Say what you will about the Deep (Chace Crawford), but the man clearly respects fish far more than the average human. He’s had fish friends and even fish lovers, and has always tried his best to help them out of sticky situations. (Well, sort of. He probably could’ve done more for poor Timothy the octopus.) His attempts to help out his fish friends don’t always work out, but the mere fact that he’s trying sets him a step above the rest of the Seven. Nobody else cared when poor Lucy the whale got impaled by a boat, but the Deep stuck around to comfort her in her final hour.
Season 4 of “The Boys” takes the Deep’s love for fish a step further, reintroducing us to his octopus girlfriend, Ambrosius. She’s presented as sweet and loving, if perhaps a little too clingy for the Deep’s liking. (Although considering she’s trapped in a tank in his closet all day, who can blame her for getting a bit antsy?) Most importantly, she can talk, and she’s voiced by none other than Tilda Swinton. Yes, that Tilda Swinton. The Oscar-winning actor behind riveting dramas like “The Eternal Daughter” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is now voicing a horny octopus.
Swinton’s wise, sophisticated line delivery juxtaposes well with a sentient sea-creature complaining that her human boyfriend hasn’t been properly “intimate” with her in weeks. It’s a casting choice similar to having Patrick Stewart voice a baby on “Family Guy,” in that so much of the humor comes from how such a role should presumably be beneath such a well-respected actor by now. The Deep’s love affairs with fish have always leaned heavily on absurdist humor, so throwing Swinton into the mix feels like a natural next step.
The choice implies a fun season for the Deep
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Perhaps more important than who’s voicing Ambrosius is the mere fact that we can understand Ambrosius at all. Throughout the first three seasons, all of the Deep’s interactions with fish having taken a cue from the R2-D2/C-3PO playbook, where we had to infer what R2 means based on C-3PO’s reactions. This dynamic has brought a lot of extra humor into the Deep’s scenes, like when the Deep’s trying to fend off the dolphin’s sexual advances in season 1. It’s brought some extra horror in too, like when the Deep tells us that Timothy is “begging for his life” as the Deep’s being ordered to eat him.
But most of all, the choice to deny us the fishes’ voices has been a choice that solidified the Deep’s status as a joke. The narrative’s been holding him at arm’s length, refusing to show us how the fish sound from his perspective. It’s a choice that’s reassured us that we don’t have to feel too bad about all these fish deaths throughout the show, nor should we take the Deep’s grief over them too seriously.
Letting us hear Ambrosius signals that the show’s willing to empathize with the Deep a little bit more. It’s probably still a joke first and foremost, but the fact that the show’s inviting us into how the Deep hears the world does imply some interesting things for his character. He’ll never be fully forgiven for what he did to Annie in the “Boys” pilot, but perhaps he’ll get a little more to do than just be the show’s perpetual sad sack. At the very least, maybe Ambrosius will be the first of the Deep’s fish friends to actually survive.
New episodes of “The Boys” season 4 drop Thursdays on Prime Video.
