The Boys reveals the Homelander twist that WON’T be in the Amazon series
The latest episode of the superhero satire apparently rules out one key Homelander/Black Noir story from the comics. **Contains minor spoilers**
It’s fair to say that Amazon’s superhero satire The Boys has already flown (faster than a speeding bullet) pretty far from its source material, with all sorts of storylines from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s original comic jettisoned or otherwise changed for the on-screen version.
For example, season two’s secret-Nazi supe Stormfront (Aya Cash) was originally a more explicitly evil male character, The Deep (Chace Crawford) was far less of a caped creep while The Boys themselves had a somewhat different, more super-powered backstory.
And now, another major twist from the comics has apparently been scrapped from the series, with a subtle scene in season two’s penultimate (and most recent) episode marking a significant change to the storyline for Antony Starr’s unhinged Seven leader Homelander. Now, The Boys is more unpredictable than ever…
Warning – minor spoilers for The Boys season two episode seven follow, along with major spoilers for The Boys comic book.
Before we explain the change, we need some background. In the comic book version of The Boys one of the most shocking twists comes when mysterious superhero Black Noir – a silent, Batman-like assassin on premiere super-team The Seven – is revealed to be a clone of Homelander, kept in the wings for when the all-American super-psycho truly went over the edge.
In other words, he was the nuclear option – a way to kill and potentially replace Homelander if the worst should happen. But unfortunately a life in the shadows drove this clone even more insane than his “brother”, driving him to commit atrocities and depraved acts in the hope of making the real Homelander doubt his sanity, or to frame him and be given the kill-order.
At this point in the series, fans had already begun to suspect that this storyline wouldn’t be adapted directly to the show. For one thing, one of Black Noir’s atrocities in the comics already played out differently on-screen (in the comics, he indirectly caused the death of leading character Billy Butcher’s wife Becca), and generally speaking the Homelander storyline appeared to be going in a different direction.
However, the penultimate episode of The Boys seemingly proved that this twist has been left on the scrapheap for good – because for the first time fans actually get a glimpse of Black Noir’s face in the show, proving once and for all that he’s not a Homelander clone.
Revealed during a climactic fight scene (which we won’t spoil the details of here), we do only see the lower half of Noir’s face – however it appears to be the face of actor Nathan Mitchell, who has portrayed Black Noir since the series’ first season, and not Antony Starr.
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In other words, there’s no chance that this Black Noir could be a Homelander clone after all – and while this might seem obvious given that Mitchell has been credited as the character since the start, there were still some who wondered if this could be a misdirect given that we still hadn’t seen Black Noir’s face.
Now, it seems all but certain that the Homelander clone plot has been jettisoned for good – unless, of course, The Boys has some deviously twisted way to include that storyline in a different way. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from this series it’s to expect the unexpected…
The Boys releases new episodes on Amazon Prime Video on Fridays. Want something else to watch? Check out our full TV Guide.
