This season of “The Boys” keeps outdoing itself in terms of gross-out moments, and episode 4 is no exception, featuring an ice-pick lobotomy, a lasered-off penis, and a flame-broiled scientist.
The episode opens with Homelander (Antony Starr) returning to his roots and revisiting the basement laboratory where he was brutally tested as a super-powered child. He exacts revenge on the Vought scientists by subjecting them to the same agony he underwent. One unfortunate individual is locked in an oven and burned to a crisp; another is forced to masturbate in front of his coworkers before Homelander discharges an eye-laser through his penis and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁s him. The mad supe learns more of the anguish Vought inflicted on him as a child, and he concludes the episode drenched in blood and surrounded by mangled scientists’ bodies.
Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) confesses in the last episode how she became attracted to the misogynistic supe: she lobotomizes herself to dumb down her super-smart, self-regenerating brain. Deep uses an ice pick to execute a brutal frontal-lobe lobotomy, briefly reducing Sage to a horny idiot who has 𝓈ℯ𝓍 with him and eats fried pickles.
“[Showrunner Eric] Kripke and I talked a lot about Sage’s sense of isolation,” Heyward told Variety. “How her brain is a blessing and a curse because she’s trapped among all this information all the time and she can never really escape and just be. And so I think [the risk of losing her eye with a lobotomy] is worth it, for her sanity, because if she doesn’t get a break from her brain, she’s gonna go even crazier than she already is. It was really fun to shoot. The stunt team made sure we all felt safe. Objects coming toward the eye is naturally an instilled moment. But I’ve been putting contacts in my eyes since I was a kid, and the stunt team was great.”
“That was squeamish inducing, for sure. It was a technically challenging little bit and we were shooting all of it until that moment,” Crawford added. “Just doing it was so intense. Truly phenomenal, very weird kink though.”
On the Boys’ side, Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) have their first team-up and run into mysterious people from Kimiko’s past while obtaining some Compound V. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) reveals his deep dark secret to Colin (Elliot Knight) that he 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ed Colin’s family years ago — which doesn’t go well for their budding romance. Butcher (Karl Urban) runs into the stretchy supe Ezekiel (Shaun Benson) and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁s him — but it seems like Butcher’s brain tumor may have caused him to blackout during the murder. And A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) helps out Hughie and steals him some Compound V to give to his dad (Simon Pegg), which makes him up from his coma.
Sister Sage asking the Deep to give her a lobotomy is one of the grossest scenes of the season so far. Where did that idea come from?
When you have a room full of over-educated, miserable writers trying to imagine what it would be like to be the world’s smartest person, you immediately get to, ‘Well, that would be awful. You would do anything to be stupid for a couple hours so that you could just be happy.’ We started talking about, ‘Is she huffing paint? What is she doing?’ I’ve been sort of obsessed with frontal lobotomies because it’s a real thing. They don’t really do it so much anymore obviously, thank God, but in the ’50s and ’60s, this was done thousands and thousands of times. Rosemary Kennedy is one of the most famous to receive them. It really is like a fucking ice pick in the corner of your eye and they literally just scrambled your frontal lobe. It’s insane to me that was a real thing and so I wanted to show that. People just get so weird about eye stuff and so I knew that that would be one where people are really going to cover their eyes watching. Obviously, no icepick ever got close to Susan’s eye. The fact that it’s as disturbing as it is is all the credit to the visual effects department.
Where there other ideas about how to dumb down Sage?
No, it mostly involved huffing things.
Sage and Deep then eat some of Guy Fieri’s Flavortown fried pickles. Did you have to get his permission to use it in the episode?
No, when something is being used as the way it’s intended you can just use it. If someone’s drinking a Coke, there’s no problem. If someone’s douching with a Coke, you need permission.
I sensed some Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan vibes on Firecracker’s “Truth Bomb.” What real-life influences did you use for her talk show?
Honestly, I feel like the Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan comparisons are probably a little bit too conservative. We have our like Tucker Carlson-type with Cameron Coleman the news anchor. The way Fox is sort of begetting OAN, so does our VNN news shows beget the Truth Bomb. It’s closer to something Alex Jones would do, where it’s just complete bananas conpsiracy theories passed off as reality and it’s meant to be outrageous and explosive but people seem to accept it as as truth. There’s just so much straight-up, Qanon-style misinformation out there, that was what we wanted Firecracker in “Truth Bomb” to represent.
This episode also has the return of the stretchy-limbed Ezekiel. Were you always planning to bring him back after he was introduced in the first season?
Oh, yeah. Shaun Benson, the actor who plays him, is just too good. I’ve always wanted to bring back Ezekiel and find the right place for him. I’m thrilled that it came up here. He’s so funny and smart in this episode, like that moment where Firecracker goes on stage to confess and he’s trying to tell her like, ‘Please don’t do whatever you’re up to do.’ I was just so happy to work with Shaun again.
