The Boys Season 4, Episode 6 recap: The first rule of Fight Club

This week’s episode of The Boys is a big one. And I’m sure everyone wants to talk about the thing that happens at the end of “Dirty Business,” aka the thing basically the entire internet was speculating would happening. But you’re gonna have to wait a bit as we set up the recap, and then recap the whole episode. Whew, this is more tortuous than Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the man who turned out to be a Fight Club-style hallucination of Billy Butcher’s (Karl Urban) tumor-riddled brain the whole time.

Oh, whoops. Spoiler alert.

Anyway, leading into this episode, “Joe” and Butcher have kidnapped Sameer Shah (Omid Abtahi), the man whom they want to make them more of that Supe-killing virus from Gen V. Meanwhile, Butcher, who is dying from his use of Temp V, is hallucinating his wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten), who is sort of the angel on his shoulder. Is there a devil on his shoulder as well, Donald Duck style? Keep reading to find out. It's Joe.

Hughie (Jack Quaid), meanwhile, put his father to sleep in the previous episode and has reconciled with his mother Daphne (Rosemarie DeWitt). Annie is having Spider-Man 2 disease, aka, her powers are on the fritz because she’s wrestling with identity issues. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) turned himself in to the authorities for murdering a bunch of folks for the Russian mob. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) is trying to bond with him, which will be hard since he's in jail. And MM (Laz Alonso) has anxiety, due to him leading the team.

Over in Vought Tower, Homelander (Antony Starr) has been working with Sage (Susan Heyward) on a plot to take over America, and they need Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) for a reason that becomes clear this week. They also need reluctant secret Supe VP-elect Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) for their plan to work, but do not need Firecracker (Valorie Heyward) other than as a mouthpiece to spew conspiracy theory nonsense to keep the people distracted.

A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) has been on a bit of a redemption arc, working with The Boys to leak info on The Seven and Vought. And while Sage clearly knows he’s the leak, she's allowed Homelander and the other members of The Seven to first kill poor Anika (Ana Sani) from Crime Analytics; and then last episode beat VNN host Cameron Coleman (Matthew Edison) to death in The Seven’s conference room.

Rounding out the team, The Deep (Chace Crawford) is exploring his dark side (yikes) at the urging of Sage. And Black Noir II (Nathan Mitchell) won’t shut up, much to everyone’s chagrin Also he has narcolepsy.

There’s more to talk about. Let’s pour out the actual recap like Butcher pouring whiskey on a table because Joe Kessler doesn’t exist.

The Boys, Season 4, Episode 6 “Dirty Business” recap:

"Dirty Business" is written by Anslem Richardson and directed by Karen Gaviola. I haven’t exactly been subtle about this, so let’s talk about the Butcher storyline first. As the entire internet figured out, while Becca is Butcher’s good side, Joe Kessler is his bad side. Joe was never there in the show, and in fact died years earlier – info Butcher knew, but was just suppressing thanks to the wormy tumors wriggling around in his brain.

We learn about Kessler's true nature at the end of the episode when he yells at Becca – making Butcher realize that neither of them is actually there. And Joe has never been there, something we get clarified through a montage of previous scenes of Butcher pouring whiskey on a table, sitting alone on a park bench, and more. How he severed Sameer’s leg and captured him all on his own is not explained, but I have a guess… Joe confesses that “he” was the one who killed Ezekiel (Shaun Benson) a few episodes back. So, folks, we’ve got a Fight Club on our hands. Joe is Tyler Durden, taking over Butcher’s body to do the extreme things he can’t bring himself to do. Including chopping off Sameer’s leg. Spoilers for Fight Club, I guess.

The other key bit from this plotline worth noting is that Sameer is given a week to recreate the virus. He explains that the only way of creating one powerful enough to kill Homelander is if it’s airborne. And that would kill every Supe in a “global pandemic,” including Annie and Kimiko.

Obviously this is a moral quandary for Butcher, but I will also note it’s a strange plot progression if you watched Gen V – which introduced the virus – as that was the, uh, plot of Season 1 of that series. So we went from creating the virus to kill Homelander, trying to make it airborne, Neuman stealing the virus, the virus getting destroyed, and now we’re recreating the virus to kill Homelander, and making it airborne. This is the definition of wheel-spinning, so I do hope there’s some progression beyond this point, particularly as we’re heading to the end of this season and into the final season of the series.

Though there are a couple of other side trips here and there, the bulk of the episode is what I like to call a classic Gossip Girl. AKA, everyone goes to a party and ruins it. In this case, it’s a right-wing billionaires party at Tek Knight’s house that serves as a front for Homelander and Sage’s planned coup.

First, though, Hughie takes his father’s ashes on the Maid of Manhattan walking tour of New York, which is just a great detail/closer for Simon Pegg’s whole character arc. While there, Starlight gets verbally assaulted by a Homelander supporter wearing a suspiciously red baseball cap shouting “abortion is murder.” Hughie and Annie seem a little shaken, but he insists he needs to get into his work, and that he’s doing just fine (Hughie is not just fine, and neither is Annie).

We also get to see Kimiko trying to visit Frenchie in jail, but he’s not letting anyone see him. Sadly, we end the episode with Kimiko trying anyway because she has nowhere else to go.

We get to the main plot with A-Train freaking out about Cameron Coleman's death. (A-Train is in Toronto, which coincidentally is where they film The Boys). The front-facing story is that Cameron is on sabbatical while Firecracker takes over his VNN anchor duties.

A-Train explains that the Batman-esque superhero Tek Knight is involved in Sage’s plan, so The Boys all decide to head to his party. In order to do so, they need to visit Webweaver (Dan Mousseau), the show’s version of Spider-Man. One big difference between Webweaver and Spider-Man? He spews webs from a hole above his butt, which: gross.

As teased in the previous episode, Webweaver's been giving info to Butcher in exchange for heroin (Webweaver was the one who got them backstage at Firecracker's VNN special), which he likes to shoot directly up his anus. MM has to do that, of course, but gives him roofies instead so they can steal his costume, with Hughie dressing up as the Supe.

While The Seven all arrive and schmooze with the extremely racist and sexist government officials at the party, Hughie sneaks in to place bugs (not literal ones, the spying kind) and tries to lure Tek Knight outside. Instead, Tek Knight takes Hughie – thinking he’s Webweaver – to his literal BDSM dungeon, where the “hero” is auditioning to be his new sidekick. His old sidekick? Laddio (Reid Miller), who is chained to the wall in a red gimp costume.

What ensues runs the gamut of fetishes from cake sitting, to cake farting, to tickling, and so much more. I’m not going to kink shame, but all of this is designed to put Hughie in the most awkward positions possible – and he goes along so they don’t, you know, kill him, down to wiping himself clean with sandpaper.

Along the way, Ashley (Colby Minifie) briefly stops by to also torture Hughie and continue the joke about her, shall we say, scat fetish? I dunno, she’s there, that’s pretty much the whole thing.

Over at IGN, Amelia Emberwing wrote a piece titled "It's Time For The Boys To Stop Torturing Hughie" in response to last week's episode. While it's a well-written piece (as usual from Emberwing), I did disagree with the sentiment when it came to "Beware the Jabberwock, My Son," which I thought was emotionally nuanced and progressed the character forward through the main theme of this season, aka letting go of your past. This week though? Hashtag stop literally torturing Hughie.

We also discover that Tek Knight, beyond loving to have sex with holes of any kind, is also extremely racist. His family made their fortune as slave catchers, they now own private prisons, and he’s abusive to his butler Elijah (Tyrone Benskin), who raised him after his parents died, Alfred Pennyworth style.

Ultimately (and we’ll jump back in time a bit to fill in the gaps here), Hughie is discovered by Tek Knight, who wants to cut a new hole in Hughie – only for Annie and Kimiko to rescue him (Hughie, not Tek Knight). They then tie up Tek Knight and torture him by sending his money to charitable organizations (Elizabeth Warren’s PAC, The Innocence Project, and the piece de resistance, Black Lives Matter), until he confesses that his role in the plan is to use his prisons to house dissidents. Or as Hughie helpfully explains, they’re going to be internment camps.

Once this comes out, Elijah chokes Tek Knight to death for going too far and seems to successfully make it look like a David Carradine-style accident. Oh, and Annie and Hughie confess to each other that they’re not doing okay.

Okay! Time jump backwards! While Hughie is sitting on German chocolate cakes, MM, Annie, and Kimiko try to rescue him by infiltrating Tek Knight's mansion. Starlight confronts Firecracker, who is very out of her depth and gets knocked out. Meanwhile, MM ends up shooting Sage in the head – don’t worry, she turns stupid but is otherwise fine – and then has a panic attack that knocks him out. Kimiko, who conveniently loses her phone, uses some book titles to convince A-Train to take MM to the hospital, and when he sees a young kid smiling at him has his first-ever glimmer of satisfaction over being a real hero.

At the party proper, Sage and Neuman bond about what it’s like to be a woman from a disadvantaged background in a white, rich man’s world. And we get what might actually be Sage’s real motivation and backstory (or she’s manipulating Neuman with lies). Specifically, her grandmother had cancer, Sage developed a cure for cancer, and the men in charge just laughed at her. So instead of helping the world with her intelligence, she’s going to destroy all humans.

Unfortunately, after getting shot in the head she’s not a lot of help to Homelander’s presentation about “how to take over America,” instead chowing down on non-farted-in (I hope) German chocolate cake and demanding Crunchwraps. And despite Homelander thinking he can do it himself… He can’t. He knows force, but he doesn’t understand nuance or politics and is ultimately cowed by the billionaires. Neuman steps up, meanwhile, and explains that if they back her coup they will all get rich. The billionaires don’t care about America, they don’t care about what drives the masses, and they know conspiracy theories are stupid. What they really want is to line their pockets, and they’ll back up any plan that does that.

Shamed by the end of the episode, Homelander gets a pleasant surprise… The Metoclopramide Firecracker has been taking is meant to help her lactate, which she reveals to him by unzipping her top and spraying him with breast milk. He immediately regresses, and we see him lying in her lap like a baby and nursing off of her.

More to the plot, though, they both realize that Cameron Coleman wasn’t the leak – it's someone else. The walls are closing in around A-Train just as he's starting to redeem himself.

One last little bit is The Deep and Black Noir – who it turns out can also fly – bond over how violence is power. This doesn’t pay off in any way and seems like a throwaway scene. But perhaps it will pay off in future episodes.

Easter eggs & cameos:

This is almost an anti-Easter egg, but you’d be forgiven if you heard Jeffrey Dean Morgan say, “Wakey wakey eggs and bakey, motherf***er,” and thought, “Oh, that must be a reference to Negan from The Walking Dead.” Spoiler: it’s not! The closest anyone came to saying that on TWD was Simon (Steven Ogg), Negan’s lieutenant, who woke up Gregory (Xander Berkeley) with “wakey wakey eggs pancakey” when they were holding him prisoner. This weird, almost-but-not-quite Negan reference continues in the scene when Joe tells Sameer, “I could just bash your head in, jog your memory.” Famously, Negan liked to bash people’s heads in. Again, not an Easter egg, but so close it felt worth mentioning.

There’s a “Black At It” poster on top of a cab in NYC, following up on Vought’s new initiative from the V52 Expo.

There was nothing in Black Noir’s closet other than drawings of Buster Beaver characters. If you remember from last season, the original Black Noir hallucinated characters from the Chuck-E-Cheese-esque pizza chain.

In the warehouse where Butcher is torturing Sameer, there’s a poster of Black Noir that says “Unions Can’t. We Can.” And there’s also a poster of Crimson Countess with the tagline “Don’t be a time thief.” There's also a Vought Potted Meat plant with the taglines, “Every Mother ‘Vought’ to Know” and “Nothing but the best for my family!” Not as much fun on that last part, but due diligence and all.

Not so much an Easter egg as a horrifying reference to something that happened in real life: in this episode, the Speaker of the House explains that if “the rape is legitimate, a woman’s body has a way of shutting that down,” which is very close to an actual quote from the now-deceased US Representative Todd Akin. He’s dead now, don’t know if I mentioned that.

This is followed up by Neuman telling Sage, “I had abortion explained to me by a man who refuses to be alone with any woman who isn’t his wife,” which is another clear reference, this time to former VP Mike Pence.

In the prison, there’s a cartoon poster of Homelander with the text, “Remember! If you’ve done nothing wrong, then you’ve got nothing to hide.”

Webweaver's safeword is "Zendaya" which seems to be a clear reference to her role as MJ in the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies.

Does Homelander drink milk?

Yep! Firecracker’s breast milk gets all over his face, and then he breastfeeds from her. I wish I hadn't written it that way, but that's what happened!

Does Hughie get covered in blood?

Nope! But he does get slathered in a ton of other bodily fluids from both Tek Knight and Ashley.

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

I’m sure many folks felt iffy about the whole BDSM sequence, but for my money, the single grossest thing in the episode was when Webweaver squirted a little bit of his web fluid on MM’s face after MM shot heroin up his butt. Yuck!

Burning questions:

Is Stan Edgar dead or alive? Neuman – and Homelander – are both being cagey about it in this episode. I assume dead, but will we get something official? Bodies or it didn’t happen.

Similarly, how long can they maintain the lie about Cameron Coleman being "on sabbatical?"

Why hasn’t Sage given up A-Train as the mole? It has to be part of her overall part of her plan. She clearly knows about him, so therefore there has to be a reason she hasn’t revealed him as of yet.

Now that the “secret” about Joe is out… What does that mean for Butcher? Is Becca gone now?

The Boys streams Thursdays on Prime Video.

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