‘The Boys’ Season 4 Episode 6 Recap: “Dirty Business”

“Have you even tried to get him out anymore?” Billy Butcher’s hallucination of his late wife Becca asks in The Boys Season 4 Episode 6. “Or is this the same old bloodlust?” She’s referring to Ryan, who every day seems to become a more willing Homeboy to his biological father’s Homelander act. But Becca could also be talking about Season 4 of this series. Another episode, another misguided plan by a fractured Boys team to glean some intel on what HL and Sage are up to, derailed by another detour into sex dungeons and jokes about dried cum. Butcher’s response to Becca is definitely on brand for him – “I’m trying to save the world; claret’s gonna get spilled” – but with the conclusion of this season in sight, any resolution of the larger issues at stake feels random. You know, like catching Victoria Neuman talking up her participation in a coup on a listening device meant for Tek Knight. 

If you know anything about Tek Knight, you know that the supe with the heightened senses and a fetish for holes is very likely to have a secret elevator leading to a subterranean lair full of whips, latex, and BDSM pommel horses. But Mother’s Milk, Kimiko, and Annie are somehow surprised when their threadbare plan to ensnare him fails because of this revelation. After sending Hughie alone into a party at Knight’s estate disguised as a random supe who farts webs instead of firing them from his wrists, they’ve gotta go in and rescue him from the “Tek Cave,” where Knight and his sex buddy Ashley Barrett like to team up and dominate. 

What’s interesting about this sex stuff scenario is not what it reveals about Tek Knight’s avowed freakiness. It’s how this detour manages to dovetail into the grand plan playing out upstairs, where Homelander is itching to reveal his scheme to dominate the entire US. With his secret cave and unearned reputation as a crime stopper, Tek Knight is like a bizarro version of Bruce Wayne. But his generational wealth comes from owning and operating a network of private prisons, prisons Homelander and Sage want to use as internment facilities when they round up anyone not on board with their takeover of the human-run federal government. Tek Knight’s party is full of politicians, judges, and corporate titans. The one percent of the one percent. Wealthy, conservative white men, who Victoria Neuman would rather pop off her own head before speaking to any longer. “I just had abortion man-splained to me by a guy who refuses to be alone with any woman who isn’t his wife,” Neuman vents to Sage at the cocktail party. “Or his mistress.” It’s exactly these elite, “more for me, rules for thee” richies the rogue supe lobby’s gonna need in its corner, and Homelander’s relying on Sage to convince them to commit high treason. 

Earlier this season, we wondered why Sage was so willing to help Homelander in the first place. Wouldn’t her super smarts allow her to see how unbalanced he is? But she has her motivation, and it goes back to her childhood, when she presented a cure for her grandma’s leukemia that was ignored by the white medical establishment. “Because fuck them,” Sage says now of humanity and its structures of power. “The only way women like us,” meaning her and Vice President-elect Victoria Neuman, “have ever gotten what we deserve? One hand in their pockets while the other slits their fucking throats.” Sidelined by a head shot from Mother’s Milk, which of course didn’t kill her but only brought out base cravings like Crunchwrap Supremes and her Sybian, Sage can’t deliver the speech that will convince the corrupt one percenters to go along with enacting the 25th amendment and installing Neuman as a Supe-In-Chief. But Neuman can, especially when she sees that Homelander can’t. Make her prez, Neuman says, and she’ll give these Christian conservatives and corporate fat cats whatever they want. And thanks to the bugging devices Hughie did manage to place before being bound up in Tek Knight’s fuck dungeon, the Boys hear the whole thing. Those sound recordings are about the only truly damning things they’ve gotten this entire season.

Where was Billy Butcher while the rest of the Boys were stomping all over their own plans? He was trying to convince Sameer Shah to whip up a new batch of anti-supe virus. Shah still isn’t going for it, mostly because Butcher chopped off his leg, but also because, as we know from the experiments on Gen V, it’s too unstable. The amount required to kill Homelander would also kill everyone with super-abilities on earth. Becca is in Butcher’s mind again, telling him genocide is not the answer, no matter how much he hates HL or wants to save Ryan. But then Joe Kessler also starts ranting at Becca. Wait, what? They can see each other? Not quite – they’re actually both figments of Billy Butcher’s yowly, Compound V-branded tumorized brain. It turns out Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s cynical black hat guy has never been real at all. Kessler is Butcher’s projection from their shared past as death-dealers for the CIA, but also a manifestation of what the tumor can do. “I killed Ezekiel for you,” the Kessler hallucination tells Billy. “Which is why when I tell you you wanna do this” – a genocide on supes – “I am literally telling you that you fucking wanna do this. So don’t you worry, Billy my boy. Daddy’s home…”

BOYS NOIZE

• America’s most wealthy and morally corrupt were receptive to Victoria Neuman’s little speech. But Homelander and Sage are not considering what might really be in it for her. They don’t know that she hijacked Stan Edgars’ prison convoy and has him stashed somewhere. Maybe Neuman’s only going along with the god-wannabe supes so she can get what she herself wants. It’s not like she hasn’t done stuff like that before.

• While Homelander, Sage, Firecracker, and A-Train were at Tek Knight’s estate, the Deep was back at Vought Tower experiencing a mask off moment with Black Noir. The actor hired to replace the original Noir is pissed enough about his lack of motivation to quit and go work at Branson. But Deep talks him down as only Deep can, by explaining how much joy he derives from destroying people who make fun of him. “Violence,” he tells the new noir, “is power.” 

• “This ain’t about sex,” Firecracker tells Homelander as she unzips her suit. “It’s about loyalty.” HL was on the verge of laser-eyeing the supe and conservative media yakker, but then she squirts breast milk in his face. She says she medically prepared her body to lactate, just for him. “I’ll do anything for you. Anything.” And we end on a shot of Firecracker breastfeeding Homelander as his American flag cape drapes across her lap. Now that’s a sentence watching The Boys will always give you.   

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.