The Boys Season 3 Makes The Oldest Flash Joke Way Darker

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Warning: This contains spoilers for The Boys season 3.

The Boys season 3 references the oldest joke associated with The Flash, and it makes it way darker than usual. While many aspects of The Flash are often played for drama, this particular joke, on the rare occasions that it’s brought up, tends to be strictly for laughs. Thanks to that, the impact of The Boys making such a mundane joke dark ends up being even bigger than it normally would be.

In The Boys season 3, it’s revealed that A-Train has to eat 30,000 calories a day to maintain his super speed. This detail, of course, is a reference to an old joke about the DC superhero The Flashwhere anyone who is a speedster has to eat incredibly large amounts of food on a daily basis because their super speed gives them an inhumanly fast metabolism. The joke isn’t brought up that often in Flash stories, but when it is, it mostly serves as an excuse for a gag about Barry Allen, Wally West, or other speedsters having large appetites.

Related: The Boys: Every Speedster Known (So Far)

While The Flash always plays speedsters eating a lot of food for laughs, The Boys makes the joke far more serious — and maybe even sad. Unlike in The Flash, when A-Train brings the idea up in The Boys, Antony Starr's Homelander proceeds to insult and ridicule A-Train for getting fat and sloppy and trying to use his powers as an excuse. This adds a much darker element to the joke than normal, especially with how it ties into A-Train’s ongoing struggles with maintaining his status as the fastest man alive.

The issue also adds another level to A-Train’s legitimate health problems in The Boys season 3. As a result of his overdosing on Compound V, A-Train’s heart problems have developed to the point that