The One Character On The Boys Who's Smarter Than Stan Edgar

Irreverent as it may be, Amazon Prime's The Boys is still a superhero show, and as such, it's full of characters with more or less awesome superpowers. However, the show has made it very clear that while might can make right in the short run, the long con belongs to the people with brainpower. Just witness the constant humiliations of The Deep (Chace Crawford), or the way the mighty Homelander (Antony Starr) frequently seems to be under the influence of one cunning character or another.

There have been many clever conspirators on the show, from the ill-fated Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) and Stormfront (Aya Cash) to the mysterious Victoria Neuman, whose agenda will presumably be revealed in season 3. Of course, there's also the Vought CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito), a masterful operator who ends The Boys season 2 in a pretty good position — and with all his appendages intact — despite the hits his company takes over the course of the season. However, it turns out even he isn't quite the most intelligent person on the show, because there's one character who may very well be even smarter than Stan Edgar.

Starting with his name and continuing with ... well, everything else about him, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) might seem like he's little more than a hyper-violent thug with just enough tragic backstory to allow him to target his aggression at Vought and the company's supes. Which is kind of true, but also precisely what he wants you to think. As Screen Rant notes, Butcher's fanaticism, gruff manner, and working-class outlook on life hide an incredibly sharp mind, which is how he can wage war on people with superpowers and actually survive. This is especially evident in the comics, in which Butcher is an intensely manipulative man who can out-think every single character in the series — and, thanks in part to a certain Butcher moment we probably won't see in the show, can use his brainpower to do some pretty surprising things. If there's anyone who might be smarter than Stan Edger on The Boys, it's Butcher.

The show's incarnation of the character has kept such strategies in check so far, though a recent interview with showrunner Eric Kripke teases concerning things for Butcher's role in The Boys season 3. However, Urban's portrayal makes it clear that Butcher knows far, far more than he lets on, and as a result, he tends to seem more dangerous without a gun in his hand than with one. Seeing as Butcher's arguably most intimidating scenes in The Boys' season 2 are a fairly civil chat with Stan Edgar and a quiet moment of drinking tea, the show seems intent on leaning toward the Boys' leader's cerebral nature in the future — and the character is probably going to be all the more terrifying for it.