The Boys cast and crew on heartbreaking Campbell family drama, Frenchie's sexuality, and more

The latest episode of The Boys, "Beware the Jabberwock, My Son," was more serious than the title might suggest...well, the bit with the flying bloodthirsty super-sheep was pretty crazy, and even in the serious scenes there were nutso moments like Hughie's dad phasing into a smooth-talking finance bro and accidentally exploding his entrails.

Okay, maybe the title is accurate, but there were still some heartbreaking scenes, namely the ones set in the hospital where Hughie's dad Hugh Sr. (Simon Pegg) woke up from a coma to discover he had superpowers; chalk that up to his son Hughie (Jack Quaid) and ex-wife Daphne (Rosemarie DeWitt), who injected him with Compound V. Except that the reawakened Hugh had been braindead too long, and was running around the hospital in a senile haze accidentally killing people with powers he couldn't control.

In the end, Hughie and Daphne were able to calm down Hugh and inject him with something that ended his life. “For us, one of the big themes was Hughie really grows up,” showrunner Eric Kripke told The Hollywood Reporter. “Dealing with a sick parent really ages you up in a hurry. Something everyone will face, when your parents go from taking care of you to you start taking care of your parents. That was a big part of this. It was time for Hughie to become a fully mature adult, and I think this ordeal really helps him do that.”

"Hughie was never good at letting anybody go. He wasn’t good at letting go of Butcher [Karl Urban], Annie [Erin Moriarty] or of his anger toward A-Train [in the first-ever episode of The Boys, A-Train accidentally killed Hughie’s girlfriend by running through her while chasing a rogue supe]. And so, this season, he learns it was time to let his father go; he learns it was time to let go of his anger towards A-Train. It’s time to show forgiveness toward his mother, and that forgiveness isn’t about the other person — forgiveness is a healthy advantage and benefit to yourself. Because you’re not carrying hate anymore, which weighs so heavily. So, in many ways he has the most mature emotional journey of any of the characters, because he really learns the secret about mercy, forgiveness and letting go."

As for Hugh, he comes to himself in the end, bidding goodbye to his "wee Hughie." Incidentally, that's the nickname given to Hughie's character in The Boys comic book. In the comic, Hughie's look is based off Simon Pegg, which is why he was cast as Hughie's father in the show. According to Kripke, Pegg himself had the idea to tie things back to the book at the end. "That was not in the script. He reached out to me and he said, 'Can I call him 'Wee Hughie' as one last nod?'" Kripke told Entertainment Weekly. "For him, this wasn't just him leaving the show, this was him saying goodbye to 20 years of this character being a part of his life. I thought that was a perfect way to come full circle."

It was very moving for The Boys...although Hugh Sr.'s last words were about how much he'd like to take The Da Vinci Code walking tour in Paris. This is still The Boys, after all.

Why does A-Train flip sides on The Boys?

Another character who has some moving scenes in him yet is A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), who started the show as just another sociopathic supe but who's been having a change of heart lately. After watching Homelander and the other psychos on the Seven descend further into moral depravity and even plot the overthrow of the government, A-Train found himself leaking information to the Boys.

“It was a long time coming,” Kripke said. “So much of his story in season three was that he decided his brand was going to be pretending to give a shit. And he did it so much that he actually started to give a shit. And so that was really where we left him last season. And then, this season, being in that shitty movie and watching The Seven do all of these horrific things, I think there was a little bit of a candle flame of a conscience that was awoken in him last season, that now these things slowly but surely were just becoming unbearable. He just needed to do something about it, despite the great personal risk. I think he is just starting to think that maybe he actually has to be a hero, instead of pretending to be one.”

The "shitty movie" is Training A-Train, an uplifting rags-to-riches story starring Will Ferrell as A-Train's helpful, Blind Side-esque white savior/trainer. Because again, The Boys can't remain sincere for too long; very soon, they'll cut it with something delightfully stupid.

Why does Frenchie turn himself in on The Boys?

Finally, let's talk about Frenchie (Tomer Capone), who's been at the center of some conservative backlash to the show this season, mainly because Frenchie has started up a relationship with a man, Colin (Elliot Knight). Some fans thought that came out of left field, but Capone has another take.

“When I started with Frenchie, in terms of me assembling character and kind of puzzling who this guy is, I had a lot of inspiration for some reason from artists like Serge Gainsbourg, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger,” Capone told Variety. “If you think about it, all those people have a sexuality that is not black or white, it’s somewhere in between. They’re so beautiful for being what they are. On the funny side, I manifested it. I tell you why, because in the second season they brought this T-shirt to the trailer and it had this crazy bone bunny, a skeleton of a bunny, on it. I had this idea out of nowhere, taking a pair of scissors and just cutting it to a crop top. I ended up on set with the crop top and I remember Eric Kripke was on set and he asked me, ‘Tommy, you know, it’s a crop top? We can see your belly button?’ I said, ‘Frenchie loves it.’ And he said, ‘All right, all right.’ Maybe that manifested the whole arc with Colin.”

"At the end of the day, it’s deeper than that. It’s the writers and the story trying to give you another angle and another peep hole to see this character, where he came from, what his demons are made of. Obviously, Frenchie is a tortured soul that walks in the crazy world of The Boys that is controlled by the Seven. And to the equivalent to our world with media and politics, he’s an outsider. So it’s just another beautiful color to explore in Frenchie’s painting. I loved it."

In the end, the relationship with Colin was sorta incidental to what Frenchie is going through now. Frenchie admitted to Colin that he was the one who killed his family years ago — he lived a rough life, that Frenchie. Colin was understandably upset, and Frenchie subsequently turned himself in to the police.

“In a way, you’re trying to show what is a moral compass,” Capone mused. “This show has so many flawed characters. The good guys are bad and the bad guys are good. In the end, by Frenchie taking the decision of going and turning himself in, it’s a question of moral compass, of someone who wants to clean his rooms in his soul, who wants redemption, who wants to start over, who wants to be genuine and to balance his moral compass more than anything. In front of characters that are far away from that in the show, it gives a certain balance. We have to a little bit — just a little bit — show what’s the right decision opposite say Butcher’s decisions or Homelander’s decisions, which are, let’s face it, not amazing. But more than that, it’s a question I asked myself as well, ‘Why does he have the need to do it? Why did he do it when it was in the past?’ But the past always haunts us. All of us have this moment in life where we wish we could have gone back and redo some shit and be better. The question is, what are you going to do with that today?"

New episodes of The Boys drop Thursdays on Amazon Prime Video.

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