Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t caught up with The Boys Season 4 via an Amazon Prime subscription, so be warned!
The first half of The Boys’ fourth season has been a total doozy thus far, splitting critics’ opinions with its satirical bent on real-world politics, while also delivering the most technically challenging nude super-clone fight in TV history, among other things. Amidst Butcher’s dying days and Homelander’s reflective aging, a new rivalry has emerged in the form of Valorie Curry’s new Seven member Firecracker and Erin Moriarty’s Starlight, and the third and fourth episodes drove home the personal reasons why the villainous supe hates both Annie and her powered persona.
When CinemaBlend spoke with co-creator and showrunner Eric Kripke, he not only told me a few key details about Rob Benedict’s self-pleasuring spa scene, but he also explained why the creative team wanted to give Firecracker and Starlight an arc with genuine comic book friction guiding it. In his words:
You know, beyond all the other things that Firecracker is - and she's a lot - she's also like the anti-Starlight in a way, where she's young and beautiful and fresh-faced, but her ideology just is the opposite of where Annie is. So we liked the idea that they have the same origin story, like any good comic book hero and villain.
While there's possibly an alternate universe where Misty Gray and Annie January became fast friends while on the beauty pageant circuit as young women, that universe is as far away as can be from the current reality in The Boys. Firecracker revealed that teenaged full-of-herself Annie was rude and callous enough to cause a permanent dent in her confidence and vulnerability, which eventually morphed into the personality that turned Firecracker into such a hot commodity for people of a certain demographic.
Eric Kripke continued, saying the concept for Firecracker allowed the team to dig more into the darker corners of Annie's character and backstory:
The idea that Annie sort of made Firecracker is a really classic comic book thing, but it's also interesting from a character perspective, because we wanted to kind of muddy up Annie this year a little bit. In the world of our show, everybody makes mistakes, and nobody's perfect. And it was good and interesting to show that in Annie's past, she wasn't always so nice, and she made mistakes that she regrets. And I think Firecracker is evidence of that.
While Annie may not have killed Firecracker's parents — that particular story beat is central to Frenchie's effed-up relationship (or lack thereof) with Colin — or anything quite so drastic, the idea of a hero being the catalyst for their own key nemesis is indeed a time-honored slice of comic book storytelling. And is proof that someone can have a catastrophically huge impact on another person without having a clue that it's happening.
And as Ep. 4 revealed through Firecracker's TV speech, even when Starlight was responsible for authenticaly heroic behavior, she still unwittingly caused others to suffer. (In that instance, a still-learning Annie accidentally blinded one of the people she was saving from a hostage situation.) The straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was the titular truthbomb that Annie was pregnant, and had an abortion, with Firecracker blaring that extremely personal information to the millions watching her show.
The antagonist's actions sparked Starlight to interrupt the telecast by beating Firecracker's face in, which just creates more red-tape drama for Mother's Milk and others to deal with behind the scenes, while also garnering sympathy and support for the battered and bloodied supe.
It's obviously a twist that comic book readers are used to, where a villain manages to spin public favor away from a core hero, and I'm as intrigued as hell to see how The Boys will save Starlight from becoming public enemy no. 1 within Homelander and Firecracker's fanbase. Assuming it even does, of course, since there's always a chance that the former Seven member will need to go into deep hiding at this point to avoid Antony Starr's all-powerful menace.
New episodes of The Boys stream on Prime Video every Thursday, with lots of other big shows hitting the 2024 TV premiere schedule soon.
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