One of The boys’ The show’s greatest virtue is how twisted it’s willing to get, especially when it comes to sex. In Season 1, a female superhero accidentally blew a guy’s head off with her vagina while he was performing oral sex on her; in Season 2, we watched in horror as Homelander crushed another guy’s head while having public sex with a Nazi. The Season 3 premiere made things even worse by having an Ant-Man-inspired superhero crawl into his lover’s urethra, only to accidentally expand to normal size while he was in there. (The results were horrifying.)
It’s understandable that the show keeps doing this kind of thing; each time it does, it’s rewarded with a wave of mostly positive (if disconcerting) headlines. There’s also the novelty that comes with taking advantage of the show’s mature rating. The family-oriented MCU isn’t allowed to explore how someone like Ant-Man would use his powers in the bedroom, so The boys is able to fill this gap.
But there’s always the risk of having too much gross stuff, and Season 4 finally took The boys In this week’s episode, “Dirty Business,” main character Hughie (Jack Quaid) is tied up and sexually tortured for at least 30 minutes. Thankfully, the episode cuts out the worst of it, but we see and hear enough to know that his two tormentors, the returning Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) and Vought CEO Ashley (Colby Minifie), hit on him at one point, and Hughie doesn’t appreciate it at all.
The sequence is not technically an extended rape joke, because Hughie is in disguise. His tormentors think he’s a consenting, BDSM-loving dude, someone with an agreed-upon password he can use at any time. But in terms of how it plays out, with the humor relying so much on Hughie’s terror and obvious discomfort, it’s still fundamentally a rape joke. It fits comfortably into pop culture’s current list of male characters sexually assaulted for laughs, the kind of cheap, lazy approach to comedy you’d probably hope for The boys would be above.
Why did the writers do this? What made them devote so much of an episode to such an unpleasant and interminable sequence? The obvious answer is that they were trying to make a sequel to “Herogasm,” the season 3 episode that revolved around a superhero orgy. That episode was pretty shocking, even for fans of the show. The boys’ standards, with giant stretched penises, flying dildos, sex with octopuses and the germaphobic MM getting splattered with a bucket of cum. It was a nasty, headline-grabbing episode, and also the most critically acclaimed episode of the season; it makes sense that The boys would like to market this latest episode as its spiritual successor.
But the real appeal of “Herogasm” was how the marketing served as a fun diversion. The ads promised a bunch of over-the-top sexual escapades, but the episode was actually meant to give us some of the most important moments of the entire series. A-Train apologized to Hughie, then killed Blue Hawk. Annie left the Seven and went public with Soldier Boy and Homelander. Hughie and Annie apparently broke up. An overexcited Butcher confronted Homelander directly for the very first time, and he almost won. It was one of the most action-packed and exciting episodes of the entire series, and it managed to be a surprise thanks to all the sex bait and switch.
“Dirty Business,” on the other hand, doesn’t have that kind of trick up its sleeve. There are a few fun plot developments throughout the rest of the episode, like Sister Sage’s untimely brain damage or A-Train’s continued alliance with the Boys, but it’s not much. There’s nothing exciting enough to erase the bad taste left over from poor Hughie being forced to sit bare-assed on a chocolate cake. The episode echoes many of the gross moments from “Herogasm,” including MM once again getting hit in the face with a superhero’s bodily fluids, but this time there’s nothing of substance surrounding the plot.
The boys has always been crude for the sake of being crude, but we’ve reached a point where the joke is getting tiresome. The spark has died out, and all that’s left is the realization of how childish this type of humor really is. Worse yet, the growing suspicion that The boys is a strangely sex-negative series that has inherently linked every unconventional sexual act to utter depravity. It would be nice to once see a superhero have kinky sex in a way that doesn’t ruin someone’s life, or that is not used as a visual shorthand to establish the superhero as evil.
Most disappointing, though, is how “Dirty Business” shows how aimless the show has been with Hughie’s material this season. Hughie was once the show’s main character, someone with a simple, satisfying arc from sweet young man to hardened badass. Season 3 tried to change things up with a storyline about Hughie trying to be Also hard, Also It was powerful at the cost of its humanity. It was messy and poorly handled, but at least it was something. It was a step up from Season 4’s approach, which is simply to torture Hughie as much as possible. Just one episode after Hughie saw his father succumb to dementia and need to be euthanized, “Dirty Business” has Hughie strapped into a sexual torture chamber. At this rate, I don’t even want to know what the next episode is going to do to him.
The great thing about “Dirty Business” is that Annie (Erin Moriarty) and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) don’t laugh when they discover Hughie’s predicament, as so many less serious shows would have you believe. They take Hughie’s pain seriously, and go out of their way to torment Tek Knight afterward, ostensibly to get information, but at least partly out of a desire for karmic payback. Tek Knight, whose powers of deduction imply that he figured out at some point (or at least suspected) that Hughie wasn’t a willing sexual partner, is punished just as harshly by the narrative as most of the other rapists in The boys Or Generation VSeeing Tek Knight end the episode strangled by his minion isn’t enough to justify the entire story, but we’ll take what we can get.
“Dirty Business” should be a wake-up call for the show: Something needs to change. You can only add so many disgusting sex scenes before the joke gets boring, just like you can only torture Hughie for so long before fans wonder if you don’t know what to do with him. The boys The show is heading into its fifth and final season, and I hope it knows we’re sick of “Herogasm”-style episodes. Please, for the love of God, don’t give us a third round.
