‘The Boys’ Boss Breaks Down Homelander’s Homecoming, Sage’s Lobotomy & More

Sometimes Going Rogue Pays Off

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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Boys Season 4 Episode 4, “Wisdom of the Ages.”]

The Boys is keeping things tense as Season 4 continues on Prime Video with Homelander (Antony Starr) making a home visit to the lab that raised him, Firecracker (Valorie Curry) exposing Annie’s (Erin Moriarty) secrets, Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) embracing a lobotomized brain, Hughie (Jack Quaid) securing Compound V for his dying dad, and Butcher (Karl Urban) uncovering a dark secret about himself in the fourth installment, “Wisdom of the Ages.”

Naturally, Homelander’s trip down memory lane with the scientists responsible for the various tests conducted on him in his youth turns very ugly. The side quest has dire consequences for those involved as the threatening Supe implements some “tests” of his own before ultimately massacring the majority of his torturers. But was his ultimate goal achieved?

And Sister Sage engages in some extracurriculars with The Deep (Chace Crawford) that are a brain-scratching good time for her, but a definite gross-out moment for viewers as she asks the aquatic supe to use an ice pick to perform a frontal lobotomy. Meanwhile, Hughie lets go of his long-held hatred for A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) who snuck him a vial of Compound-V out of Homelander’s apartment so he could try and save his dad. After seemingly deciding against it, Hughie leaves the hospital room and returns to find his mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) had injected Hughie Sr. (Simon Pegg) with the serum before waking up.

Prime Video

What could a formula like Compound-V do to a coma patient? And what happened to Butcher who woke to find he’d seemingly killed Ezekiel (Shaun Benson)? Showrunner Eric Kripke offers some answers, below.

What was Homelander’s ultimate goal of returning to the lab where he was raised, and did he achieve it? 

Eric Kripke:  His goal was to finally confront his feelings of vulnerability and humanity and his need for approval and love because he feels like that all originated from [his] time there. So he wanted to confront it and kill it. And was he successful? I think he thinks he was successful. The thing about Homelander is no matter how hard he tries to kill the part of him that’s human and become a god, he’ll never be able to because he’s human and as much as he’s disgusted by it or represses it, he has human emotions and I think that’s what’s slowly driving him mad is he’s someone who hates humanity and yet he is one.

And I don’t need [the audience] to be sympathetic towards Homelander, I wanna go on record with a hot take that I do not condone or approve of any of his behavior. But I want them to understand him a little bit more and get why he is the way he is. I don’t like nor do I know how to write villains who are just evil for the sake of being evil. They’re evil because they have a really heavy disconnect between their internal life where they think they’re a hero and their external life when they’re definitely not. And so I’m interested in that space and, and what makes someone so self-deluded.

Hughie and A-Train reached a truce in this episode as the Supe got him Compound-V for his dying dad. What can viewers expect from a sickly person being injected with the power-inducing substance?

Prime Video

I don’t wanna spoil anything, but that story of Hughie and his parents really takes off now that his dad is awake again. But, giving that to someone in a coma is unpredictable at best. So, I think people can expect our usual Boys-ian madness.

What happened with Butcher and Ezekiel in the trailer and should we be reading deeply into Becca’s (Shantel VanSanten) more frequent appearances?

Yeah, Becca is the angel on his shoulder and she represents everything that’s good about him, and the part of him that’s human, but I think we’re sort of hinting more and more in Episode 4 is a big revelation that he took regular Compound-V and there clearly is something happening under his skin. So it’s like he’s dealing with his mortality and he’s also dealing with the fact that part of him is human and part of him might be a monster. And if you look at Homelander’s arc, he’s dealing with his mortality and dealing with that part of him that’s human and part of him that’s a monster. And so we always like to put up Butcher and Homelander as two sides of the same coin.

Sister Sage has a casual lobotomy in this episode as a means of unwinding when her mind gets too busy. What made you want to include that and how should The Deep feel knowing she has to be lobotomized to spend time with him? 

I don’t think The Deep gives a s**t.

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The Deep isn’t very deep.

I think if The Deep is getting laid, he’s happy. The Deep is a simple, simple creature. It came out of this notion in the writer’s room of if you were the smartest person in the world, you’d be really f**king miserable. And you’d almost be at constant war against your own brain and looking for ways to just be stupid for a couple of blissful hours. And even before this show, I was both fascinated and horrified by these frontal lobotomies. It happened a lot in the fifties and sixties. Rose Kennedy had one, thousands of people had them!

And this notion that people were shoving ice picks in your eye socket and scrambling your frontal lobe is just so horrific and barbaric. I was interested in seeing that as a way for Sage to mess up her brain for a while. And, you know… people just have a thing about eyes, people don’t like pointy s**t near their eyes. And so we knew it was gonna be something that was gonna freak people out. And obviously, no pointy thing ever got close to Susan Heyward’s eyes. So the fact that it’s as disturbing as it is, is completely due to Stephan Fleet and his VFX department.

The Boys, Season 4, New Episodes, Thursdays, Prime Video