The episode follows the Boys infiltrating the Sage Grove Center after Annie January discovers the lead from Stormfront, while also joining them to avoid repercussions as the latter has started to suspect about her actions.
In the present, Annie January has her tracking chip removed by Frenchie against Hughie Campbell's protests, fearing repercussions from Stormfront who now knows that she exposed Compound-V. Annie goes to the hideout alongside Hughie and Frenchie to give Billy Butcher the information regarding Stormfront's e-mails with Stan Edgar about a psychiatric hospital known as the Sage Grove Center.
The Deep delivers a camera to Queen Maeve which contains footage of her and Homelander abandoning the passengers of the Transoceanic Flight 37, resulting in the deaths of everyone onboard.
Frenchie, Mother's Milk, and Kimiko infiltrate the Sage Grove Center with the help of Annie, who must return with Butcher and Hughie.
Being unable to use her powers to cauterize the wound due to the EMP wave destroying every electrical source nearby, Annie and Butcher are forced to leave the others to get Hughie to a hospital.
Elena finds the camera where she sees the video of Homelander and Maeve abandoning the passengers of the Transoceanic Flight 37 which disturbs her.
Lamplighter reveals that the reason Vought is experimenting there, is to perfect the Compound-V so that adults can receive any powers without suffering any side effects.
The Boys and Lamplighter finally escape from the hospital and while they wait for Mallory's arrival, Frenchie apologizes to Kimiko, admitting that he thought that by trying to save her, he would redeem himself from all the things he had done in the past.
Mallory arrives intending to kill Lamplighter to avenge her grandchildren, but Frenchie convinces her to spare him as he could serve as a witness against Vought.
[3] In June 2020, it was announced that the episodes for the second season would be released in a weekly basis instead of dropping all of them in one day in order to make people discuss about the topics for a longer time.
It is revealed that the character is actually a German woman with born in 1919 who was indoctrinated with the Nazism ideologies, who married the scientist responsible for her powers while also being part of the Third Reich.
[13] The episode 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, Laz Alonso as Marvin T. Milk / Mother's Milk (M.M.
), Chace Crawford as Kevin Moskowitz / The Deep, Tomer Capone as Serge / Frenchie, Karen Fukuhara as Kimiko Miyashiro / The Female, Nathan Mitchell as Earving / Black Noir, Colby Minifie as Ashley Barrett, and Aya Cash as Klara Risinger / Stormfront.
[14] Also starring are Shawn Ashmore as Lamplighter, Andrew Jackson as Love Sausage, Jason Gray-Stanford as Dennis, Jordana Lajoie as Cherie, Nicola Correia-Damude as Elena, Laila Robins as Grace Mallory, and Goran Visnjic as Alastair Adana.
[20] The crew captured multiple shots from several actors portraying the prisoners of the Sage Grove center, to later use the visual effects for the creation their respective superpowers.
[21] Fleet considered that the creation of the visual effects for the episode was the hardest and biggest to make, with multiple powers being already established in the script while other having been improvised.
[22] The episode features the following songs which are "Çasquette à l'envers" by Sexion d'Assaut, "Happy Together" by The Turtles, "Orinoco Flow" by Enya, and "Thank You for Being a Friend" by Cynthia Fee.
Club, praised the episode for Starr's performance as Homelander stating that while the character is a "fascist and a murderer and a xenophobe and, most unrelentingly, an asshole.
"[26] For his review at Entertainment Weekly, Nick Schager praised Frenchie's character development by stating that he even "during a dark time in his life in New York City, he was saved by watching early morning episodes of The Golden Girls, which he loved because "those saucy ladies, they made their own family.
However, he was also critical of the Church of the Collective's storyline as he believed that it didn't fit for the episode and considered that what star as a promising story for the Deep's evolution as character now feels undeveloped.
[30] For IGN the episode was rated with a score of 8 out of 10, where he praised Frenchie's backstory as Shawn Ashmore's performance as Lamplighter to which he considered that he did a "brilliant job of imbuing his character with a bit of menace and vulnerability, especially since we tend to remember him as that baby-faced version of Iceman from the X-Men film franchise."