‘The Boys’ Season 4 Episode 7 Recap: “The Insider” 

As The Boys closes in on its Season 4 finale, series creator Eric Kripke has already said he’s got Season 5 and its “gory, epic, moist” series finale sussed and on the page. Which, assuming eight installments to get there, makes “The Insider” the tenth-to-last episode ever of the flagship series. Maybe that’s a good thing. And maybe in a way, it’s good for the characters, too.

In a season that has found the Boys fragmented and floundering, never getting any closer to either killing Homelander or stopping incoming vice prez and secret supe Victoria Neuman, the usual derailments into riotous gore and superficial sex jokes have become profane spur lines to nowhere. On its face, the gross-out stuff is definitely fun. From the beginning, it’s been a bold component of Boys DNA, and a gleeful stick in the eye of conventional series television. But seven episodes into this season, and with only one left, there has been so little growth, and even less to root for. Watching Homelander rip a random supe in half with his bare hands resonates very little if it’s the wrong guy anyway and the would-be superhero god-king’s just gonna sit and stew about it. Gore? More like bore. 

It’s Christmastime in Boys land, which means Inauguration Day is just around the corner. Homelander is in greater alignment with Firecracker after that whole fresh breast milk on demand thing, and he’s pushing Sage out of the Seven after her temporary cerebral regression at Tek Knight’s mansion. They also found the Boys’ listening devices, and now know that the team knows their nefarious 25th amendment endgame. Sage papers it over. All part of her master plan, she says, and assures HL that “the shooter” will be in place like she’s arranged. With intel from A-Train, the Boys track down this sniper. But as usual, they get no closer to actually apprehending him, because it turns out the shooter is a shape-shifting supe with powers similar to the Skrulls from the MCU. Physical touch allows this individual to replicate anyone flawlessly, and in three dimensions. If the shooter could be literally anyone at the inauguration, Hughie wonders how they’re to stop Robert Singer’s assassination. And boy, he’s in for a surprise on that one. Cough-cough “The Insider” cough-cough…

The looming threat of Homelander’s diabolical national takeover being put into action has everyone who knows about it officially freaking out. Mother’s Milk puts his wife and daughter on a plane to Belize, but despite their protests and his recent panic attack, will not accompany them. Hughie tries a personal intervention with Neuman. “If you’re one percent of the person I know,” he pleads with her as she packs up to move to Washington, “I don’t think you want to do this.” She won’t budge – though we haven’t seen Stan Edgars since his prison escape, she could still be planning something with him – but anyway, the threat that Hughie will go public with her Homelander complicity is totally empty. Mutually assured destruction, as Victoria once put it. If they released the dirt, she would just murder the entire team. Which is probably true. But it also zeroes out any stakes we might have in the eventual outcome. This season, even the Boys’ one chunk of solid evidence is a floppy red herring.

Ashley Barrett is freaking out, too. But why so much, and why now? As a Vought exec, she has borne witness to countless murders. It’s tough to believe that the framing and eventual killing of her sexual submissive Cameron Coleman has somehow inspired her to grow a conscience, but here we are. It’s like Annie says to Hughie at another point in episode 7. “It’s just all too much,” she laments. “There are so many fucking dumpster fires.” But those fires have been burning all season, and the Boys have never had any water to put them out. Or at least they always choose the wrong way to put them out. If all of these sudden freakouts are good for anything, it’s that they agitate characters into some kind of action.  

Due to the information leak, Homelander has finally decided to outright murder the Boys. (As there are no consequences for any of the violence he commits, it seems like he could’ve done this way back, but whatever.) “Me Too’s over,” a smug Deep tells Annie at the Flatiron. “It didn’t work.” And he backs up this spoken assholery with a physical attack, assisted by Noir. Annie and Butcher are surprised to learn (new) Noir can talk, and also hover. But they’re losing badly until A-Train pops in to fight on their side. Punches are thrown, the unexplained sputtering of Starlight’s powers remains unexplained, and even though Mother’s Milk opens up on Noir with a minigun, thousands of rounds later, nobody’s even dead. There is at least one result from this confrontation, though, which is the revelation of A-Train working both sides. Knowing Homelander will come after him, he cuts out his microchip tracker and bolts for the unknown.  

Butcher’s health is failing further. He’s coughing, he’s pale, he fights with his tumorous Kessler manifestation, he falls on his face unconscious. But his decision to pull some CIA strings and boost Frenchie from prison was solid, because now the mass murderer/skilled chemist can assist Sameer Shah in cooking up a street version of the anti-supe virus. A quick setback – Frenchie must also saw off Kimiko’s leg after an escaping Sameer sticks her with a hypo of the stuff. (It’ll just grow back, right? No consequences!) And the team is at least on a path to finally have something tangible to stop Homelander and Neuman before their coup. Finally a win, despite the Civil War medicine and temporary loss of a limb. Which brings us back to that looming inauguration, and the mystery of the shape-shifting supe. At Annie and Hughie’s apartment, she puts on the Starlight suit and they have sex. But it’s neither Annie nor Starlight. It’s the shapeshifter, who gets out of bed and steals the information that would incriminate Victoria Neuman. The Insider, revealed.

BOYS NOIZE: 

• Billy Butcher sent Ryan a little Christmas gift, a framed photo of his mom to remind him of better days, when he wasn’t under Homelander’s thumb. Fake name on the return address? “Don T. Beakunt”
• Tilda swinton: voice acting star. Swinton returns to The Boys in episode 7 as the soothing voice of Ambrosius, but the Deep is such an idiot that he smashes his octopus lover’s aquarium rather than listen to her call him out for cheating with Sage. The Boys might be teetering a bit as we near the end of its second-to-last season. But hearing an Oscar-winning legend like Swinton say “Your tongue is like an outboard motor, I came so many times” as the voice of a doomed cephalopod is pretty, pretty worth it.

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.