rotten 🫀

Someone’s daughter:

ohhhh man this is gonna be really long and disjointed because i just finished the episode. i'm just gonna be focused on the homelander stuff here bc i feel like that's what we're all here for lol

I have many thoughts about Barbara Findley and her relationship with Homelander, so I'm going to try to unpack some of them here. Their relationship is interesting and twisted -- she's more fucked up than Vogelbaum in many ways, and despite all that, Homelander is still trying to get a sign of approval from her in this scene, and leaves her alive in the end.

First, like the other scientists, she still calls him John. He recognizes her immediately (no big surprise there -- he was asking for her earlier and was disappointed she was offsite).

Unlike with the others (or with Vogelbaum, for that matter), he does not berate her for calling him John or try to correct her. My guess is, in this moment, it doesn't even occur to him that he could ask her to call him Homelander, like he did with Marty just moments ago.

She gives him an order, to put Marty out of his misery.

He tries to act nonchalant and like he doesn't care but follows her order immediately.

He tries to regain control by taking her into the bad room. She's still calling him John, and it still does not occur to him that he could try and get her to call him Homelander instead.

She interrupts him effortlessly when he tries to give her a piece of his mind:

She does make an effort to save the other people in the lab by taking responsibility.

He's clearly upset when she tells him the others were scared of him, "terrified from your first breath".

Now here comes the first interesting part: Homelander tries to get reassurance from her that she wasn't scared of him. Or rather, he knows that she wasn't scared of him (since he can and could read her vitals) and wants a reassuring answer from her as to why that was:

It almost seems like he's hoping for an answer along the lines of, "I was not scared of you because I knew you would never hurt me. I always knew you were a good boy." For a very brief moment, it looks like he's genuinely hoping she'll say what he's always wanted to hear (but has never heard) from her mouth, some kind of expression of love for him.

Instead, she tells him the ugly truth why she was so certain he would not hurt her.

Now, here comes the second interesting part: Unlike Vogelbaum, she still works at Vought, and from the way she tells the story, I get the sense it may have been her idea to bring in the psychologists and try to engineer his need for love.

It's pretty clear that, unlike Vogelbaum, she still takes pride in her work. She knows there's a really good chance she's going to die today, but she's still proud of what she did. Unlike Vogelbaum, she does not consider him her greatest failure.

On the contrary, she seems to consider him the success of a fucked up but (to her) intellectually stimulating experiment, and she outright says so:

It's a double punch because she tells him that engineering "human" needs in him, the thing he hates the most, was a greater success than developing his physical powers and making him the strongest man on earth, something he clings on to as a source of pride.

but one of the most annoying recent fandom trends is forcing characters into this nuclear family dynamic and the way it's made shipping discourse unbearable. "alexei's the dad, bob yelena and ava are the big siblings and bob is the little brother," on paper, is a harmless headcanon. the problem is the weaponization of these family headcanons to fuel ship wars.

bob and yelena have a deep bond in thunderbolts. you can interpret it as a sibling dynamic. you can also interpret it as romantic or queerplatonic or literally whatever you want. the problem is the same people who call bob yelena's "little brother" are simultaneously saying that any romantic interpretation of their characters is "incestuous weirdo behavior."

like, can we not?

and while boblena is the ship that's taking the most heat right now, i've been seeing hostility towards any variation of any thunderbolts ships. john/ava, john/bob, bucky/alexei, bob/void (which, lmfao, is SUCH a typical ship to me that people getting up in arms about it just proves we've let too many normies into fandom spaces). even yelena/kate is catching strays right now. and it doesn't have to be this way.

again, can we not? just say you're not into any of the ships and move on with your life.

(spoilers obviously)

This reminded me a lot of 80s disaster films where the plot is super basic so you need to rely on strong characters and high stakes with a dangerous environment. No elements of that were felt here authentically

Antony Starr and Viola Davis gave an awful script their best shot. Love them both for that

Whoever wrote this script has never seen a real family interact. May have never seen real people

Can we please take the outdated “teenagers hate their parents” stereotype and yeet it off the helicopter with Rutledge

Rutledge definitely lived

I would let Edward Rutledge ruin my life

I kept expecting a “she’s got help” moment of women empowerment but thank god there wasn’t one

Why did they only mention Sutton’s PTSD once when that could’ve been a uniting element between her and Rutledge???

My husband kept laughing at the very incorrect tech jargon

“SCHVITZING IN THE SAUNA” is the funniest line I have ever heard

Of course the British character is a stereotype. Why not just have him carry tea around?

Everyone here is a bit of a stereotype tbh

I would let those twin guards in the kitchen ruin my life

The only character I carried about was the South Korean humanitarian. She could stab me any time

“100 years ago neither of us could vote” well thank god racism and sexism don’t exist anymore

Goodness gracious this was not the right timing in the current American political climate