The Boys season 4, episode 5 recap: Old McVought had a farm

It’s a bit of a surprise that this week’s episode of The Boys, “Beware The Jabberwock, My Son,” includes a hefty portion of recap from spinoff show Gen V in the “previously on” section. The biggest surprise is why it took this long, though the episode briefly explains the wait. And don’t worry, we’ll explain how it all fits together, too. That’s how a recap works?

Before we get into it, though, a bit of recap of our own, including how all those scenes in Gen V lead up to this crossover episode (nobody tell Mr. Peanutbutter), in case you skipped the spinoff.

Previously on The Boys, Annie (Erin Moriarty) went E!’s Wild On Firecracker (Valorie Curry) after the latter went on live TV and revealed that Annie had an abortion. Meanwhile, Hughie (Jack Quaid) was wrestling with whther to give his brain-dead dad Hughie Sr. (Simon Pegg) a dose of Compound V. His previously absent mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) seemingly taking that choice away from him, leading to Hughie Sr. waking up from his otherwise deadly stroke.

Butcher (Karl Urban) has been working with his old CIA buddy Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), aka the only man more extreme than him, while also dealing with the tumors riddling his body and some strange wormy things crawling up and down his spine. And not only that, he somehow blacked out and ripped Supe preacher Ezekiel (Shaun Benson) to shreds while backstage at Firecracker’s TV special.

Onto the other Boys, Frenchie (Tomer Capone), told his boyfriend Colin (Elliott Knight) that he had killed his family, which didn’t go well. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) had an awkward confrontation with someone she used to be friends with in the Shining Light terrorist organization. And MM (Laz Alonso) is barely holding everything together.

On The Seven side, as usual, there’s a lot going on. Homelander (Antony Starr) slaughtered the last of the people who raised and tortured him and has been attempting to bond with his son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti). A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) has been leaking info on Vought to The Boys, while Sage (Susan Heyward) has been tracking down the leak. She’s the smartest person in the world, so it’s only a matter of time. And Ashley (Colby Minifie) has been dominating VNN host Cameron Coleman (Matthew Edison).

What about previously on Gen V? Glad you asked. On that show, Godolkin University was mostly a front for The Woods, a secret facility where the school’s Dean was creating a virus to kill all Supes. While it wasn’t strong enough to kill Homelander, her ultimate goal, it did take out Supes on a one-on-one basis. The main cast discovered this, and through a series of circumstances not necessary to explain here, most of the good guys ended up in prison, while the bad guys, Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and Sam Riordan (Asa Germann), were hailed as the Guardians of Godolkin.

While all that was going down, current VP-elect and secret Supe Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) took the remaining sample of the virus to try and gain the upper hand on Homelander. And in an end credits scene, Butcher showed up at the wreckage of The Woods.

And that’s what you missed on Glee! Let’s get to the recap of this episode, but a bit of a warning: the Easter eggs section below is arguably longer than the recap.

The Boys, Season 4, Episode 5 “Beware The Jabberwock, My Son” recap:

Written by Judalina Neira and directed by Shana Stein, this episode has a classic A plot, B plot, C plot structure. Usually we get these things crossing over or crashing into each other by the end, but not so here! So let’s break down this recap into three sections: What happens at the V52 Expo; what happens to the Campbell family; and what happens with, well, everyone else.

The V52 Expo (and what comes after):

As teased earlier in the season, we’re headed to the V52 Expo, a clear parody of Disney’s D23 Expo, right down to the obscene timeline of upcoming movies and TV shows. Don’t worry, they're not just skewering Marvel here; DC’s dark and murky movies get ribbed as well. It’s all razor sharp and exactly the sort of cultural/media parody you expect from The Boys, and again, head to Easter eggs below if you want to read it all. Or as Cameron Coleman says, “...which we’ll be sharing with all of you today in exhaustive detail.”

But let’s focus on the plot elements, because this is set up almost like a classic backstage farce, if in a classic backstage farce someone got beaten to death at the end. I’m sure that happened in one of Moliere’s plays, but I’m not going to double check.

Coleman and The Deep are hosting the show together to a crowd of appreciative, crying fans in cosplay, cheering and giving standing ovations to pretty much everything they announce. The one exception? Their advertising platform, which tailors product integration based on area of interest. When they get to throwing a cheap cognac in for Black audiences, both the Black members of The Seven (that would be A-Train and Sage, as well as Black Noir who is “undefined”) and those in the audience are not thrilled, to put it lightly.

In fact, all of the casual racism exhibited at the V52 Expo is biting, from coming up with a “Black At It” initiative, to the fact that A-Train is standing there silently on stage while two white men talk about diversity.

However, I will mention that it is particularly wild that this product integration joke happens mere months after scenes from a Chilean cut of Star Wars went viral for inserting shots of Cerveza Cristal beer. It’s nothing new – that cut was actually introduced in 2003 – but it’s just another instance of the eerie luck this show has in terms of reflecting current culture, despite the fact that this season was done shooting well over a year ago.

Back to The Deep and Cameron, there’s a push and pull here because the aquatic Supe is pissed Coleman reported on him getting canned from Crime Analytics. In another pointed reference, Coleman explains he needs to take shots at the home team to appear “fair and balanced,” which used to be the tagline of Fox News. Subtle, this show ain’t.

Mostly, this seems to be here to dovetail with the Ashley and Cameron storyline, which finds him rejecting her because she’s not really in charge of Vought anymore, which hurts her credibility as a dom. Ultimately, she manipulates his phone records to make it look like he’s been texting MM, leading to Cameron being beaten to death in The Seven conference room. Now Ashley is free from any blackmail Coleman has on her, The Deep got revenge for Coleman’s threats towards his beloved octopus Ambrosius (Tilda Swinton), and VNN is down a host.

A-Train, the actual leaker, makes more of an alliance with Ashley this episode as Sage closes in on him. And while Coleman is the one who takes the fall, it’s clear Sage knows A-Train is the one actually to blame, so he’s not in the clear yet.

But the main draw, as usual, is Homelander. In a surprising turn of events after his slaughterfest last episode, he’s having traumatic flashbacks. Could Homelander… Feel bad? Again, as usual, to be clear: do not feel bad for him. But it certainly seems like – in a shocking twist to nobody – killing everyone in his past has left him feeling alone once again rather than miraculously solving all of his problems.

So he turns to the only other person he sees himself in, Ryan, and for a time acts like an actual father. Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne) pitches Ryan on Super School, a teen comedy Ryan doesn’t want to do — so they don’t do that. Instead, when Ryan says he wants to save people for real, Homelander suggests they “save” P.A. Bonnie (Connie Mu), who is clearly being sexually harassed by Bourke. Unfortunately… this is still Homelander we’re talking about. He’s a bully, and a bad guy, and despite Bourke’s despicable actions, the solution — Ryan gets Bonnie to slap Bourke while he kneels before her — is supplication and torture, not heroism.

I’ve seen a number of folks lauding Ryan as more Superman than Homelander, but I’d argue that’s not the point the show is making at all. He’s unformed clay with unchecked power, and neither of his two father figures — Homelander and Butcher – are the right people to set him on the correct path. So yeah, bad stuff is coming if this continues. He might end up as Superman; more likely, he’s going to end up as Dane DeHaan’s character in Chronicle. 

Oh, and Sam and Cate present their body-switching comedy to V52, as well as pledge allegiance to Homelander by helping in the Cameron Cole beatdown. It’s the lightest of all possible crossovers with Gen V.

Meet The Campbells

Easily the most emotionally charged part of the episode, and perhaps the most emotionally charged thing the show has ever done, is the death of Hughie Campbell, Sr. In actuality, he died back at the beginning of the season when he had a stroke. But the V reactivates his brain tissue enough to give him a simulacrum of life, and superpowers.

The superpowers are incredibly pointed, by the way. Multiple times in this episode, Hughie Sr. mentions being interested in the most middle-of-the-road things possible — he’s specific about flavors of pizza rolls, he wants to go to Paris so he can go on a Da Vinci Code tour, he likes Diet Snapple — but what we learn here is that’s all a front for a simmering cauldron of rage. Yes, that’s the V coursing through his barely animate body. But it’s clear that being abandoned by his wife hurt far more than he lets on.

Hughie Sr. even says as much: “I did everything for you, and you looked through me like I wasn’t even there.” So of course, his powers are to become intangible, and pass through things...until he doesn’t, and they end up being ripped apart. And in case you didn’t get it, he keeps ripping the hearts out of people, just as his own heart was ripped out by his wife.

But all this is leading back to what Kimiko stressed to Hughie in the previous episode: that what junior needs to do is let his dad die. Yes, he’s killed multiple people now, including a Wall Street Bro who was trying to ask out his nurse, and a security guard. But the whole Campbell family gets one final chance to say goodbye. And in the midst of this dark, upsetting moment, it’s also rather beautiful: who wouldn’t want the chance to say all the things they wanted to say to their parent before they passed away?

Hughie Sr.’s final words? Specifying that the Da Vinci Code tour he wanted to go on in Paris isn’t based on the book, he wants to go on the one based on the movie. “Tom Hanks…” says Hughie Sr. So to Simon Pegg? We say: T. Hanks.

Farm Life

While all of [gestures] that is going on, the rest of The Boys free Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) from prison in order to track down Victoria Neuman’s virus. It’s a classic “good guys team up with the bad guys” plot, except it mostly takes the form of wandering around a farm for a series of one-on-one conversations, punctuated by killer farm animals.

I don’t want to get too down on this, but between Annie and Victoria having a conversation where they stated their character’s main goals and issues out loud, and Frenchie and Annie doing the same, The Boys is breaking with its tradition of showing rather than telling. Maybe as we’re just past halfway through the season, this is the only way they could figure out how to get folks from one place (emotionally) to another, but frankly I didn’t need Frenchie playing with a rosary and telling us he’s probably damned, to know he feels that way. To quote Futurama: “You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!”

To keep lumping on this section, you could feel the gears creaking on the virus storyline, too. Look, I get it, it’s an almost literal smoking gun to have a virus that instantly kills Supes that everyone is trying to make go airborne. That’s a big move, and one that takes away a lot of the drama of “well, how are they going to kill that guy?” But the actual plot in this episode feels forced: Neuman has the virus at the end of Gen V; Neuman loses all of the virus except one dose; they use the dose to save themselves from V-ed up farm animals; Butcher is going to remake the virus at the end of the episode… I feel like I’m reading the note cards on the board in the writers room instead of watching a TV show.

I get it, I do… You can’t introduce this virus and then ignore it for all of The Boys. At one point, the Boys even ask Butcher when he was going to tell them about it, which is basically what everyone who watched Gen V has been asking all season long. The explanation — I think — is that while the bulk of Gen V season 1 took place prior to season 4 of The Boys, the end-credits scene featuring Butcher investigating The Woods took place off-screen during this episode. He may not have known about the virus, or that Neuman had it, until about 10 minutes into this week’s hour of TV.

Regardless, it’s frustrating to bring it up at all because now we’ve got three episodes left and are stuck back in the same plotline that took all of Gen V’s freshman season to build up to. We’ll see how this pans out, but it really feels like we’re spinning our wheels here: either use the virus, or destroy it permanently and move on.

But don’t get me wrong, killer farm animals are fun. We get to see flying sheep attacking, before the team uses their one remaining sample of the virus to infect a dead body and feed it to the sheep, solving their problem.

And we get to see Omid Abtahi as Sameer Shah, the father of Zoey, aka Neuman’s daughter. He’s always a welcome presence on TV, even if he does end up minus one leg courtesy of Butcher and Kessler by the end of the episode, tied up and forced to recreate the virus.

The other big event is that Frenchie turns himself into the police, which seems like it’ll really mess with his and Kimiko’s relationship.

But for something that should have been the main thrust of the episode, even the appearance of Esposito’s Stan Edgar felt like tying up loose ends, rather than the apocalyptic event it could have been.

Easter eggs & cameos:

So many Easter eggs. A bonkers amount. So, here’s what we caught.

From the V52 Expo intro reel:

• Bombsight in The Curse of Fu Manchu (1953)
• Budweiser ad: “Where there’s Liberty… There’s Bud” (1957)
• Crimson: “She’s the Countess you can count on! …Using the fire of freedom to fight the Commie machine!” (1967)
• Big Chief Apache says “Don’t litter, Kemosabe,” a clear parody of the infamous “Crying Indian” ad (1970)
• This Means Noir: “Code name: Black Noir. You don’t find him. He finds you.” (1979)
• Whiskey Sunrise: “He taught her everything about seduction, passion and murder.” Starring Crimson Countess, Soldier Boy, and Gunpowder. Written by David Best. Produced by The Legend (aka, Paul Reiser) (1984)
• Red Thunder 2: “The Soviet Union has declared war on the United States. Again.” Tagline: “Payback are back!” (1988)
• Y2KAOS: “We were warned” — starring Lamplighter (1999)
• Queen Maeve: Her Majesty: “Say Hello To Her Majesty.” (2007)
• Rising Tide: “Go Deep or Go Home” (2007)
• Translucent: Invisible Force 2: “You can’t kill what you can’t see.” (2018)
• Dawn of the Seven (2022)
• The reel ends with a number of channels, streaming services, and sub-companies run by Vought: Vought Studios, Voughtemundo, Vought New Network, V+, VTV: Television for Women, American Hero, VoughtSoul

The Deep says that G-Men: World War III is coming this summer, and then teases the full VCU Timeline, Phases 7-19, again a clear parody of the MCU. So strap in for VCU Phase 07:

• Training A-Train
• Firecracker: Lord’s Soldier
• Homelander: Story of the Savez [Editor’s Note: This one was blurry, could be wrong]
• The Deep: Secrets of Atlantis
• The Seven Reborn
• The Tek Knight [Editor’s Note: In the style of The Batman]
• Super School

VCU Phase 08:

• Homelander / Soldier Boy: Annihilation
• The Deep: Lifeguard Summer
• A-Train: Off The Tracks
• The Seven Returns
• Firecracker: Heaven’s Miracle
• Tek Knight: Night Light
• Teenage Kix: Home for Kwanzaa 2
• G2: G-Men [Editor’s Note: In the style of X2: X-Men United]

VCU Phase 09

• Double Standard
• Homelander: Justice Served
• Black Noir 3: Back to Hanoi
• The Deep: Gods & Dolphins
• A-Train: Into the Multiverse
• The Seven Forever
• Firecracker: God Help Me
• A Dark And Stormy Knight
• Teenage Kix: Ditch Day!
• G3: G-Men

VCU Phase 10

• Silent Vengeance 3: Vengeance [Second word too blurry]
• Firecracker: A Christmas Wish
• Let There Be Knight
• The Guardians of Godolkin: Flipped
• Teenage Kix: Sex-Ed
• Speedwalkers 2: Mall Race!
• G-Men: Days Past From The Future [Editor’s Note: In the style of X-Men: Days of Future Past]

Tek Knight shows u, after his appearance on Gen V to plug his reboot The Tek Knight. It’s got a “soundtrack of Nirvana hits, and a 12-minute sequence that’s entirely pitch black.” Take that, The Batman.

The Guardians of Godolkin logo is a straight rip of the Guardians of the Galaxy logo, and of course Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and Sam Riordan (Asa Germann) are from Gen V, as well. They’re doing a body switching comedy where she’s a sorority girl and “he’s a nerd, but when a gypsy swaps our bodies...”

When Frenchie says, “Mon dieu, I can’t believe this is f**king happening to me again,” he’s not just doing a one-off weird joke. He’s actually referring to Jamie the Hamster, from Season 3, Episode 4, “Glorious Five Year Plan.” While searching for info on Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), the team discovered a lab where they gave the hamster Compound V. Jamie eventually broke free, flew around the room and ate a soldier’s eyeball, saving Frenchie. Jamie is possibly still out there somewhere, by the way. #BringBackJamie. Frenchie doubles down when he says, “A V-ed up hamster was your first mistake, mon ami.”

When Hughie Sr. is being put to sleep, he says, “I love you too, son. My Wee Hughie.” So not only was the character of Hughie named Wee Hughie in the comic books the show is based on by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, but the character of Wee Hughie was based on Simon Pegg. Feel free to visualize the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood meme here.

Does Homelander drink milk?

I don’t know the exact drink here, but Homelander and Ryan seem to be drinking coffee frappes that are about half whipped cream, and cream is a milk product so: yes?

Does Hughie get covered in blood?

Not as much as you might think given his dad is ripping people’s hearts out, but Hughie Sr. gets covered in blood. So...yes?

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

Gotta give it to Hughie Sr. running into the middle — literally — of Wall Street Bro (Roderick McNeil), then spinning around inside of him as his guts dripped on the floor. That said, a sheep infected with the virus screams and then throws up, so that’s a close second.

Burning questions:

A-Train and Ashley make an alliance based on him telling her she’s done a whole lot more than take a s**t in Homelander’s toilet. So, what else does he know? Is it just that she’s been dominating Cameron Coleman?

Butcher frees Mr. Fuzzy Buzzy, a bunny, from the lab in Neuman’s house. They’ve been feeding Mr. Fuzzy Buzzy Temp V. Later, Butcher sees Mr. Fuzzy Buzzy lying on the ground, and some horrific tentacles emerge. Is this somehow tied to Butcher’s current worm-filled condition? Or is he hallucinating? Related: how many times can I type the words “Mr. Fuzzy Buzzy” in one paragraph?

When Neuman confronts Stan Edgar in the car at the end… Does she kill him with her head-popping abilities? I’m going to say “yes” based on both of their expressions, but TBD, I guess.

Sage shows Tek Knight her plan, in an adorable little notebook. He seems shocked, saying, “Jesus f**king Christ, are you serious?” She tells him to stay quiet, but it seems like Sage’s plan is bigger than we thought. Also, nice to see the two smartest people in the room see each other as equals. That’s not a burning question, just an observation. Clarity!

The Boys streams Thursdays on Prime Video.

• 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"
• Episode 405, “Beware The Jabberwock, My Son”

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