Photo: Courtesy Prime Video
It’s no secret that The Boys’s political commentary and satire have become increasingly obvious over the years. This was never a subtle show, but season four in particular has leaned into real-world parallels, especially when it comes to Homelander and Donald Trump. As of “Dirty Business,” the all-powerful white supremacist at the top has persuaded some of the richest and evilest people in America to participate in a coup on January 6 — possibly with the on-the-ground assistance of some of the most radical right-wing Fox News (sorry, Vought News) viewers in America.
Depending on your tolerance when it comes to blatantly cribbing from real life, this type of thing can be annoying in its on-the-nose-ness — but it’s also unfortunately as relevant as ever, especially considering this week’s Supreme Court decision regarding presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. (“In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”)
Setting aside our own declining nation, “Dirty Business” is another pretty entertaining episode of The Boys. It continues the season’s upward trajectory after it got a little too fragmented and too mired in misery early on. Of course the torture streak continues here in both major stories — and personally, I could’ve used a little less of Tek Knight and Ashley traumatizing Hughie — but at least all the characters feel part of the same story now.
Hughie has been somewhat sidelined lately, especially compared to those first two seasons, so it’s nice to see him play a central role this episode. A mission to infiltrate Tek Knight’s estate during a Federalist Society party offers the perfect opportunity for Hughie to pour himself into a mission and get his mind off the loss of his dad; he’ll be undercover as Webweaver, Butcher and Mother’s Milk’s go-to informant, who scored an invite as a new candidate to be Tek’s sidekick. This leads to possibly the most disgusting scene in a pretty disgusting episode with MM rectally roofie-ing Webweaver and getting facialed by a spurt of white goo from his “web hole” as a result. (I hated even typing that.)
There’s some solid comedy in watching Hughie adopt the slang of Webweaver to impersonate him at the party, croaking out unconvincing “dog”s and “no cap”s from inside his smelly suit. As MM informs the Boys (and viewers who haven’t watched Gen V), Tek Knight has extremely heightened senses, which makes him a brilliant lie detector. But Hughie manages to pull off the act and plant some bugs at the party, even after an almost disastrous run-in with Victoria Neuman and the Seven.
It’s when Hughie loses signal down in the hidden “Tek Cave” that everything slowly goes to shit. Hughie never signed up to sit his bare ass on a German chocolate cake while a billionaire chokes and strokes himself, and he certainly didn’t sign up to get tickle-tortured or pissed on. These scenes contain some effective comedy, like when Hughie starts yelping out random words — like tarantula — when trying to guess Webweaver’s established safe word. But the dominant feeling is horror, especially the longer it goes on. It’s almost a relief when Tek does finally unmask Hughie and figure out the truth, though it doesn’t diminish the threat of sexual violence one bit.
Thankfully, Kimiko and Annie manage to sneak into the mansion, locate the secret entryway to the Tek Cave, and save Hughie in time, sparing us the sight of Tek drilling new holes into Hughie’s body to stick his dick in. And with the help of Tek’s former “sidekick,” a man in a red gimp suit, they get access to Tek’s bank accounts, allowing them to finally get the truth out of him: He and Sage made a deal to use his private prisons for locking up dissidents once she and Homelander put their plan into action.
After the shit we’ve seen, it would be hard to watch Tek Knight walk away from this episode alive, so it’s satisfying to see his butler (and supposed father figure), Elijah, choke him to death after he hears about the camps. But this story ends on a refreshingly emotional note when Hughie starts to process his feelings and open up to Annie about what he had just experienced. “I’m not fine” might be a predictable line, but Jack Quaid’s choked-up delivery of “I miss my dad” is downright heartbreaking.
But the most surprisingly moving moment of this episode, to me, concerns A-Train, who makes the risky move of leaving the party to drop MM off at the hospital after the latter shoots Sage in the head and has a heart attack. (It’s actually a panic attack, which makes sense; MM has been trying to practice mindfulness, but it’s impossible with all the responsibilities on his shoulders.) Noticing a wide-eyed kid who witnessed the rescue, A-Train is touched by the smile of awe on the kid’s face. Just a few episodes ago, we saw this guy bragging to his nephews about people whose lives he hadn’t actually saved; now, he’s truly helping people, and it feels good.
While A-Train is changing and becoming a better person, very few other people on this show seem interested in the same path. I’ve been curious for a while about Sage’s actual belief system and motivations, so it was gratifying to hear her open up to Neuman about the moment she became radicalized: She discovered a cure to her own grandmother’s leukemia at 11 years old, but she was ignored and laughed at and her grandma died. If she wanted to, she could single-handedly solve all of the world’s problems, but she has no respect for humanity. So even if she doesn’t have anything in common with all these fat cats, she’s happy to drain their wallets and discard them when she no longer has any use for them.
It once seemed possible that Sage had some deeper hidden agenda, one that could even involve discarding Homelander eventually. (I suppose she still could.) But this monologue helps us understand her superiority complex, which is rooted in a totally different place from Homelander’s. Both of them consider humans animals that should be controlled and subjugated, but Homelander has an innate sadism and scorn for human life, while Sage learned to see humans this way over years of outthinking everyone she met yet still failing to gain their respect.
Unfortunately for Homelander, the bullet in Sage’s head temporarily prevents her from thinking about anything beyond her Taco Bell order and which TLC show she’s going to watch later, so she’s no help during the exclusive meeting in which Homelander cheerfully announces his insurrection plans. But Neuman steps up to the plate, combining her political acumen (she can handle the Justice Department, the military response, and OPEC, among other practical issues) and a persuasive emotional appeal (“The masses are fucking stupid,” and billionaires shouldn’t be regulated or restricted in any way).
Neuman has been too far gone for a while, and last week’s unlikely team-up didn’t really change that. But Butcher has been hanging somewhere in the middle, morally speaking, for the whole show. At any given point, he has an angel on one shoulder and the Devil on another. Since the beginning of this season, his wife, Becca, has functioned as the angel, appearing to him in hallucinations. But in “Dirty Business,” the truth finally comes out: Joe Kessler is the Devil, and he’s just as imagined as Becca. He was conjured up by Butcher’s brain tumor as a manifestation of Butcher’s dark, violent side that always does what needs to be done, no matter the cost. When Butcher blacked out and somehow violently tore Ezekiel apart, that was Kessler taking the wheel.
Viewers have been speculating about Kessler for weeks, and the reveal here is pretty well done with Kessler unmasking himself by turning and barking at Becca to shut up. It’s a reaction to Sameer’s head-spinning intel on the virus, which leaves Butcher with an interesting conundrum in these final two episodes: Is it worth risking the lives of supes like Kimiko, Annie, and (most important) Ryan just to take out Homelander? According to Kessler — who speaks to a good half of Butcher’s psyche — a supe pandemic doesn’t have to be an unfortunate side effect. It could be exactly what the world needs. And once you start justifying a genocide, it’s hard to come back.
• No sign of Frenchie, who refuses to let Kimiko visit him in jail.
• “You didn’t get all the santorum off the gibbet cage!” Wow, can’t say I’ve heard that word in a while, but this line-reading reminded me of one of Glenn Howerton’s deliveries in It’s Always Sunny.
• The Speaker directly parroting Todd Akin’s infamous comments about “legitimate rape” is one real-world reference that feels a little more lazy than clever to me.
• “Firecracker, it’s kind of a private conversation, but I’m sure the bar has some SunnyD and Everclear.”
• Of course the book that opens the entrance to Tek’s lair is The 120 Days of Sodom.
• Love the moment when Annie owns up to her mean-girl behavior on the pageant circuit and apologizes to Firecracker, only to tranq her. Pretty satisfying turn, and it doesn’t detract from the sincerity of her reflecting.
• Hughie, Annie, and Kimiko transfer $40 million from Tek’s account to Elizabeth Warren’s super-PAC along with $65 million to the Innocence Project and $100 million to Black Lives Matter. It would’ve been funny to see him explain those donations on Vought News the next week, but he’s dead now.
• Apparently Stan Edgar hasn’t been seen since his release, and Homelander definitely seems suspicious of Neuman’s involvement.
• Firecracker is on a regimen of drugs to produce breast milk in order to please Homelander. It’s working!
• Pretty funny to see the new Black Noir with his mask off, admitting that he “doesn’t really like violence” and ranting about how he’s not allowed to use his flying abilities as Noir. And the scene also moves the Deep to the next phase of his Homelander-ification as he insists that “violence is power.” The motivation for violence, in his case, is forcing people to stop laughing at him and take him seriously.
