The Boys Finale Sets Up Butcher's Season 3 Story To Be Closer To The Comics
Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for The Boys Season 2 finale.
The finale of The Boys Season 2 sets Billy Butcher up to be more like his comic book counterpart in Season 3. It does this by setting up circumstances that are basically identical to where Butcher stood at the start of the comic book series, both in terms of his emotional state and the political situation of the world at large.
Many liberties were taken with Billy Butcher's background in adapting The Boys from a comic book into a live-action streaming series. While both versions of Butcher were out to avenge the death of their wife and share a hatred for superhumans, the show put a fresh twist on the comics by rejecting the fridging of Becca Butcher. Season 1 ended with the stunning revelation that Becca Butcher was alive and well, but had been raped and impregnated by the superhero Homelander and willingly gone into hiding to raise her son in secret in the hopes that she could make him into a less emotionally disturbed individual than Homelander.
Related: The Boys: What Stormfront Says In German In The Season 2 Finale
Unfortunately, the discovery that he had a son left Homelander wishing to take a hand in seeing that Ryan Butcher had a better childhood than he had and there was little anyone could do but hope that Homelander might eventually get bored with playing house. Such hopes proved to be futile, however, and Ryan was kidnapped from his home by Homelander and his girlfriend, Stormfront, in the penultimate episode of The Boys Season 2.
With no one else to turn to, Becca Butcher sought out her husband, whom she had earlier rejected when he tried to help her escape from Vought-American custody. Becca did this because she feared Billy couldn't put aside his anger and his hatred of superhumans to love Ryan as her son and that sooner or later he would try to find an excuse to separate her from Ryan or kill Ryan himself. The concern proved to be justified, as Butcher plotted to hand Ryan over to Vought-American and keep Becca for himself. In the end, however, Butcher couldn't go through with the plan, and was fully ready to sacrifice himself to give Becca and Ryan a life free from the influence of Vought-American and the Homelander.
Fate, it seemed, had other plans and Billy Butcher was denied his chance at a redemptive death. He was also unable to bring down the Homelander, but The Boys did manage to expose Stormfront's secret past as a Nazi and her plans to build an army of racist superhumans. This led to the creation of a new office of the Executive Branch of the United States government; the Office of Superhuman Affairs. Former Deputy Director of the CIA Grace Mallory, who founded the original incarnation of The Boys, informed Butcher of this development and that the new office was giving her some off-the-books funding for a secret CIA team that could monitor all the major superhero teams and prevent someone like Stormfront from coming so close to destroying the world in the future. Mallory also noted that there was a place for Butcher on the team if he wanted it.
While Butcher didn't explicitly accept Mallory's offer, merely walking off and donning his sunglasses, it seems likely he will ultimately take the job, if only because The Boys Season 3 won't have much of a story if he doesn't. It's worth noting, however, that the original The Boys comic opened with Butcher assembling a new Supes-hunting team on behalf of the CIA. It's also interesting that while the show changed up the details of Butcher's past, Season 2 ends with him honestly having a dead wife to avenge and several reasons for hating Homelander personally that he didn't have in the comics. What's more, with Compound-V now authorized for peace-keeping government agents, Butcher and his gang may be able to face The Seven on equal footing in the future.