The Boys season 4, Episode 4 recap: Welcome to the Bad Room

After a wild three-episode premiere drop that included the now-notorious Sauna Scene, Vought on Ice, and much more, you’d be forgiven if you thought the show could calm down for a bit. Ha ha, got you. The Boys Season 4, Episode 4 “Wisdom of the Ages,” might be the most horrifically violent episode the show has ever done, thanks to a brutal visit home for Homelander (Antony Starr), and the total emotional destruction of Annie (Erin Moriarty).

We’ll get to all that in a moment, but first let’s do a little pre-recap. Precap? I don’t know, I just work here. Homelander has been having a hard time of late, what with Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) stepping up as de facto CEO of Vought, aging, and the fact that his son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) seems to have a mind of his own. So after breaking a mirror last episode, he told himself Green Goblin-style to go back to the start.

Meanwhile, Annie has been slowly working her way up to re-embracing her Supe identity as Starlight. At the same time, she's been specifically targeted by the QAnon-esque Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a new member of the Seven, because of some absolutely awful things Annie said to her back when they were teens on the pageant circuit.

Butcher (Karl Urban) is… not doing great. He’s got about six months to live after riddling his body with tumors due to using Temp V last season. He also desperately wants to do one good thing before he goes: free Ryan from Homelander’s influence, something the hallucinatory specter of his wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten) has been encouraging him to do, and you don’t not listen to ghosts. We’ve all seen A Christmas Carol.

Meanwhile, Frenchie (Tomer Capone) is spiraling because he’s dating a guy named Colin (Elliot Knight), and he hasn’t told him yet that back in the day he killed Colin’s entire family. Awkward! Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) has also got some awkward reunions coming, as a cell of the terrorist group Shining Light is in town.

Some other bits before we get into it: Sage and The Deep (Chace Crawford) hooked up over trashy TV and a Bloomin’ Onion, while The Deep’s poor octopus girlfriend Ambrosius (Tilda Swinton) languishes in a tank in his closet. A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) is maybe getting flipped to the good guys’ side by MM (Laz Alonso). Hughie’s (Jack Quaid) dad (Simon Pegg) is dying of a stroke in the hospital, and his absent mom (Rosemarie DeWitt) has turned up again.

Oh, and there’s this whole thing with President Dakota Bob (Jim Beaver) wanting to make Supes obsolete, even though his VP Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) is secretly a Supe. He knows it, she knows he knows it, and he knows she knows he knows it, but no one admits it. Plans upon plans!

Okay, enough precap – that works, I think! Print it – let’s get into the recap.

The Boys, Season 4, Episode 4 “Wisdom Of The Ages” recap:

This episode is directed by Phil Sgriccia and written by Geoff Aull. Let’s start with Homelander, since he’s on his own, horrifying track for most of the episode. He heads back to Project Odessa, the place where he was raised – and we use that word loosely. This is where he was abused and tortured for years, and so he tortures and abuses the people who work there right back.

Specifically, here’s the sequence of events:

• Homelander brings the whole team a Fudgie the Whale, which is frankly a better ice cream cake than Cookie Puss and I think we can all agree on that (Cookie O’Puss? Now that’s a debate).
• Homelander wants Barbara (Nancy Lenehan), the woman in charge of the facility, to come down to “chat,” but she’s off-site at the moment.
• While he waits, he plays wastebasket basketball with Frank (Mark Cowling), who used to play that while he put Homelander in an oven as a kid. Frank says, “I was just doing my job,” which is a line straight out of the Nazi playbook of “excuses,” and Homelander sticks him in the oven so he can see how it feels.
• Next up is Martin (Murray Furrow), who used to call Homelander “Squirt” because he caught him one time masturbating in “The Bad Room,” a place where they isolated Homelander for days at a time. So Homelander tells Marty to masturbate in front of everyone and they’ll be square, and gives him “motivation” by telling him if he doesn’t do it, he’ll laser his penis off. Spoiler: he lasers his penis off.
• Barbara comes in and resignedly chastises Homelander, tells him to put Marty out of his misery (he crushes Marty’s head under his boot), and then they have a little chat in The Bad Room.
• Barbara explains that Homelander was strong enough that, as a kid, he could have escaped at any time – but he didn’t. What they did at Project Odessa deepened his narcissism and his aggressive need to be loved.
• We’re left with Homelander having ripped apart the rest of the staff and splattered them all over The Bad Room, with Barbara left gasping and terrified inside. The final shot of the episode is Homelander going back upstairs in the elevator, also covered head to toe in blood. He smiles.

So, other than “that’s the concept of a recap” why did I lay out all of these events above in order like that? Because I think there’s a non-zero chance that some viewers are going to wildly misinterpret this storyline as some sort of Homelander redemption story.

Yes, Project Odessa and its casual villainy is not only bad, but it is directly taken from techniques Nazis used to “test” Jews and other people they considered deviant “races” during the Holocaust. This sort of “I was just doing my job” thing is, indeed, extremely bad.

However, what Barbara pretty clearly explains in the episode when she talks about Homelander’s birth, is that as a just-born baby he cut his way out of his mother and slaughtered an entire room full of doctors and nurses. He was born bad. There is no good in him, and there never was. Does that make torturing him the right thing to do? Absolutely not, and I’m not sure if you’ve heard this one before – maybe I just made it up? – two wrongs don’t make a right.

But the bigger thing that is definitely going to fly over the “when did The Boys get woke???” crowd, and brother, the answer is “first episode of Season 1,” is that the theme of this episode, and the whole season, and perhaps the entire show, is owning your mistakes, regardless of the consequences. What Homelander does here gives him that momentary injection of fear and godlike worship he craves, because he was – again – born that way, and only made worse by Vought and Project Odessa. He didn’t do anything heroic, or because it was the right thing to do. He didn’t balance any scales. He did what he did because it freed him of any sort of responsibility for his own actions… By doubling down on his own violent actions.

That’s not heroism. That’s villainy. He is a villain. Homelander is the villain of The Boys. I don’t know why or how people are missing that, they again all but literally say it out loud in this episode. But he is. It’s perhaps because Antony Starr is so damn engaging in the role that people think he’s somehow this misunderstood anti-hero. But unless you are using it to mean “against hero” i.e. “villain” then you’re not using the term correctly.

Annie, Hughie and the rest

Anywho, rant over, let’s hit some other highlights here, because a lot more is going on. Specifically, as mentioned above, Starlight, aka Annie, is making some big moves. She teams up with President-elect Dakota Bob to help take down Vought after dropping a banger of a line about his current efforts in that direction: “Your ad buys during CSI Las Vegas are definitely winning over the 'left the TV on because they’re dead' demo.” Ouch.

It seems to be working, too, right up until Firecracker sets up a VNN special right across the street from the Starlight House. While Homelander is away, Sage will play. She’s directing the Vought staff to manipulate social media and trend hashtags against Starlight, while Firecracker goes on a star-studded (“...And Kanye West!”), song-filled special all about tearing Annie down.

Side-note: perhaps the funniest visual joke of the episode is cutting to the street outside the staged special, where nobody is watching and business is happening as usual. Hm, wonder whose empty rallies that could be a comment on? No idea, I guess.

Back to the rally, Butcher is weirdly back with the Boys despite MM kicking him out the last time we saw him, and it seems like there might be a scene or two missing, perhaps? Regardless, Butcher uses his contact Web Weaver to get them backstage at the rally, where they reveal to Firecracker they’ve got dirt on her: she slept with a 15-year-old boy. Again, very pointed commentary on how the people who scream “pedophile cult” are often the pedophiles themselves, but showing a bit of grit, Firecracker manages to turn things around by posting a tweet (xeet?) and then confessing to the whole thing live on air. With the help of Supe preacher Ezekiel (Shaun Benson) she instead explains it was a temptation from god that sent her on the right path…

…And it’s nowhere near as bad as the abortion that Annie got six months ago. In case you’re searching your official The Boys handbook, this happened between seasons, so it’s as much of a surprise to us, the viewers, as it is for Annie and Hughie to hear their secret on live TV. And laudably for the TV show, though Annie freaks out, they are clear that it’s about a private moment being shared by Firecracker – not because she’s ashamed about what they did. They later agree it was the right thing to do, they weren’t ready to have a baby. But the writing doesn’t ignore those experiences can be hard and traumatic, even as they are acceptable legally and morally.

Unfortunately, though, Annie does beat the crap out of Firecracker in front of everyone, and by episode’s end Dakota Bob has cut ties with her, too. She’s lost the Starlighters, the government, and her reputation, all thanks to Sage’s behind-the-scenes manipulation. And as a bonus, Firecracker got beat up after earlier telling Sage, “When we first met, I thought you were kind of uppity, but you’re one of the good ones.” Two birds with one stone.

Speaking of Sage, if you were wondering what that bloody metal stick was last episode? Turns out she self-lobotomizes as a form of relaxation. She notes that if you shoot her through the heart, she’ll die – which seems a little bit of foreshadowing, if you ask me – but her brain grows right back. So she gets The Deep to lobotomize her, and then, uh, go to Flavortown.

Let’s jump back to Hughie, who goes on a side mission this episode to get Compound V to save his Dad’s life, even though everyone tells him it’s a bad idea. Specifically Kimiko, who can’t believe Hughie is teaming up with A-Train, aka the man who killed his girlfriend, to go get the Compound V. Kimiko comes in with the most pointed line of the episode, which is not her autocorrect having fun with the phrase “fish d**k” but in fact her telling Hughie when he asks what he’s supposed to do, she texts that he’s supposed to let his father die.

They don’t have time to discuss, though, as Shining Light attacks, and Hughie immediately trips and jams his leg on a loose board. Kimiko then outfits him with deadly office supplies, and while she battles an old frenemy from her Shining Light days, Hughie ends up killing one of them, mano a mano. I could be wrong, but I believe this is the first time Hughie has killed a human on the show, and it clearly changes him enough that he not only forgives A-Train, but decides not to give his dad the V. Only oops, it looks like his mom did it instead, and Hughie Sr. wakes up after Simon Pegg’s four-episode nap. Get that paycheck, Pegg!

A-Train, of note, finds Homelander’s jar of gray pubes, as well as an entire drawer of what might be Madelyn Stilwell’s breast milk, on top of the V. And in the process he discovers Ashley (Colby Minifie) left a floater in Homelander’s toilet, a suggestion Cameron Coleman (Matthew Edison) made in the previous episode. So now they’ve got an alliance, I guess?

This is already pretty long, but two other characters worth mentioning: Butcher and Frenchie. On Butcher’s end, he’s full on worms crawling in his back, which is pretty gross. He also blacks out and rips Ezekiel apart somehow. On Frenchie’s end, he ends up confessing to Colin that he killed his family, and you know what? It doesn’t go well.

So going into episode 5, everyone is in a bad place, except Homelander, who is doing great! Still not the hero, though.

Easter eggs & cameos:

Most of the Easter eggs this week come via a promo for the V52 Expo “Powered by Fans, For Fans,” which is a clear riff on Disney’s annual D23 Expo. In the promo for the V52 Expo, they plug appearances by Sister Sage, Homelander, Firecracker, Sam (Guardians Of Godolkin), Cate (Guardians of Godolkin), Adam Bourke, A-Train, and many more. The big tease here is an upcoming appearance by Sam (Asa Germann) and Cate (Maddie Phillips), in a crossover with sister show Gen V.

We also get an exclusive sneak peek of Training A-Train, which means Will Ferrell as Will Ferrell as Coach Brink gets another credit at the end of the episode.

Most intriguing is a promo for The Whole Truth, which teases that Marie Moreau and the Godolkin Four have “seemingly vanished” into a “dark, gaping hole.” In case you didn’t watch Gen V, this is the show hosted by Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) where he investigates mysteries but is really just shaping the Vought narrative. Here we’ve got two things going. At the end of Gen V, the Godolkin Four found themselves in a strange, windowless, doorless chamber. But this is also a joke on the fact that Tek Knight has a brain tumor that makes him sexually attracted to holes.

I’ll also note that while it’s not an Easter egg, we do see Chance Perdomo’s character briefly here, and given the actor suddenly died in a motorcycle accident earlier this year, with Gen V and The Boys promising they will work his passing into the second season of the spinoff… Yeah, that’s rough.

Last note: we see Firecracker is taking some meds. Her real name is Misty Tucker Gray, and she’s taking metoclopramide, which treats nausea in cancer patients. It also can increase breast milk production, though is generally frowned on by practitioners because of some nasty side-effects.

Does Homelander drink milk?

Homelander doesn’t drink it, but he does have a whole drawer of breast milk above his drawer of Compound V.

Does Hughie get covered in blood?

After four episodes, Hughie finally gets sprayed with a ton of blood after cutting a Shining Light terrorist’s throat during the office fight. The show is back, baby!

Love Sausage Award for most gross-out moment of the episode:

No question here: Sage getting lobotomized definitely takes the cake. Actually, I’ll give this a tie because I cannot deal with watching eye stuff – and The Deep slowly shoving a metal stick into Sage’s eye horrified me. But Marty masturbating and then getting his penis lasered off while Homelander cackled with laughter was pretty horrible, too.

Burning questions:

We see the worms in Butcher’s back again, which seems very different than how cancer usually works? Could be wrong, I’m no doctor. The worms also seem larger this time, and one thing I skipped in the recap: Butcher confronts Hughie for taking the Compound V to his dad, with Hughie asking why he hasn’t taken it. Weirdly, Butcher mentions he has taken V, about four months back, and it didn’t do anything. But perhaps it did do something, and that something is “worms?”

How did Butcher rip Ezekiel to shreds? Perhaps the answer to the first question is the answer to this one, as well?

The Boys streams Thursdays on Prime Video.

The Boys season 4 reviews

• Episode 401, "Department of Dirty Tricks”
• Episode 402, "Life Among The Septics"
• Episode 403, “We’ll Keep The Red Flag Flying Here”
• Episode 404, "Wisdom of the Ages"

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