The Name of the Game (The Boys episode)

"The Name of the Game" is the first episode of the first season and series premiere of the American superhero television series The Boys, based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis. It is set in a universe where superpowered individuals, known as Supes, are portrayed as corrupt individuals instead of the heroes the general public believes they are. The episode was written by the series showrunner Eric Kripke and directed by Dan Trachtenberg.
The episode follows Hughie Campbell being recruited by Billy Butcher to the Boys, after his girlfriend, Robin Ward, is accidentally killed by A-Train, leading him to realize the truth about the heroes and the company behind them, Vought, which would lead him to a conflict with one Supe named Translucent who is also a member of the superhero group known as the Seven. Meanwhile, Annie January / Starlight struggles to realize the truth about the heroes she admired after joining the Seven. She struggles to adapt to her new reality after another member of the team sexually assaults her.
"The Name of the Game" was released on the streaming service Amazon Prime Video, on July 26, 2019. The episode received critical acclaim from critics with praise for its visual style, direction, performances, black humor, and faithfulness to the source material. It received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
Queen Maeve stops a stolen bank van from killing two kids. The bank robbers are overpowered by Homelander, revealing that the series takes place in a universe where the superpowered individuals are called Supes who are recognized as heroes by the general public.
Hughie Campbell works as a salesman for Bryman Audio. While discussing his uncertain future with his girlfriend Robin Ward, the latter is accidentally torn apart by A-Train with his speed before he runs away, while Hughie starts to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the events. Hughie attempts to file a lawsuit against Vought International, but his father Hughie Campbell Sr., attempts to convince him to accept the company's offer, a $45,000 settlement, fearing that the corporation is too powerful to defeat.
Meanwhile, aspiring superhero Annie January is accepted to join the superhero group the Seven. At the Seven's headquarters, after Annie tells the Deep that she had a crush on him as a kid, the latter masturbates in front of her much to the former's horror. The Deep proceeds to blackmail Annie into performing oral sex on him or he will tell Homelander that she attacked him, which would lead her to be thrown out of the Seven.
Hughie is approached by Billy Butcher, who is aware of the truth behind Robin's death. He proceeds to show Hughie that the Supes are corrupt outside their heroic personas and that they lose hundreds of people a year, but Vought keeps this as a secret to hide the truth from the public. Butcher takes Hughie to a secret "Supes Club" to show him security footage of A-Train laughing about Robin's death. He offers Hughie the chance to expose the Supes by accepting Vought's settlement so he can plant a bug at the Seven Tower, but Hughie refuses. The next day, he meets Annie at Central Park and have a conversation over how their lives have changed over the course of the previous day. The two of them motivate each other with Hughie changing his mind and deciding to accept Butcher's deal, while Annie decides to remain in the Seven and stand up against her colleagues.
Hughie calls a lawyer from Vought to accept the deal in exchange of receiving an apology from A-Train in person. Hughie arrives at the Seven Tower where he reluctantly accepts the half-hearted apology from A-Train, and successfully hides the microphone while Translucent secretly watches him. After Butcher drops Hughie back at his work, the latter is attacked by Translucent who followed him and removed the bug, though Butcher arrives to fight him. During the fight, Hughie electrocutes Translucent and apparently kills him.
Vought International Vice President Madelyn Stillwell offers the Mayor of Baltimore one of Vought's Supes the Nubian Prince for a $300 million/year deal, but the Mayor refuses and proceeds to blackmail Stillwell by exposing the truth of the existence of Compound V. In response, Homelander destroys the Mayor of Baltimore's plane while in flight, killing every passenger onboard.
An adaptation of the comic book series The Boys was initially developed as a feature-length film in 2008. However, after several failed attempts to produce the film, which caused it to be in development hell for several years, the plans for a film were scrapped in favor of a television series. In 2016, it was announced Cinemax would develop the show. Erick Kripke became the series showrunner and head writer, alongside Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, who would direct the pilot episode. In November 2017, Amazon acquired the rights to develop the show, announcing that they would produce over eight episodes for the first season while confirming that the previously announced creative team would still be attached to the series. On 2018, Dan Trachtenberg was hired to direct the pilot episode for the series, replacing Goldberg and Rogen due to scheduling conflicts. However, the duo would remain as the series executive producers. The episode titled "The Name of the Game" was written by Kripke and directed by Trachtenberg. The episode is titled with the name of the issues #1–2 as well as the Vol. 1 of the comic book series of the same name, while its cover reassembles the series teaser poster.
Kripke made major changes from the comics for the series, intending to achieve more realism in the adaptation. To achieve this, Kripke instilled one major change by replacing "Jack from Jupiter" with a more human character known as "Translucent." He considered Jack's alien form too fantastical for the world he wanted to create, though Translucent kept Jack's power of indestructible skin. One of the biggest changes from the comics made to the television series is to Starlight, a character that is sexually assaulted. While in the comics, she is assaulted by Black Noir, Homelander, and A-Train, in the television series, she is only assaulted by The Deep, who is also depicted as being white, unlike the comics, in which he was black. Kripke deemed this very hard to adapt due to the Me Too movement, leading to several discussions of how to make this adjustment.
Another major change that was a deviation from the comics was how they adapted the character of Hughie Campbell. Originally, the character is described as a Scottish man with little to no hair, which reassembles the appearance of English actor Simon Pegg. Pegg was originally plotted to portray Hughie in the film adaptation of the comic, but due to the project's delays and eventual cancellation, he grew too old to portray the character. Instead, Pegg was given a recurring role to portray Hughie's father in the show for a few episodes. American actor Jack Quaid took over the role of Hughie, which is why the character is portrayed as an American in the show instead of Scottish. However, the same story elements from the characters in the comics remain in the show. Another character that underwent a major change was the Vought Guy, whose role was split across two characters: Madelyn Stillwell (portrayed by Shue, as a red herring character) and Stan Edgar (portrayed by Giancarlo Esposito).
The episode's main cast includes Karl Urban as Billy Butcher, Jack Quaid as Hughie Campbell, Antony Starr as John Gillman / Homelander, Erin Moriarty as Annie January / Starlight, Dominique McElligott as Maggie Shaw / Queen Maeve, Jessie T. Usher as Reggie Franklin / A-Train, Chace Crawford as Kevin Moskowitz / The Deep, Nathan Mitchell as Black Noir, and Elisabeth Shue as Madelyn Stillwell. Also starring are Simon Pegg as Hugh Campbell Sr., Alex Hassell as Translucent, Shaun Benson as Ezekiel, Ann Cusack as Donna January, Colby Minifie as Ashley Barrett, Jaden Martin as Jamie, Jess Salgueiro as Robin Ward, Bruce Novakowski as Doug Friedman, and Paulino Nunes as the Mayor of Baltimore. Laz Alonso, Tomer Capone, and Karen Fukuhara are credited for their respective characters as Marvin T. Milk / Mother's Milk (M.M.), Serge / Frenchie and Kimiko Miyashiro / The Female, though none of them appear in the episode. Jimmy Fallon makes a cameo appearance as himself for the episode.
The filming of the first season would take place in Toronto while the story takes place in New York City. Filming began in May 2018, with the crew choosing several locations across Toronto to recreate New York City's atmosphere. One of the filming locations took place at the Roy Thomson Hall to recreate the exterior of the Vought International company headquarters, better known as Seven Tower. While the show is mainly filmed in Toronto, the series was partially filmed in Mississauga and Hamilton. Jeff Cutter was the director of photography for the season's first episode, having already worked with long-time collaborator Dan Trachtenberg in the film 10 Cloverfield Lane.
Visual effects for the episode were created by DNEG TV, Framestore, Folks VFX, Mavericks VFX, Method Studios, Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies VFX, Mr. X, Pixomondo, Rocket Science VFX, Rodeo FX, and Soho VFX. It was announced Stephan Fleet would act as visual effects supervisor and oversee the development of visual effects. The scene where A-Train accidentally kills Robin was originally intended to use practical effects, but due to the complexity of the stunt and the time required to shoot practically, it was decided the scene would be produced using CGI. Additionally, the canvas for Robins' dead body floating in the air took several months to finish. Due to its complexity, the visual effects team took over eight months to complete the scene, with Fleet stating, "It took us the better part of eight months to nail down the look and tone and storytelling of that shot. It was just an incredibly challenging piece and big, big props to DNEG for pulling that off." The scene was filmed with a Phantom camera at around 500 frames per second while using a Bolt High-Speed Cinebot rig in a robotic arm to get the camera to move as fast as possible. The scene wasn't constructed entirely by CGI, as the blood splattered on Jack Quaid was a practical effect.
The last scene of the season to be filmed would be the pilot episode's opening scene, where Homelander and Queen Maeve foil a truck robbery. Kripke believed it was important to keep most of the effects grounded to tease the kind of world eventually presented in the series. For this scene, the crew filmed a truck crash in the street, while Queen Maeve's performance was filmed separately and stitched together using CGI. The VFX company behind the scene, Framestore, created a CGI double for McElligott. When she leaps over a car crash of several digitally-replaced police vehicles and stops a hi-jacked bank truck with her body, the VFX team added detailed debris from the crash in slow motion. Mr. X was in charge of creating the visual effects for the fight between Butcher and Translucent, where the latter's stunt double used a gray tracking suit to capture the animation reference. This reference tracks a digital double of the Translucent character, simulates blood splatter, and uses his powers. In the ending scene where Homelander destroys a plane, Starr is attached to a wire to capture the essence of his character's flight, while his cape is created through CGI by the visual effects company DNEG. For Homelander's heat vision, the visual effects team refined an anamorphic lens flare to make it unique to play into the character.
The episode features the following songs: "Barracuda" by Heart, "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing" by Chris Isaak, "London Calling" by The Clash, and "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop. The episode also featured "Take You Down" by Daniel Pemberton, a track from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. soundtrack.
"The Name of the Game" premiered on Prime Video in the United States on July 26, 2019. It was released alongside all the episodes from the season, which were released on the same day. The episode and the rest of The Boys' first season were released on Blu-ray on May 31, 2022.
"The Name of the Game" received critical acclaim from critics. Brian Tallerico from Vulture rated the episode with 3 out of 5 stars, praising the episode for introducing the grim world of the series and the themes it seeks to portray like breaking the typical old superhero myth for which he stated that "it was a tough balance for a comic book to maintain, but the source material had the freedom of time between trips into this grimy world, whereas Amazon is asking us to wallow in the muck for eight episodes in a row. Keeping a world in which superheroes sexually assault and murder with a twinkle in their eye from becoming too brutal to take is going to be this show's greatest challenge." While writing a review for the episode at TVLine, Kimberly Roots had a positive reaction to the episode for the series by stating that "Superheroes are preening sacks of something-or-other in Amazon's The Boys, the comic-book adaptation helmed by Supernatural's Eric Kripke. Though seemingly upright and good-hearted, the "superabled" men and women of a league known as The Seven are degenerates who overindulge in every vice and even kill the innocent." Samantha Nelson from The Escapist praised the performances and their faithfulness to the source material, to which he commented, "As a nice nod to the comics, Simon Pegg makes an appearance as Hughie's father, urging him to move on with his life and accept the things he can't control. Instead it looks like Hughie's willing to burn his old life to the ground and have fun doing it."
Randy Dankievitch from Tilt Magazine considered that the episode managed to break the old myths from other superhero projects: "If this is just another story of men fighting other men over who is right until the end of time, The Boys is never going to be able to entrench itself as a fundamentally different take on the superhero ethos, no matter how effective this first hour is at stripping away the inherent emotional, sexual, and moral sterility of the iconic stories it's satirizing." Greg Wheeler from The Review Geek rated the episode four stars out of five, stating, "As an opening episode, The Boys does well to set the tone and mood for the series to follow. Butcher is certainly an endearing character and Starlight's talk with Hughie on the bench near the end of the episode is a nice inclusion, doing well to foreshadow future events for them both to undertake in the future." Darryl Jasper from ScienceFiction.com praised the episode for the departure of the particular themes and the frequent portrayal of superheroes. He commented that the show is a wildly entertaining and somewhat cynical representation of the superhero genre that embraces this and the often-quoted aphorism of how power corrupts.