Updated 07/06/24 see updates below.
The Boys has always been a show determined to shock and disgust its audience, so it’s no wonder that they keep pushing the proverbial envelope. I’m no prude, but I’m often plenty grossed out by this show, though in the past that’s (mostly) been a good kind of grossed out.
It’s been funny for the most part, though early on in the series Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is sexually assaulted by the superhero The Deep (Chace Crawford). That scene was deeply disturbing, and it was supposed to be. It was a tough scene but it was here for a reason: Starlight got her first glimpse at how vile The Seven truly were—though not the last. Soon she’d realize that even the golden boy, Homelander (Antony Starr) was a villain.
In this week’s episode of The Boys, however, things are taken too far and not in a good way. There’s shock value and then there’s shock value. Season 4, Episode 6—titled ‘Dirty Business’—is only shocking in its lack of empathy for victims of sexual assault. Spoilers ahead.
It’s odd, because last week was the first time this season that I genuinely thought to myself “This is finally getting good.” The episode had a lot to love, from flying “Supe” sheep to a hilarious parody of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Get woke, get yoked” is one of the funniest and most absurd things this show has done, and the ridiculous “woke” product placement in that episode is classic The Boys.
But it all came crashing down in Episode 6, when Hughie (Jack Quaid) learns the saying “never meet your heroes” the hard way—the same way that Starlight did back in Season 1. This time, however, the sexual assault is tackled with all the nuance of a freight train crashing into a brick wall.
Content warning.
My colleague Paul Tassi has already detailed why this scene is so messed up, so I’ll just direct you to his synopsis and critique. I want to talk about the authorial intent, which makes it all so much worse. As far as I could tell, watching the scene and its aftermath, The Boys was playing Hughie’s suffering for laughs. I was a bit mollified by his emotional breakdown after the fact, but it turns out that I was wrong: Showrunner Eric Kripke called the scene “hilarious” in an interview with Variety.
The interviewer asked the following question, which is one I would have asked, too: “Let’s start with the Tek Knight sex dungeon part. Where did the idea come for it? And why bring Hughie into this situation now — kicking him when he’s down by having him sexually assaulted by his childhood hero after his dad just died?”
Kripke’s reply, in full, reads:
Well, that’s a dark way to look at it! We view it as hilarious. Obviously, Tek Knight is our version of Batman, and we wanted to really play around with that trope: Batman’s fascist underpinnings as a really wealthy dude who hunts poor people, and then profits of the incarceration. So that was one. Tek Knight was already set up to be a freak, so we were kind of already halfway there. Then the notion came up of, he should have a Batcave — but let’s be honest, the Batcave would be a sex dungeon. Like, even the real Batcave is just this side of being a sex dungeon. It’s really dark, and there’s rubber suits everywhere. It’s not that much of a push to add a couple dildos and then a weird urinal that turns into a face mask.
And in the comics, there’s a great storyline where Hughie goes undercover disguised as a superhero. That was a story that Jack had always asked us to do. So part of it is, always be careful what you ask the writers for. Then we finally had this Webweaver character and the idea of Spider-Man going down to be kink tickled in the Batcave is just too good to pass up. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t leave that on the table.
Kink tickled? I’m sorry, this wasn’t “kink” this was entirely non-consensual. The fact that the show’s creator views it as “hilarious” and waves it off as some kind of funny sex dungeon scene is more disturbing than the scene itself.
When asked if there was ever a time that Amazon said that this was taking things too far, Kripke adds:
“I love that it’s just such a perfect setup that he doesn’t know his own safe word. It’s just like a beautiful comedy setup that he’s trying to find it the whole time.”
Not knowing your own safe word is just about the farthest thing from funny I can think of, and I’m absolutely baffled that someone in charge of a major television series could be this tone-deaf.
This wasn’t just “shock value” as far as I’m concerned, any more than Starlight’s assault was, but it’s bizarre to see how Kripke views it as just a fun segment, rather than something that should be taken very, very seriously. Contrast his comments with what he said about Starlight’s scene at the time:
I wanted to get it right. I had a lot of conversations with a lot of women, some of which were very painful. And I did my absolute best to get the f– out of the way, and just let them speak, and not try to steer it one way or another. And then, ultimately, kind of, y’know, boil it down to Starlight’s experience, both in that moment, and then in the aftermath of that moment. Then when it came time to loop in Erin, and then Chace… we went through that process all over again. Because the actors actually have to live in and play it. And so, I’ll say this: I’ve never worked so hard or stressed so much about a scene in my life before or since. Because if I got that wrong, it’s not just that it would fail as a scene, it would be hurtful. And I felt that pressure and responsibility all throughout.
Imagine if he said the Starlight scene was “hilarious” and waved it off the same way as he does with Hughie’s horrific scene. There’s a lot of stigma around male victims of sexual assault, and rather than tackling that in a serious manner, The Boys just amplifies that stigma. It’s hypocritical and more than a little revolting. I’d call it a shame, but that’s not quite strong enough.
Reprehensible. That’s the word I’m looking for.
Again, imagine that this scene wasn’t Hughie, but Starlight or Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara). Then compare how this show is handling such a devastating moment with Netflix’s recent miniseries Baby Reindeer, which dove headfirst into how trauma can destroy your life. How terribly disappointing.
Update: You can watch the show’s creator and some of the cast joking around about this scene in the most bizarre way right here. It’s like it never occurred to anyone when they were making this scene that it was sexual assault at all. Just wow.
Update 2:
A lot of people are jumping through hoops to defend this scene. One common defense I’ve read is that Hughie knowingly put himself in this situation, so it can’t be nonconsensual. Another is that because both Tek Knight and Ashley thought he was Webweaver, they believed it was nonconsensual. That may be the case, but I don’t think it changes anything with regards to what happened to Hughie, who definitely didn’t plan on engaging in any sexual activities at all when he went in disguised as Spider-Man-Adjacent.
Another thing I wanted to comment on is just how tiresome it gets when every single Supe is a sexual deviant, and not in a way that’s even relevant to their characters or powers. At least earlier on in the show, the writers tried to make it make sense. Translucent was a peeping Tom, for instance, because he could turn invisible. The Deep is into sea creatures. Now, the show seems to just want to up the ante over and over again. There’s a sense of desperation to it, which is kind of sad.
It’s also kind of sad that Hughie wasn’t even given an episode to grieve his father’s incredibly tragic death, and instead they throw him in this gross scene for laughs.
Finally, I have a question: Has this season advanced the plot in any meaningful way? Gen V introduced the Supe-killing virus, but The Boys has barely moved the story forward at all. It’s just wheel-spinning and shock value and nothing else.
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