This The Boys Character Has a Surprisingly Fun Meta Layer

While waiting for season 4 of the highly praised superhero satire, fans keep on rewatching the past seasons and finding new details.

The Boys fans paid attention to one interesting fact from The Boys' season 3. The detail revolves around the character by the name of Gunpowder, played by Sean Patrick Flaner.

Gunpowder, a character created by Garth Ennis, is a relatively minor antagonist in The Boys comics. In the third season of The Boys TV show, he made his live-action debut, appearing in a single episode.

However, the show's version of the character is different from the comics' Gunpowder.

In the show, Gunpowder is a former member of the Payback team and Soldier Boy's sidekick. He was one of the supes The Boys decided to investigate to get some information on Soldier Boy.

His abilities are slightly different in the show. In the comics, the character had the ability to manipulate the energy of bullets he fired, granting him control over their power and trajectory.

While it is hard to say with certainty, it appears that Sean Patrick Flanery's portrayal of Gunpowder might be employing a similar technique when attacking Billy Butcher.

However, unlike his comic book counterpart, the live-action Gunpowder seems unable to redirect bullets to make them curve.

Also, Gunpowder carries a small arsenal on his person and does not demonstrate the capacity to summon pistols out of thin air in the same manner that he does in the comics.

But what is intriguing about this character is that he is originally a parody, as well as many heroes from The Boys are. It is clear that Gunpowder is a parody of Judge Dredd ( and maybe DC's Deadshot as well).

This fact adds some meta layer to the scene from season 3 of The Boys, when Butcher, who has recently injected himself with Compound V, brutally kills Gunpowder after interrogating him.

What makes this somewhat meta is the fact that Karl Urban played Judge Dredd in the 2012 movie Dredd, believed to be underrated by many fans. In other words, we witnessed Judge Dredd killing another Judge Dredd.

Source: Reddit