Every episode of The Boys, Prime Video’s ultraviolent, savagely satirical superhero series, offers an abundance of gross moments. Some involve violence. Others involve sex. And others still feature characters crossing moral, personal, and ethical boundaries. But even in a series in which no one’s hands are ever fully clean — literally or figuratively — some characters behave worse than others.
With The Boys, an episode title like “Dirty Business” practically doubles as a warning label that things will be nastier than usual. (See also “Herogasm.”) And guess what? They are. This week brings our heroes into an exclusive gathering hosted by Tek Knight, where they discover parties within parties where dark plans get hatched and dark desires find expression. Plus there’s cake!
Daphne Campbell
Let’s take this opportunity to apologize to Hughie’s mom, Daphne. In the end it was (probably) wrong to suspect her of being up to no good. It seems like she really cared about Hugh Sr. and felt awful about leaving her husband and child behind but felt her mental health made staying impossible. We could dock her some points for scattering Hugh Sr.’s ashes in a questionably legal fashion, but let’s let her have that. She’s in mourning.
Unnamed Guide to the Maid in Manhattan–Themed Walking Tour
Look, even if you agree with Daphne and Hughie’s assessment of the 2002 rom-com Maid in Manhattan starring Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes, you have to admit she’s good at her job and able to keep a smile on her face while she does it. Keep at it, unnamed guide.
Frenchie
Frenchie’s out of the picture this episode. He’s in a dark place, and it’s easy to feel bad for him, but refusing to see Kimiko is still pretty crappy.
Ghost Becca Butcher
Once again, the spirit of Becca Butcher is on hand to offer her husband wise moral counsel. True, she might be the side effect of a tumor, but that doesn’t change anything. And, even so, she’s far less dubious than Butcher’s other tumor ghost friend.
Sameer
Sameer’s in a gross situation, but that’s not really his fault. He’s trying to stay strong and do what he feels to be the right thing by not giving Butcher a virus that will kill Homelander (which he’d probably be okay with) but also every other supe on earth, including those he loves.
Kimiko
Apart from dealing out some serious violence at Tek Knight’s mansion, Kimiko spends the episode making sure an ailing Mother’s Milk gets medical attention and trying to visit Frenchie in jail. In the world of The Boys that practically qualifies her for sainthood.
A-Train
A-Train’s journey back to the light continues despite the threat of cold feet spoiling his progress. (Can a super-speedster ever literally have cold feet? Interesting to think about.) But even if his fear sends him all the way to Toronto to take a phone call, he still does the right thing and rushes Mother’s Milk to the hospital (with some prodding from Kimiko). What’s more, he likes the look of admiration his heroics inspire in a young onlooker. Could he end up being a flat-out hero? He seems headed in that direction.
Ryan
Ryan looks a little too comfortable at Homelander’s side at Tek Knight’s party, but does he have any choice? He might be drifting to the dark side, but he’s also a kid. Let’s cut him some slack and hope his better angels prevail. (That one of them is Butcher makes that kind of a long shot, though.)
Starlight
Starlight’s apology to Firecracker honestly seems to be from the heart. That she uses the moment to administer a knock-out injection almost seems coincidental. (It’s still a pretty dirty trick, however.)
Mother’s Milk
This is a tough one and a tough episode for Marvin. He’s using a meditation app to stay focused, but what good is that when the job requires you to shoot up a superpowered junkie via “the pooper”? True, he doesn’t want to do this, but it’s still pretty gross.
Hughie
Similarly, Hughie participates in a lot of, let’s say, unconventional sexual activities in this episode, but not by choice. In fact, he seems pretty shaken by the experience as the episode ends. Still, if you fart on a cake, you’re not going to end up at the bottom of this list. Sorry, Hughie. Also, the line “You tap my undies, they’ll shatter like peanut brittle, man,” summons up a seriously nasty image.
Black Noir II
Black Noir’s replacement wears the costume well, literally, but not in any other sense. He really just wants a steady acting gig with none of the violence and mayhem this part requires. That, apparently, was not a problem for his predecessor, who sounds like a true sicko based on the Deep’s description. Speaking of …
The Deep
This is an unusually low showing for the Deep, who’s usually elevated by a combination of his aquatic proclivities, radioactive insecurity, gross overcompensation, and repellent, needy aura. Still, his speech about how violence creates respect is enough to score a relatively high berth for our guy, even for an episode that otherwise doesn’t give him much to do. The kid stays in the picture!
The Abortion Is Murder Guy (tie)
The Speaker of the House (tie)
Like the Deep, these minor players are defined by awful words, not deeds, in this episode. But that doesn’t let them off the hook.
Butcher
Between the bloody vomiting and the torturing of Sameer, this is a pretty nasty outing for Billy Butcher. But other developments — like the temptation to create superhero genocide via a global pandemic — suggest it could get even more unpleasant.
Ghost Joe Kessler
Okay, it seemed pretty obvious that Becca only existed in Butcher’s head, but it turns out his old CIA partner-in-violence is just as incorporeal and that Butcher has been Beautiful Mind–ing both characters all season? What a twist! That doesn’t make Kessler any less of a bad influence on Butcher. It also casts a lot of what’s gone on this season in a new light.
Tek Knight’s Previous Sidekick
We don’t learn much about this leather-suit-clad sex-dungeon dweller, but, given the chance, he does the right thing and turns on the billionaire who’s bound and imprisoned him. Maybe that wouldn’t be that hard, though?
Victoria
Just how committed is Victoria to helping out the bad guys? That answer gets less clear with every episode. Between having abortion and rape mansplained to her and her barely disguised impatience with her far-right fellow travelers, she seems gripped by discontent. Sure, she ends the episode signing on to help Homelander’s evil schemes — namely internment camps for his enemies — but she seems to have an agenda of her own.
Sage
Ditto Sage, who forms an unexpected alliance with Victoria when they bond at Tek Knight’s party. We learn a bit about her origins as a child genius who watched her Black Panther grandmother die despite having concocted a cure for her leukemia, thanks to condescending and uncaring doctors. Her seeming motto — “One hand in their pockets while the other slits their fucking throats” — all but confirms she’s not a true believer in Homelander’s cause (if that’s the right word). But what does she believe? Well, sometimes she believes in mindlessly eating awful food with little regard for manners, which helps score her a pretty high slot for this episode.
Elijah
Tek Knight’s butler/surrogate father has seen and cleaned up plenty of nasty deeds, but he has his limits, as Tek Knight learns the hard way.
Ashley
Okay, let’s tread lightly as we enter the Tek Knight sex dungeon in earnest. We do not want to kink shame anyone. What happens between consenting adults is fine. And to be fair, as disgusting as Tek Knight is as a person and as repulsive as his sexual tastes might be to many, the whole S&M situation he has going with Ashley does seem like a consenting-adults arrangement — at least until he crosses the line late in the episode. (Though the discarded sidekick kept in chains might suggest otherwise. We don’t really know what his deal is, though he tries to bring down Tek Knight with enthusiasm when given the chance.) Whatever makes you “swampy,” right? With that out of the way, these are bad people, which makes their turn-ons seem pretty foul, too. Ashley doesn’t think she’s doing anything wrong by laying abuse on the bound figure she believes to be Webweaver, nor, by the rules of that space, should she. But she’s also fundamentally awful, so it’s pretty hard to see what she’s doing as anything but awful, too.
Webweaver
The Boys’s Spider-Man analog lives a drugged-up hermetic existence that’s left him devoid of shame. (“Shoot it up my pooper, dog,” is undoubtedly one of the most memorable lines the series has produced so far.) He’s nasty, his costume smells nasty, and his “webhole” is pretty gross, too. With only one appearance (after a handful of previous references) and limited screen time, Webweaver shoots (climbs?) way up the chart. Congrats, dog.
Homelander (tie)
Firecracker (tie)
Just as she is starting to make it possible to feel a little sorry for her, Firecracker reveals she’s so obsessed with Homelander and all he represents she’s been medically altering herself so she can lactate and breastfeed him. (It just “enlarges the heart just a tiny little bit,” no big deal.) It’s hard to say one has the edge over the other in the grossness department, the milker or the milked. Beyond the lactation scene, Firecracker goes on about “Jewish space lasers” while Homelander plots to imprison his enemies and gets twitchy when anyone objects to his plans to stage a coup. Call the No. 2 spot a draw.
Tek Knight
There is only one possible winner this week, however. Tek Knight’s superhero persona combines elements of Batman, Iron Man, and Daredevil. But behind closed doors, he’s less a superhero than a superfreak. Again, what he and others do is their own business, but when you couple his fuzzy idea of consent with boasts about how his family made their fortune as slave catchers and that he now owns “more private prisons than any other company in the U.S. of A,” it’s pretty hard to stomach. When he tells Hughie he’s tired of all the usual holes and that “sometimes you just gotta make your own. And then fuck them,” any doubt that he’s the most disgusting character in the episode goes out the window. Also, R.I.P. Tek Knight. In hell there are no safe words. Not even “Zendaya.”
