When Soldier Boy was last seen, his own son had stuffed him back inside a freezer.
That was the way The Boys closed the book on its most unruly villain. Homelander turned on him, put him into cryo sleep for a third time, and kept him out of the season 5 finale altogether. Unsurprisingly, fans were irritated. A character that loud deserved more than a quiet fade-out on ice.
In a sense, he’s getting that send-off now. Vought Rising, the 1950s-set prequel, places Soldier Boy and Stormfront front and center. Its boldest move is the one worth watching: the series intends to rebuild Soldier Boy from the ground up and present a version of him The Boys never could, one that may turn out to be the most authentic portrayal of the character so far.
Ben came before the swagger
The Soldier Boy audiences know is a charismatic, fearless brute. The man Vought Rising has to begin with is a completely different person.
Long before the shield and the ego, Ben was an ordinary guy desperate for his father’s approval. That craving drove him to volunteer for Frederick Vought’s Compound V experiments, even though he was reportedly terrified of them. At that point, he had nothing close to the arrogance or confidence that would later define him.
If the series explores his life before he became a supe, viewers should expect an insecure, timid Soldier Boy. That’s almost certainly the direction things are going. Even once the powers took hold, it probably took him years, if not decades, to grow into the attitude fans remember.
That’s what makes this promising. By putting Soldier Boy in the lead, Vought Rising can lay bare his human weaknesses and reveal who he is when the fame, the power and the corporate machine aren’t holding him up.
What The Boys has already revealed
A spinoff isn’t required to know that Soldier Boy’s history is grim. The Boys devoted enough screen time to him to fill in much of it.
Ben grew up wealthy, under an abusive father who made no secret of how disappointed he was in his son. Matters worsened when Ben’s brother became a decorated soldier. Ben enlisted as well, and that’s where he signed on for Vought’s experiments.
The grim irony is this: he sat out combat for most of WWII, and even once the serum took effect, his role was minimal at best, since Vought didn’t want to put its prized possession at risk. The public still greeted him as a returning hero.
His father did not. In Dad’s eyes, Ben remained a failure, because using Compound V amounted to cheating.
The making of a Vought star
When The Boys first brought in Soldier Boy, he was a forgotten hero who had been replaced. At his peak, however, he was every bit as popular as Homelander. Well before Homelander arrived, Soldier Boy was Vought’s major investment, combining the looks, the powers and a carefully manufactured personality.
Vought handled him that way. The company staged a lot of his rescues and made him a public figure, right down to music videos and film appearances. Like most of Vought’s supes, he became more celebrity than superhero, with an ego to fit and a lifestyle packed with sex and drugs.
Vought Rising is poised to show precisely how that unfolded. The series aims to follow his journey from ambitious hero to Vought’s corrupt poster boy, and to chart how the company grew into such a powerful force, built on propaganda, celebrity and concealed violence. It also intends to dig into how Vought’s public image was assembled and how its corruption became intertwined with American culture and politics.
The matter of Stormfront
The largest unresolved thread is his relationship with Clara, better known as Stormfront, who was called Liberty in that era. The Boys’ final season referred to it repeatedly, yet offered almost nothing about how the two met or what their bond was really like.
Given how much it shaped the main series, Vought Rising will surely put heavy emphasis on that relationship. Just don’t expect anything warm. The show is being billed as a murder mystery, and its first-look trailer made clear that the gore and violence The Boys was known for will be along for the ride.
What happened next
Because the prequel takes place in the 1950s, it sits well ahead of the chapters The Boys has already told. Soldier Boy would eventually move past his original team of Bombsight, Private Angel and Torpedo before heading up Payback in the 1970s.
As the leader of Payback, he mistreated members such as Black Noir. He was also romantically involved with fellow teammate Crimson Countess. Then, in the 1980s, a mission went wrong.
Amid a Soviet attack in Nicaragua, his own teammates turned on him and handed him over to the Russians. They ran experiments on him, which is how he acquired his radiation-based powers, before placing him in cryo sleep.
The main series takes it from there. Butcher and the rest of the crew released him from a cryo chamber, and he even teamed up with them for several episodes, facing off against Homelander despite being his father. The alliance collapsed near the end of the season 3 finale, and by the final installment of The Boys, he had sided with Homelander.
Over five seasons, The Boys pitted its heroes against no shortage of threats, from Stormfront to the Seven to various other supes, all while pursuing Homelander and Vought International. Few of them stirred up as much trouble as Soldier Boy. Adapted from the comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the franchise has always centered on what happens when a corporation manufactures its heroes.
Vought Rising has the chance to return to the moment just before that manufacturing began: a frightened rich kid queuing up for an experiment, still hoping his father would one day call him a hero.