‘The Boys’ Season 4 Episode 1 Recap: “Department of Dirty Tricks”

It’s election night in the universe where The Boys exists, and with the liberal party riding a blue wave to victory, Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) is ready to meet her moment. Every state called for presidential candidate Robert Singer (Jim Beaver) brings his running mate steps closer to true power, and she can taste it. Which is crazy, because while Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the rest of the Boys – Marvin T. “Mother’s” Milk (Laz Alonso), Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), Kimiko Miyashiro (Karen Fukuhara), Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and new bonus member Annie January (Erin Moriarty), aka Starlight – are at election headquarters with the intention of assassinating Neuman, they discover in the course of totally fucking that up how her daughter Zoe (Olivia Morandin) has manifested superpowers in the form of human-devouring face tentacles. Behind her progressive facade, Victoria Neuman is known to be a diabolical blood-manipulating supe, and the CIA has tasked the Boys with silencing her. But now she has a deadly sidekick, also hiding in plain sight. And Vought International, the corporate behemoth with its own tentacles everywhere, expects that incoming VP Neuman will always be in its corner. 

“Even with a soft-on-crime, fucking lib-tard for a president, it’s gonna be business as usual at Vought.” Welcome back to The Boys universe, where everything is in reverse, but not at the same time. Adapted from the series of comic books co-created by Garth Ennis and Darick Roberston, and in the capable hands of developer/showrunner Eric Kripke, its writers and its directors, The Boys has always identified as a gleefully subversive, deliciously sour version of our own country, society, and political system. But it’s not as simple as a blue state-red state ideological divide. Supes exist in this world. Head-poppers, face-suckers, physical regenerators, and untold numbers of others with enhanced powers. Earth’s mightiest heroes? More like its mightiest assholes. And the biggest super A-hole of them all, Homelander (Antony Starr), has just told Victoria Neuman how it’s gonna be. She may have transacted with corporate behemoth Vought International in exchange for proximity to political power. But Homelander and his whims remain nearly invincible. 

Nearly. Because you see, with the harbinger of gray pubes (ew, he saves them in a mason jar), Homelander is confronting his own mortality. Will his biological son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), conceived when Homelander raped Billy Butcher’s late wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten), become his legacy? Or will Ryan, the world’s first natural-born supe, whose considerable powers are still emerging, ultimately become Homelander’s replacement? Pandered to by frazzled Vought prez Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie), and “surrounded by sycophants and fucking imbeciles” – the fellow members of his corrupt superhero team The Seven, including A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), The Deep (Chace Crawford), and a new version of Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) – Homelander turns to Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), the world’s smartest person, for a devious superhuman assist in the maintenance of control. With a few nudges of the mob – basically, Hometeamers are MAGA-pilled, while “Starlighters” rep progressive ideals – Homelander believes he can become a new American Caesar. A supe as god and savior. Remember, he tells Ryan in another moment of his flimsy milkshakes-and-nicknames fatherhood act, “humans are toys for our amusement.”

In The Boys Season 4, Susan Heyward plays Sister Sage with a gleam in her eye that’s as mortally pragmatic as it is instantly charming. (“Just Sage,” she tells Homelander. “Vought added the ‘Sister’ part. Can’t have one of us without the racial qualifier.”) And Heyward isn’t the only one who’s joined up anew. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is also here as Joe Kessler, who seems to want to enlist his old CIA buddy Butcher in a shadow war against supes. (We also briefly see Laila Robins as Grace Mallory, who has placed Mother’s Milk in charge of the Boys for the agency’s mainline operation against Victoria Neuman.) On social media, Firecracker (Valorie Curry) concocts brainwormy “truthbombs” about Starlight’s “LGBT terror dungeon” and a fantastical cabal of pedophile celebrities, while the former member of the Seven can’t generate clicks and donations for her advocacy group as simply Annie January. She will need to reckon with what the Starlight supe identity means to her personally. Annie’s boyfriend Hughie also receives two shocks to the system. When his father (Simon Pegg) is felled by a stroke, his mother Daphne (Rosemarie DeWitt) resurfaces. Hughie hasn’t seen Daphne since he was six, when she walked out on the family after promising to purchase tickets to see his beloved Billy Joel.

“I save people, they cheer. I fucking kill people, they cheer. It’s meaningless!” Publicly, Homelander leans on his season 3 laser-eyeing of a protestor as the pretext for a stand your ground defense, and a mandate from the “patriots” who follow him. Privately it’s part of his existential fretting. A supe-life crisis. And when his “not guilty” verdict is announced, it becomes the fuel for Sage’s plan to nudge the mob. She instigates a riot between yellow-clad Starlighters, with their “Fight Like a Girl” placards, and the Hometeamers, who sport stars-and-stripes ballcaps. In a horrifying display of his power, Homelander also forces Noir, Deep, and A-Train to beat three of his supporters to death with baseball bats, including the man who Mother’s Milk’s estranged wife Monique (Frances Turner) was seeing, and to place their bodies at the scene. Caught up in the violence is Colin (Elliot Knight), a man Frenchie met in Narcotics Anonymous, who doesn’t know about his new crush’s bloody past. And Kimiko, who would love for her platonic partner to find his true love, is still working on herself, attempting to process her own traumas while staying true to the Boys’ primary mission. 

Remember in the Gen V finale, when Grace Mallory and Billy Butcher discovered the anti-supe virus being developed at Godolkin University? Billy Butcher remembers, too, and despite or perhaps because of his diagnosis of terminal cancer – his ingestion of temporary Compound-V in season 3 was the disease’s driver – Butcher has offered his direct aid to Victoria Neuman, outside of the Boys command structure. “I know it ain’t strong enough to kill Homelander…yet,” he tells Neuman. But they both want Vought’s kingshit supe gone, and if this admittedly sketchy deal can help Butcher save Ryan from Homelander’s clutches, then he’s willing. Fulfilling the promise he made to a dying Becca is all that matters, now that he believes he’s about to join her.

BOYS NOIZE:          

• After she discovered his sexual sealife kink, the Deep’s ex-wife wrote a tell-all book about “the octopus in the room,” and now PETA has him on its bestiality watchlist. But Deep didn’t dispose of the cephalopod like he told Vought and the Seven. Not only is “Ambrosius” living secretly in his quarters, she is voiced by Tilda Swinton! We can run away together, Ambrosius tells Kevin. We won’t have to hide anymore… 
• A-Train is also feeling the effects of conflict with Homelander. It’s not like the speedster supe is innocent. But the murders and the lies and Vought’s reversal of everything for its own gain – he’s growing increasingly exhausted with it all. 
• And speaking of Gen V, what’s the word on Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and Sam Riordan (Asa Germann)? Homelander turned them into heroes after their wild murder spree on the human population of God U. Still developing is how they’ll fit into his plans for a godlike takeover here in season 4 of The Boys. 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.