday until the finale on July 8.
