Of The Boys’ many viscerally upsetting scenes starring its sadistic superhuman protagonist Homelander (Antony Starr)—pressuring a suicidal woman into jumping off a building; abandoning a nosediving plane full of passengers to their deaths; threatening to harvest his captive teammate’s eggs—one of the most jarring in Season 4 achieves that same unsettling effect precisely because of how utterly powerless it renders him.
“Why am I not good enough for you?” the supe asks his young son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) at the end of Episode 3. His mouth is downturned, eyes watery, anger giving way to deep hurt. It’s a display of pained vulnerability so primal, your first instinct is to assume it’s a well-calibrated performance meant to manipulate the child’s emotions. But that isn’t the case; this is a genuine moment of vulnerability. While decades of corporate control and celebrity image management have taught the superhero to mask his barely restrained rage, he’s increasingly beginning to erupt with it. Open displays of needy petulance, though? Those are rare.
So far this season, Homelander has been needled by his graying hair, a betrayal of the lab-manufactured peak physical status he’s long taken for granted. Now, his churning insecurities—his lack of control over his son exacerbated by the loss of control over his own body—have finally come to a boil. He’s upset that, despite ensconcing Ryan in Vought Tower’s chrome cage, plying him with all the comforts a teenage boy could want and systematically poisoning his mind, the boy still seeks out the company of his surrogate father William Butcher (Karl Urban).
