Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers from the season 4 finale of The Boys and the The Boys comics.
The Big Picture
Billy Butcher’s supernatural powers reveal the truth about his obsession with Superman, leading to a major conflict. Season 5 will feature a final showdown between Butcher and Hughie, bringing The Boys series to a close. The show will continue to build on the original comic book storyline while also introducing new twists from its spinoffs.
Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) summed up the theme of The Boys in Season 3: “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Not only is this a perfect inversion of Spider-Man’s mantra, “with great power, comes great responsibility,” but it’s so true. Nearly everyone who gains superpowers in The Boys has either become a total monster, a narcissist, or led a traumatic life… Butcher is no exception. Season 4 will explore the impact of his decision to take a temporary version of Compound V, which caused a deadly brain tumor.
The tumor has an unexpected side effect: Butcher begins having visions of his late wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten) and former CIA colleague Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Becca tries to convince Billy to keep his promise to protect Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) from the increasingly crazed Homelander (Antony Starr). At the same time, Kessler demands that Billy wipe out every superhero on Earth. Kessler wins, and so does the cancer in Butcher’s body, giving him terrifying superpowers.
the boys
A group of vigilantes rises up to take down corrupt superheroes who abuse their superpowers.
Release date: July 26, 2019
Creator Eric Kripke
Season 4
Studio: Amazon Studios
Expanding
The Boys Season 4 gives Butcher some terrifyingly appropriate superpowers
In the fourth season finale of The Boys, Victoria Newman (Claudia Doumit) seeks help from The Boys after Homelander reveals her psychic abilities on live news. Hughie (Jack Quaid) convinces the others to make a deal with Newman until Butcher arrives. Before anyone can stop him, a horde of tentacles erupt from Butcher’s chest and rip Newman in half! This fits into a recurring theme in The Boys, where a person’s psychic powers reveal the truth about their true nature. Homelander has superhuman strength and is nearly invincible, but he is a ruthless narcissist who was raised as a commodity, not a person. Butcher’s cancer (reflected in Kessler’s hallucinations) is a sign that his obsession with defeating Superman is a kind of disease. It also puts him at odds with the other members of The Boys, sparking a major conflict from the comics.
Butcher heads to a final showdown on The Boys, but it won’t just be Homelander
Image from Prime Video
Season 4 of The Boys continues a story thread from sister show Gen V, which is about a virus that attaches itself to Compound V in the bloodstream and can kill Superman. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) creates a new version of the virus, but the problem is that it needs to be infected in order for it to work. Butcher drives off in the night with the virus, intending to use it to cause a superhuman genocide. This is exactly what happened in The Boys comic book series. In the comic’s final story arc, Butcher decides to use an improved strain of Compound V to cause a superhuman genocide, ultimately killing off the rest of The Boys.
This ultimately leads to a final showdown between Hughie and Butcher, with young Hughie finally killing Butcher. Although Season 4 ends with The Boys being captured by Vought and Homelander’s superhero army, the stage is set for a final showdown between Hughie and Butcher, giving The Boys a bittersweet ending. Showrunner Eric Kripke has even said that the series-concluding Season 5 will be an apocalyptic one.
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The Boys: Diabolical inspired Butcher’s new powers
This isn’t the first time The Boys has used a gun as a weapon. In the short story “John and Sunhee” from the animated anthology The Boys: Diabolical, a Vought cleaner stole Compound V to cure his wife’s cancer, only for the cancer to return to life and go on a murderous spree. Ahead of the season 4 finale, Kripke spoke to Entertainment Weekly about how “John and Sunhee” inspired Butcher’s new superpower.
“I kept saying, ‘It should be Cronenberg-esque. No blue light or spiritual stuff. It should be a scary pulsating tumor.’ So when I did it myself, I thought, ‘I’m going to do the Cronenberg version.’ At a certain point, [“John and Sun-Hee”] “Because in the canon of the episode, I already considered in the back of my mind that cancer could go super or go into overdrive. I think that’s a really scary thought. So, yeah, it’s a different version of that. I like how the shows inspire each other.”
That The Boys follows the comic book storyline while also building on Diabolical and Generation V to create new and fascinating twists is a rare but welcome feat in superhero media. In most superhero worlds, the spinoffs are so intertwined that you have to watch them all to understand the story. But The Boys almost stands on its own, even as it sets up the final stage of Butcher’s journey. In Season 3, when Butcher was trapped in a telepathic nightmare, his brother Lenny accused him of looking for an excuse to be a monster. Now, it seems he has fully embraced the monster within him. Or rather, the monster has embraced him.
The Boys is available to stream on Prime Video in the US
