SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 5 of “The Boys,” currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
While Homelander (Antony Starr) and the supers were absent from Vought’s V52 fan event (not to be in any aspect confused with Disney’s 23) in this week’s episode of “The Boys,” Butcher (Karl City), Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and company played a bunch of crazy, vicious cattle on a quest to discover a super-killer virus.
Amid these two wild plot factors was a more serious plot: Hughie (Jack Quaid) and his newly returned mother Daphne (Rosemarie Dewitt) saying goodbye to Hugh Sr. (Simon Pegg), when Hughie agrees to give his father a painless death to take him out of his new anguish. Throughout the episode, Hugh Sr. struggled to manage the tremendous damaging phase energy he acquired after Daphne gave him Compound V so she could bring him out of his coma. Hugh Sr. ended up accidentally killing several people in the hospital while in a dazed state.
Here, “The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke breaks down “The Boys” Season 4 Episode 5, titled “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son” — along with these “Generation V” cameos.
Let’s start with the bloody, flying cattle scenes from Compound V, as the boys are in search of the super virus lab on Stan Edgar’s (Giancarlo Esposito) estate. How much of this was sensible, if any, and how much of it led to visible results?
Much, little or nothing was sensible. The bull was real, although Stephan Fleet and their visual effects division made it look more angry – it was actually a very, very sweet animal. The chickens were mostly real, except when they were bursting out of people’s chests. And the sheep, outside of that scene where the barn door opens and the two sheep come in – I think that was the only time there were real sheep in that sequence. Huge credit to our great visual effects team, because it’s not easy to create a respectable test animal from scratch and make it a completely new monster. It was Stephan’s idea to give it a baboon tooth – it has baboon jaws, and that’s what gives it its fangs and its menacing appearance.
Butcher has a special connection to the rabbit because he was being experimented on with Temp V – the thing that led to Butcher’s deadly prognosis – and frees him.. So he steps on it to kill it later when he sees tentacles sprouting from the rabbit’s stomach. We all know he was taking the same factor as Butcher, so what can you tease about what this means for Butcher, and why Butcher had such a visceral response to it?
This does not imply something good. I don’t want to give too much away, but I think Butcher is starting to wonder what’s happening to him and wondering how he was able to kill Ezekiel. And it’s a little foreshadowing of the rabbit.
Antony Starr (Homeland), Cameron Crovetti (Ryan)
Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Shortly after this, Butcher cuts off the leg of Vought scientist Sameer — nice to meet Victoria Neuman’s lover, and Zoe’s father, by the way — and kidnaps him with Kessler. Much of that drastic choice made by Butcher, to keep Sameer occupied with more supe viruses, was based primarily on the rabbit’s fate — and happened to be juxtaposed with Ryan (Cameron Crovetti). moving even further to the dark side with Homelander in this episode?
This is an extremely insightful level. The story for him in this episode is trying to stay straight and slender, trying to be loyal to his group. But then the rabbit and what’s happening to him – and possibly what’s happening to him he —it just, actually, really shakes him up, and makes him feel a lot more determined. So he brings Kessler into the equation, and cuts off a man’s leg just to cover his tracks, which is not an incredibly rational habit. I feel like he’s really shaken up, and scared about what might very well be happening to him.
Hughie’s father’s tremendous power – there’s always a meaning to how you all decide what a character’s power will be. What was the choice here for what Hugh Sr. would receive when he was given a dose of V in the hospital?
We really like when powers can form a mirror of your psychological state, or some of your deep-seated unconscious. I feel like that was kind of a lesson we learned in “Gen V” that really served us well. So we really got this concept from him, based largely on his relationship with his estranged wife, that he felt really light on. He has that line, “You’d look right through me, like I was invisible to you.” So giving him an influence that made that metaphor concrete was something we were really excited about.
It’s tremendously refined, but it says something about Campbell’s DNA that Hughie’s energy is a teleportation energy and Pop’s energy is a kind of phase energy — yet they’re both cousins in a way. It was in the same ballpark. In our minds, the ability that you get is a combination of V and his DNA. And so if he has DNA comparable to his father, it stands to reason that possibly his father would have an analogous energy.
Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Moving on to the very disturbing stuff with Hughie and his father: I’m going to call it the euthanasia scene. How did you come up with the selection for Hughie to attempt this?, and working with Jack Quaid and Simon Pegg on the importance of that scene?
From the beginning, we needed to model that scene. Of course, Hughie is growing up this year, and really learning to take ownership or manage the family is something that a lot of kids go through – like that moment when their parents are taking good care of them and then, inevitably, they’re taking good care of their mom and dad. Everyone goes through that, and it’s an incredibly common and painful experience. And it’s the moment that so many people say, “Oh, yeah, that was when I really grew up, when I became my dad or my mom’s dad or mom.” I assumed that was an extremely common thing for Hughie to go through, and a problematic one.
The thing about Hughie, after we’ve talked about this season, is that we’re dealing with everyone’s core trauma, and his biggest drawback is his inability to let anyone go. And he’s really learning this season by forgiving A-Prepare and forgiving his mother and really letting his father go, he’s really learning the way to mature. They start the episode with his father saying, “You’re still that same kid who couldn’t let go of the cat.” And we end the episode with Hughie standing up and making the difficult choices that his other older relatives are unable to make. So this simply shows him growing into true maturity.
You deliver “Generation V” characters Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and Sam Riordan (Asa Germann) for guest appearances in this episode. Why did you decide now, during season 4 of “The Boys,” to make the transition? And What should their appearances tell us about what’s happening in the current timeline at Godolkin College — and where the other “Generation V” characters likely are now?
Now it made sense given the history of V52, and that Homelander would use V52 as a canopy to deliver totally different superheroes near him as he’s starting to build this army. And it made sense that Cate, who may be a supremacist, would need to enlist in this. I feel like Sam is a little more reluctant, but he also doesn’t communicate his personal opinions — he kind of needs to evolve into that as a personality as well.
However, in terms of what this means, as is typical in the Vought universe, the characters who were actually the villains of the day, Cate and Sam, are packaged by Vought to be the heroes, and given a movie and new levels of fame, while the real heroes of that day are locked away in some undisclosed location that will be revealed in Season 2 of “Gen V.” Simply our comparable message that being a hero is often an unsung and thankless thing, and when you’re presented to everyone as a hero, you’re usually anything but.
Associated with V52 – which is clearly totally unrelated to any real-life occasion an organization makes — have you heard from anyone at Marvel, whether complimentary or not, at this point about jokes within the show?
I’ve heard very casually and in passing that Marvel execs watch it and just enjoy it. However, I wasn’t given a name or anyone – simply someone told me about it in passing. I think it concluded with good fun. Like I said, I watch all the Marvel movies. I like them. It’s just the sheer amount of content that makes it worth having some fun.
Throughout V52, they laid out the initiatives in Phases 7-19 of the Vought Cinematic Universe. How many of these titles will be exclusive to Vought+ and how many will make it to theaters?
Indeed, let’s be honest, at least half of them could be written off for write-down, and after that a bunch will go to Vought+, after that only a few will make it to the big screen. It just seems to be the way the company is today.
This interview has been edited and condensed.