Summary
“One Plus One Equals Two” establishes how Homelander decided to control public perception and abandoned his morals in the process.
This recap of Amazon’s The Boys Presents: Diabolical season 1, episode 8, “One Plus One Equals Two,” contains spoilers.
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The Boys Presents: Diabolical season 1, episode 8 recap
This time, Terror is delightfully chewing on a bone. A bloody bone. Uh, it is attached to a foot.
Good boy.
This is a Homelander (Antony Starr) prequel or origin story. He is now introduced to a crowd and tells his life story. He wanted to play baseball and hit a home run for the Yankees. While he describes his yarn, flashbacks are folded into his narrative as a child discovering his heat vision superpower. They include training as a child to be the man he is today. One of those memories is of his mentor and friend. Now, back in real-time, he introduces that person—Black Noir.
Later, Madelyn Stillwell (Elizabeth Shue) doesn’t like that Homelander lets Black Noir steal his spotlight. She reminds him how good it felt that everyone who saw him wanted to be him, be with him, and fudge him. This, uh, gets Homelander to stand at attention. Madelyn looks down with approval and tells him not to let Black Noir take your thunder. She leaves him with this parting thought about dropping “the” from his name. As she goes, Homelander sees Black Noir hiding around the corner.
Now cut to a new story. The CLF has taken over a chemical plant and has kept all the manager’s hostage. He removes them by wrapping them with a metal pipe and a hose. He disables all the weapons of the three remaining CLF who are holding the hostages in the control room. However, a CLF agent has a gun that is now twisted like a pretzel at the head of a hostage. He said Homelander needs to go or pull the trigger because the weapon will explode, killing them.
Our hero, though, has a great plan. How can he hold a gun that is now 500 degrees? So, he heats the weapon with his heat vision. Smart, right? Well, no. The weapon explodes, killing the hostage and taking off the bad guy’s hand.
This is where we start to understand the origin of Homelander’s rage problems. When a CLF member accuses him of being a psycho, he pushes her to a wall and rips off her jaw. When the hostages and the last bad guy accuse him of being a cold-blooded murderer, he flashes back to his awful childhood. Everyone is dead when he comes to, except for one female hostage who doesn’t like him very much (ungrateful brat).
That’s when he feels Black Noir’s eyes on him—judging him. So Homelander attacks him and chases him all over the plant. This causes it to explode. Homelander wakes up and finds himself under the rubble, soaked in blood. He sees that ungrateful brat crawling away as she somehow survives. Black Noir comes up and has her safely in his arms as he is about to zap her to hell.
He then snaps her neck.
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