The Boys recap: “Insane and desperate is where we are” (2024)

The Boys begs us with each passing minute to suspend logic to devour the vicious satire and sentimental punches up its sleeve. Proper reasoning doesn’t fit into a world where wacky, graphic things happen constantly. The show raises the bar for itself when it comes to overwhelming us—A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) running through and obliterating Hughie’s (Jack Quaid) girlfriend, The Deep (Chace Crawford) f*cking an octopus, the whole “Herogasm” episode, and whatever Homelander (Antony Starr) is doing at all times, for example. But what if the gore slides over to silliness, displacing theshow’s painstakingly cultivated lore? A form of continuity, even in bizarre settings, makes it coherent. The Boys toggles with that majorly (again) in an entertaining but hella weird “Beware The Jabberwock, My Son.”

I’m not just saying weird because the villains of the hour are screeching, flying, homicidal farm animals (although that whole chase is spectacularly bizarre). It’s not a stretch to think various creatures are injected with Compound V (Remember season three’s hamster?) So Victoria Neumann (Claudia Doumit) secretly operates a lab where her ex-boyfriend experiments with Gen V’s Supe-killing virus, whichisn’t surprising. The infected livestock goes rogue and attempts to gut Victoria along with The Boys, who have infiltrated her shed to steal the virus. It’s better off in their hands than Victoria’s—or at least that’s what Butcher (Karl Urban) and MM (Laz Alonso) convince the crew.

She immediately threatens to blow up The Boys and Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito, welcome back) for breaking into the shed. So it’s unbelievable that, at some point, Victoria doesn’t kill the animals chasing after them. Much like episode three, in which Homelander could’ve easily lasered Hughie, it’s hard to believe she wouldn’t combust the unhinged sheep. Girl, use your powers!

Instead, everyone wildly tries to outrun superpowered buffalo, sheep, chicken, etc. It’s funny to watch the Butcher, MM, Stan, and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) flail, as they’re mere humans. But you would think Kimiko (Karen f*ckuhara), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), and Victoria would do something as Supes. Starlight’s powers are conveniently conking out. The un-killable Kimiko doesn’t fight back much. What excuse does Victoria have? She already blazes at least one animal to save her stepfather, former Vought CEO Stan, who is out of prison temporarily. She could blow up the other flying beasts, too.

This dumbing down of Supes’ strengths to drag out why Butcher only told his team about the virus now makes The Boys appear ludicrous (more than usual). There’s no real answer either, so we should assume his health issues slowed him down. But what happened to character development or the idea that Victoria et al.’s abilities need to be feared? Let’s compare this to the season-two finale when Starlight, Kimiko, and Queen Maeve (Dominic McElligott) defeat the almighty Stormfront (Aya Cash) together. The buildup paid off there.

The Boys seems to be rewriting its established narrative for surface-level shock value. “Beware The Jabberwock, My Son” is fun. It will add to the ever-expanding list of the show’s most outrageous moments, but it’s also vain in a way I can’t defend—a growing trend in a show I otherwise love. At one point in the episode, Butcher describes their situation to Annie as “Insane and desperate is where we are.” This sentiment extends to The Boys itself.

At least Hughie’s jaw-dropping experience leads to something momentous—momentously horrific, that is. Daphne (Rosemary DeWitt) injecting the dying Hughie Sr. (Simon Pegg) with a shot of Compound V has nightmarish consequences. It allows Pegg to go out with aplomb in his final episode. I never expected to tear up in The Boys, but Pegg grants immense vulnerability to Hughie Sr. dealing with the fallout of becoming a Supe without asking for it and eventually embracing death. He’s the calm (but bloody) anchor.

Upon waking from his coma, Hughie Sr. is seemingly fine before his power manifests. It’s straight out of X-Men’s Shadowcat playbook: He can phase through solid objects including, as brutally depicted, human bodies. It’s an awful and sad sight as he foggily walks through unsuspecting people in the hospital corridors, emerging on the other side with organs in his hand, confused about why he’s turned into a killing machine. Nothing is left to the imagination when Hughie Sr. churns one patient’s insides out like he’s an electric mixer, a sight I shall try my best to forget.

It’s such a cruel journey for a sweet, sweet man. But this catastrophic event also forces Hughie (and us) to reckon with what mortality is in The Boys. We’re numb to it because there’s so much death, especially around Hughie, our supposed POV in this Wild West. But after having fought Supes, getting attacked by them, and committing crimes himself, he’s gotten lost and has yet to find his purpose. Hughie tends to get swayed and holds onto things tightly, as his father points out. Season four doesn’t know what to do with him anymore, so I appreciated the growth when Hughie mercifully ends his father’s life in an emotional scene with both of them and Daphne.

See, the Boys can pull off carnage with catharsis. That’s what the show has been missing this year. Instead of parodying the headlines, it’s ripping stories directly from them. Just look at how Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a stand-in for Marjorie Taylor Greene, keeps attacking Starlight on a conservative network about her abortion (among other things). Watching it on the second anniversary of the disastrous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is upsetting, to say the least. The Boys is copy-pasting real events with a satirical tone but it’s not saying anything new anymore, doubling up the material’s weariness.

Meanwhile, in what feels like it took place in a parallel universe, the V52 Expo is fertile ground to poke fun at our Comic-Con obsession and Marvel/DC’s annual display of their profuse programming. It’s a neat reminder that conglomerates are just here to satisfy our frenzy for non-stop content, quality be damned. Vought, too, has several “phases” planned as Deep (Chace) and right-wing journalist Cameron Coleman (Matthew Edison) announce onstage, channeling Kevin Feigeas they list franchises like A-Train’s movies, Gen V’s Cate and Sam in a gender-flip series, and Deep getting his own version of Aquaman.

Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), however, isn’t thrilled about leading his TV show. (The cheesy title is Super School, so you can’t blame him.) Why waste time with fictional saves when he can use his powers for good, he tells his dad, Homelander. For his part, Homelander is mostly zen after his murder spree last week and supports his teen son’s goals. Or so we think. He ends up manipulating Ryan into punishing Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne), the director harassing his female assistant. Fine, this ranks low on the list of bad things he has done, but Homelander and Ryan sipping on their drinks with smirks as Adam is being slapped is not a good sign for the kid.

Billy Butcher, you need to rescue Ryan, stat. His plan to steal the Supe-killing virus doesn’t work, but our fave Kiwi has a backup. He has kidnapped Sameer, Victoria’s ex who knows how to recreate it. Butcher smirks hard at this plan while sharing it with Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who is certainly a figment of his brain damage, as most of you predicted. I’m curious as to why Billy is imagining him instead of say, Lenny, his dead younger brother. Let’s just hope The Boys gives us an answer before wrapping up the season.

Stray observations

• This exchange during the farm-animal crisis made me pause and chortle.
  Frenchie: “This man [referring to a dead body] is in no condition to f*ck a sheep.” Stan sincerely replies, “The sheep would eat him.”
• Here’s how Homelander explains his predicament of being told what to do by Vought to Ryan: “It’s like being a slave, only worse” and “We are both emancipated from slavery.”
• Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) knows A-Train is the leak, right? So why does she go along with it when Ashley (Colby Minifie) frames Cameron for it? I hope she uses this knowledge to help them take down Homelander.
• In case you missed it, Deep was supposed to star in the next Noah Baumbach slice-of-life movie. Sure, Jan.
• We see A-Train’s movie trailer at V52, a biopic that’s described as an homage to Will Ferrell’s white coach and the boy he taught to run by yelling things like “Run faster than that.”

• Before things go haywire for the Campbells, Daphne gives her ring to Hughie and nudges him to propose to Annie. I shudder to think of what a wedding in The Boys universe will look like.
• As far as crossovers go, this episode doesn’t shed insight into what Cate and Sam have been up to except that they’ve aligned big time with the Seven, a fact we already knew.