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'The Boys' showrunner Eric Kripke says 'Diabolical' finale connects to Season 3 of main series
All eight episodes of The Boys Presents: Diabolical are now streaming on Prime Video.
Have you checked out The Boys Presents: Diabolical yet? ... No? ... Well, what exactly are you waiting for? Despite the fact that it's an anthology comprised of unrelated stories, the finale produced for the new animated series actually shares a bit of narrative DNA with the upcoming third season of the main show (premiering on Amazon's Prime Video streaming service this June).
Written by showrunner/executive producer Simon Racioppa, Diabolical's eighth and final episode ("One Plus One Equals Two") is set during the early days of Homelander's crime-fighting career on behalf of Vought and provides a breezy origin story for his sociopathic, manipulative, and immature tendencies as a superhero capable of mass destruction. The finale also serves to underscore the professional relationship of mutual respect shared between Homelander (Antony Starr) and the reticent Black Noir.
Breaking it all down for Variety, The Boys showrunner/executive producer Eric Kripke confirmed that this episode is not some sort of "What if...?" exercise, but a piece of bona fide canon that fits into the larger context of the live-action property.
“I thought he did such a good job with it," Kripke said of Racioppa, whose script for Episode 8 was co-directed by Jae Kim and Giancarlo Volpe. "I don’t think we had any specific plans going in for it to for sure be canon. But he just did such a good job writing and directing it, that watching it, I was like, ‘This is for sure what happened.’ “There is a certain amount of background setup of really understanding the relationship between Homelander and Black Noir and giving us a deeper understanding before Season 3.”
According to Racioppa, the goal with the finale was "to try and make that like a good American-action-animation-influenced episode that feels like it’s really connected to the mothership. That is the one most connected episode to the mothership."
Kripke also let slip that the second episode of the anthology — written by Justin Roiland and Ben Bayouth (in true Roiland fashion, it's called "An Animated Short Where Pissed-Off Supes Kill Their Parents") — features an "unexpected tie-in" with the upcoming batch of episodes. "But in a way that I won’t give away,” he teased. “And Roiland’s isn’t canon at all, but there is a connection and you’ll see.”
Of course, mandating that each chapter of this show had to fit perfectly within the set rules and continuity established by what's come before would have been incredibly limiting from a creative perspective.
“Some episodes feel like they could be more canonical than other ones,” Racioppa concluded. “We didn’t want to lock people into that. We felt like, if everything has to exist canonically with the mothership show, it would have limited a lot of the creativity of Diabolical. We wouldn’t be able to go quite as broad and crazy and weird as we wanted to go. Like Justin’s episode obviously cannot — this guy with a speaker head is probably not canonical.”
Season 3 of The Boys arrives on Prime Video Friday, June 3. All eight episodes of The Boys Presents: Diabolical are now streaming.
