WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for The Boys Season 2, Episode 7, "Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker" available now on Amazon Prime Video.
Throughout its first season and well into its second, The Boys has featured surprise twists. The series thrives on sensationalism, whether in its violence, its set pieces or the storytelling itself. Given that, it's a safe bet to expect a twist that will pull the rug out from under fans' every expectation, and if there's one place it's sure to come, it's from underneath Black Noir's mask.
Fans of the comics will already know that the revelation of Black Noir's identity is a story-upending twist. At the end of the source material, after spending the series following Butcher and the Boys' attempts to finally take their vengeance on Homelander, it turns out Black Noir was a Homelander clone all along. Created by Vought as a safeguard in case the real Homelander ever went rogue, over the years the clone went increasingly mad as he awaited the fulfillment of his true purpose and enacted many of the atrocities Homelander was thought to have committed. The twist transitions much of the focus of the main character's ire onto a different target, and culminates in a climactic fight between Black Noir, Homelander, Butcher and the entire U.S. military.
It makes for an epic finale and a startling reveal... but it's not a surefire bet that the Amazon series will retain the twist. Thus far, the adaptation has freely diverged from the source material, and although the Homelander twist is definitely still possible, it seems less and less probable.
In particular, the show's latest season has included moments that seem intended to endear the audience to Black Noir. In the first season this came in the way of small sight gags of him ineffectually reaching for a caterer's platter or getting an enthusiastic congratulations from Homelander during an otherwise tense scene. But in more recent scenes, like Black Noir offering a small child a stuffed toy or crying in a hallway after the reveal of Compound V's true nature, the show doesn't seem to be setting him up as the true villain. Thus far, he's too sympathetic for that, and while the comic maintained the same air of mystery around the character, it made no such efforts at endearment.
There are alternatives that would make the revelation of Black Noir's identity just as shocking. Stormfront's disclosure that she was Frederick Vought's wife and the first subject of his Compound V experiments indicates that Vought himself could come back in a big way. One possibility is that Black Noir is Vought, kept alive and healthy by Compound V like Stormfront. Alternatively, if the show wanted to riff on the comic's clone concept, it could make Black Noir a clone of Vought.
Given the brief glimpse beneath Black Noir's mask in the latest episode, making Black Noir a clone would be tempting. Although only the lower half of the character's face was visible during his dust-up with Queen Maeve and Starlight, his skin seemed blackened and degraded. It could be that the cloning process is imperfect, hence the reason Black Noir needs to cover up his rapidly deteriorating skin at all times and never speak. This would set up a potentially even scarier possibility: he's immortal.
That same fight where Black Noir's face was partially revealed ended with Queen Maeve force-feeding him an Almond Joy to trigger an allergic reaction, and then kicking away his epi pen and leaving him to suffer through anaphylactic shock. If he died then and there, it would remove one of the Seven's biggest threats... but only if he stays dead. If Black Noir is a clone then Vought could bring him back any time it wanted. It could even create its own army of Black Noirs. If the Almond Joy trick worked once by dumb luck, it would take a miracle for it to work thousands of times over.
Clone or no, fans trying to anticipate the series' direction can be sure that the revelation of Black Noir's identity will come as a groundbreaking discovery. Peeling back just a portion of his mask teased the mystery, and it's only a matter of time before the whole thing comes off.
Amazon Studios' The Boys stars Karl Urban as Billy Butcher, Jack Quaid as Hughie, Laz Alonso as Mother's Milk, Tomer Kapon as Frenchie, Karen Fukuhara as the Female, Erin Moriarty as Annie January, Chace Crawford as the Deep, Antony Starr as Homelander, Aya Cash as Stormfront and Simon Pegg as Hughie's dad. New episodes of Season 2 release Fridays on Amazon Prime Video.