Simon Pegg joins Jack Quaid for one of the show's more poignant subplots
The most cruel carnage | The boys | Prime Video
The boys are full of death, but a little grieving. Since Season 1, Homelander has laser-blasted bystanders, punched Vought's underlings through the chest, and torn apart fellow humans almost once an episode. The violence is so over the top that the loss of innocent life never really sinks in beyond "Good lord, someone's got to stop that guy!" It's a bit of a miracle; each week, showrunner Eric Kripke and his team of writers and directors ride the edge (lord) between gleeful shock value and grotesque reality. There is no show that has made me scream out loud more times than The Boys.
Which is why Season 4 Episode 5, "Beware the Jabberwock, My Son," cracked me up. The episode is full of standard Boys absurdity, from the Marvel-at-Comic-Con parody of the V52 Expo to a standoff against Compound V-enhanced sheep. But through the chaos, writer Judalina Neira and director Shana Stein swing into a grim scene: Hughie (Jack Quaid) discovers that his estranged mother injected his dying father, Hughie Sr. (Simon Pegg), with the stolen Compound V. Hughie almost shot himself, in a last-ditch attempt to save his father by superhuman means, but ultimately threw the dose away, all too aware of the long-term consequences. His mother didn't—and even though Hughie Sr. bounced back a moment, all hell breaks loose quickly.
Pegg's screen time only amounts to 15 or 20 minutes of an hour-long episode, but it feels painfully long, the way it can feel to stand next to a declining loved one in the final years, months or even days. Association V gets Hughie Sr. to immediately lose control of his body, but instead of breaking a hip or having an accident, he teleports into the torso of a nearby patient and explodes blood and guts around the room. Hughie Sr. phasing in and out of awareness of their actions. When he's on, he's in shock—how did he come to be holding a human heart? Hughie, who has seen these horrors before, remains calm… until it dawns on him that he has never seen this horror before: his father, a simple but healthy man up to this point, is completely breaking down.
