Commentary: The Reaction To Flight 37 Is The Most Realistic Part Of ‘The Boys’

Early on in The Boys, there’s a plot device that becomes pretty essential to maintaining the status quo. By the final season, the superheroes are pretty out and open about their terrible behavior. They feel as if they have nothing to hide. In the beginning, though, those around them went to great lengths in order to hide just how bad they were from the public. These extraordinary cover-ups involved the suppression of evidence and lying to the public. The most egregious: a recording from Flight 37 — more on that in a moment. But the way the show handled the eventual release of the recording was pretty spot on for how something like that would occur in our real world.

As seen in the program’s first season, Flight 37 was crashing when Queen Maeve (Margaret Shaw) and Homelander (Antony Starr) arrived on the scene. The terrified passengers were desperate for the heroes to save them, but Homelander saw the situation for what it was. He wouldn’t be able to stop the plane and decided to just let everyone die, even going so far as to threaten them when they begged for his help. One of the passengers recorded the incident and the footage was recovered from the wreckage. Annie January (Erin Moriarty) wanted to release the footage to show the world just how terrible Homelander could be. Unfortunately, by the time she eventually decided to do so, hiss propaganda machine and fascist takeover had become so strong that they were able to discredit the video immediately.

Even though this is a show about superpowered individuals, it draws a tremendous amount of parallels to real life. Instead of focusing on the character performing heroic acts, the series can be seen as an allegory for people in power. It’s perfectly plausible to believe a politician has a damning video they don’t want the public to see. They could go to great lengths in order to suppress the footage, just like Homelander originally did with the footage from Flight 37. At the same time, there comes a point when an individual could amass so much power and influence that the evidence against them can lose its impact. If the Flight 37 video was released in Season 1, it would have undoubtedly turned public opinion against Homelander. But by the final season, he was in such a different position that the video had no effect and was immediately discredited. This is just one of the many eerie parallels that The Boys shares with our reality.

The Boys is now streaming on Amazon Prime.