There have been many similarities drawn between Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and Homelander (David Harbour) in the third season of The Boys (Antony Starr). When the season begins, neither player is in the greatest possible shape. With Stormfront and Starlight taking over as co-captain of the Seven, Homelander has fallen out of favour with the public, while Butcher feels constrained by a new arrangement between The Boys of Summer and the Bureau of Superhero Affairs, and he is hurt by the fact that Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) left The Boys to join the Bureau. They’ll soon find themselves on a precipice that they can’t get out of. When Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) is ousted as CEO of Vought, Homelander takes control and tortures the remaining Seven members.
On the other side, Butcher begins taking an experimental form of Compound V, granting him superhuman abilities at the expense of the other Boys. Even more so in the most recent episode, “Here Comes a Candle To Light You to Bed,” which ties both of them even deeper via common trauma. Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), Homelander’s forerunner, was actually alive and well, as Butcher and the Boys find in the second half of the season while searching for the weapon that will ultimately put an end to Homelander. The patriotic superhero can now shoot a radioactive beam that removes the Compound V from someone’s veins, making them helpless, according to Russian doctors’ gruesome research. Soldier Boy makes a bargain with Butcher and Hughie: if they help him track down and murder the members of his previous superhero team Payback who sold him to the Russians, he’ll help them take down Homelander as well.
Butcher finds himself ensnared in a mental nightmare remembering his boyhood in “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed,” when the trio is on the trail of hero Mindstorm. Payback betrayed Soldier Boy because Vought wanted to use his genetic material to build a new hero to take his place. Now we learn that Soldier Boy (Homelander’s father) really is his son. Butcher’s connection with his father Sam is the centre of “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed,” which is also about Butcher’s own troubles with his father (Brendan Murray). For whatever reason, Sam would beat Billy and brother Lenny (Jack Fulton) on a regular basis and slam them for being more in touch with their feelings.
Consequently, Billy reacted angrily when questioned by a schoolteacher for selling pot and when Lenny begged him to stay at school instead of joining the SAS, saying, “You can’t be a poof all your life!” As a result, Lenny takes his own life, a decision that has weighed heavily on Butcher ever since. To add insult to injury, Butcher must deal with the notion that he may be doing the exact same thing to his younger brother Hughie. Because he looks so much like Lenny, both Butcher’s aunt Judy (Barbara Gordon) and Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) refer to Hughie as “the canary” (or, more accurately, his conscience) in Season 2.
After learning his employer Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) is the superhuman responsible for busting people’s heads, Hughie re-joins the Boys and even takes on some temporary V of his own. Although Hughie develops a fondness for his abilities, Starlight confronts Butcher and reveals that the temp-V would have deadly repercussions — and Butcher ends up hiding this from Hughie, even promising to buy him more temp-V. Butcher is following in his father’s footsteps and leading Hughie to certain death, as the mental version of Lenny concisely puts it. Furthermore, Homelander has his own troubles with fatherhood because he was created in a lab, unlike his model, Superman, who was raised by his parents. This all changed when he discovered he was the father of Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), the boy he conceived with Butcher’s wife Becca as a consequence of a sexual assault (Shantel VanSanten). At one point, Homelander wants to shove Ryan over the top of Becca’s house and into releasing his innate abilities.
Becca and Stormfront are both gravely wounded when Ryan unleashed his heat vision and killed them both. It’s a blow to Homelander’s ego that Ryan goes with Butcher rather than him. Here comes a candle that will light you up to the bed, where he makes threats against the queen, stating that he will extract her eggs and produce a kid in her own image. When it comes to Homelander, family isn’t about unconditional love so much as it is about creating the finest possible superhero. It’s something Soldier Boy has in common. Soldier Boy’s attack on Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) and the rest of Payback is depicted in many sequences in “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Sleep.” Since of this, the quiet ninja and other members of Payback eventually turned on Soldier Boy because they’d had enough of his tyrannical treatment of them. While Soldier Boy may be Homelander’s father, the scenario is prepared for him to follow in his father’s footsteps or even worse if he joins forces with his comrades.