The Boys Season 2 Mocks Joss Whedon's Justice League Reshoots

Forum 3 years ago

The Boys Season 2 Mocks Joss Whedon's Justice League Reshoots

The latest episode of The Boys season 2 mocked the infamous Joss Whedon rewrites of Justice League, with several scenes centered around the filming of a movie based on the exploits of The Seven. The scenes for Dawn of The Seven also seemed to parody Whedon's work on the Avengers movies and the Agents of SHIELD television series.

Once a prevalent figure among fans of comic books, fantasy, and science fiction, Whedon has become as controversial as he was once beloved. The writer/director first found fame as the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and developed a devout cult following, thanks to several short-lived but beloved series, like Firefly and Dollhouse. Whedon later found mainstream success as the writer and director of the first two Avegners movies, but his star fell after reports that he had cheated on his wife and sexually harassed several actresses he had worked with. More recently, Whedon was accused of bullying the cast and crew of Justice League, when he was brought in to finish the film after Zack Snyder left the project.

None of these personal controversies were touched upon in The Boys season 2 episode "We Gotta Go Now," but the show did parody several stylistic elements of Whedon's work on Justice League, with two scenes centered around Queen Maeve. The opening scene found Maeve searching the rubble of a bombed-out city for a woman named Ruby, who was revealed to be both a master hacker and a leather-clad lesbian stereotype, with blue hair and multiple tattoos and piercings. Maeve randomly praised Ruby's bravery; not for what she had done to hack a Department of Homeland Security mainframe, but because she was living her life as a lesbian openly and without shame. Maeve then admitted that she was "afraid to show the world who I really am" before confessing her own homosexuality and almost kissing Ruby. The filming was overseen by an ever-smug Homelander, who commented to Maeve, as she took a break while the scene was reset, that "(the) new Joss rewrite really sings, huh?"

The episode took a more subtle stab at Whedon's writing and directing style in a later scene, where Maeve and Ruby encountered a suit-clad man identified only as Agent Pearson. Pearson identified Ruby as a fellow agent and explained that it was very important they get the information Ruby had found to someplace called The Tower. The brief scene might seem familiar to fans of the first Avengers movie and Agents of SHIELD, with the dialogue marking Pearson and Ruby as clear parodies of Agent Coulson and Skye.

The scenes were also shot with an orange filter that brightened them considerably, comparable to the filters Joss Whedon used in post-production on his Justice League footage, which distinguished it from the darker, more desaturated filters favored by Zack Snyder. (The scene may also indicate that JJ Abrams is producing Dawn Of The Seven in The Boys' universe, as Agent Pearson is played by nerd icon Greg Grunberg, who is frequently cast in Abrams' productions.)

The fact that Queen Maeve was the focus of these scenes was probably intentional, given that the character is The Boys' version of Wonder Woman. Whedon wrote a script for a Wonder Woman movie in the mid-2000s which Warner Bros. declined to produce. The script was later leaked following the release of the 2017 Wonder Woman movie and was roundly drubbed by fans for being sexist and overly focused on the heroism of Steve Trevor compared to Diana of Themyscira. The scenes also seem to mock how Whedon wrote romance between female characters in a manner that, while revolutionary at the time, has not aged well in an era when gay women are now writing and directing their own shows and movies.