This is easily the best of the three. Pretty much. This episode finally made me care about these characters again, and actually managed to create tension with that ice rink scene, unlike the scenes from the previous two episodes where they tried to be intense but failed.
The episode does a lot of great character work for many characters and character relationships and dynamics, giving more depth to them.
I really like what they did with Starlight here really driving the point home that these main characters we love aren't really that goody-two-shoes and they all have done horrible things in the past. And also surprisingly giving Firecracker more depth at the same time, and making her more than just a goofy new bad guy character who's just there for the audience to laugh at and just be the one-dimensional far-right mocking character.
Butcher and Ryan's relationship is developing in an interesting way too and pretty much every dialogue scene with the characters (even Hughie and his mom) is great to watch.
This is by far peak Boys for this season. It has a lot of funny gory scenes with people getting accidentally cut in half and mutilated, Homelander being scary again with another intense scene, great dialogue scenes between characters, and another iconic Homelander mirror scene which makes me more excited for where his plotline is going to more than the dawdling they were doing with him in the last two episodes.
It seems that the theme of this season is every character revisiting and confronting their pasts and the things they did in the past. From Homelander to Annie and Frenchie and Kimiko, it seems that we're gonna get more of their past this season and I ain't complaining.
Anyway, the first two episodes were fine, but this episode was a lot of fun and got me excited about the show again setting up interesting premises. Here's hoping the rest of the season is gonna get even better than this.