Karl Urban wears a Luminox Navy SEAL

Billy Butcher runs The Boys the way a man runs a grudge, his against Homelander, the supe who raped his wife. Karl Urban plays him in a long coat and a permanent sneer, an ex-SAS operator gone freelance, a British soldier loose in an American war on the supes. When Propstore put his season-four kit up for auction, the lot filed under Butcher's accessories held two watches, not one. The black one is the watch that fits him.

It is a Luminox, the tactical brand Barry Cohen and Richard Timbo started in California in 1989 around a single idea. The hands and markers carry sealed tritium gas tubes that light themselves and hold the glow for as long as 25 years, with nothing to charge and no daylight to store first. A Navy SEAL named Nick North found the brand at a trade show in the early 1990s and wanted a watch his unit could read on a night dive, and the Original Navy SEAL reached the public in 1994: a 200-meter diver in a light carbon case, the whole of it blacked out.

Butcher never goes near the water. The 200 meters and the dive bezel are wasted on a man whose war happens in parking garages and safe houses, and none of it is why the watch suits him. The reason is the glow. By Luminox's own account the tubes never go dark, and a man who works at night wants the one watch that asks no questions.

The rest of the lot is the contents of his pockets. A St. Christopher medal on a steel box-chain, the saint travelers carry for protection. A silver signet ring stamped with a winged sword, near cousin to the winged dagger the SAS wears. A second watch, plainer, a black dial and white numerals on a black leather strap. And, cataloged with the rest, Joe Kessler's folding rubber knife. Kessler, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, is the old partner who goads Butcher through season four, until the show reveals he died years earlier in the field and Butcher, his head coming apart from the Temp V, has been listening to a man who is not there. The auction kept the knife anyway.