MIDNIGHT REVIEWS The Boys Season 4 Episode 6 Review
Midnight Reviews features reviews and thought pieces written and edited by a parent, at night, after bedtime.
The Boys Season 4 Episode 6: ‘Dirty Business’
Series created by: Eric Kripke
Featuring: Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr
Synopsis: Since the death of his father (Simon Pegg), Hughie (Quaid) rejoins the team for a piece of undercover work. What’s set up as a simple plot becomes anything but.
Review: The Boys has always been vaguely cartoonish, but episode six verges on the childishly uncomplicated. The Boys infiltrate a meeting, involving Homelander (Starr) and others as they try to take over the world. But how the episode turns out, and how it has been received, are both more complex than this straightforward premise.
Hughie, his father’s body still warm, decides to come back to The Boys and go undercover. After a hilarious (and yes, childishly) disgusting scene involving a super needing MM’s (Laz Alonso) help getting high, Hughie ends up with a costume that looks like a bargain basement Spider-Man. He then uses this costume as his pass into a party, where various Voight supers are meeting the incredibly influential, shadowy figures that ensure America runs the way it wants to be run.
The simplified setup comes amid episodes that were getting a little complicated, at least in terms of plot, and so perhaps could be seen as a palette cleanser; with some small changes, Dirty Business could even be moved elsewhere in the sequence of episodes.
However, the show takes this simplicity to heart with not just its plot. The immaturity of some of the gags (the Spider-Man parody shoots webs out of his rear end; whilst in disguise as Webweaver, Hughie’s tasked with placing bugs around a super villain’s mansion) bleeds into the characterisation of some of the characters we meet, and into how the show deals with certain situations.
Can be taken or left depending on tastes.
Hughie’s hero, all-time smarm champion Tek Knight (Derek Wilson), is not just from old money, he’s from old slave money, and he’s so in love with this fact that he brags to super-fast A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) that his ancestors would’ve even been able to catch up to him. Whilst A-Train’s heel-face turn has not just seemed believable, but has actually been one of the highlights of season four, it’s made a little outlandish here. How do you make a character who has done awful things look better? Stick them next to someone cartoonishly reprehensible.
However Tek Knight, complete with Batman and Sherlock Holmes references, is an enjoyable enough OTT Bruce Wayne knock-off. Wilson imbues him with an empty charm and there’s the very real sense that he might, at any moment, bring the secrets he has in his mysterious cave up to the party just because he has enough money to get away with it. A character that is well balanced in both performance and writing, who could easily have been ineffectual.
Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) gets to enjoy the double whammy of being both black and a woman at a party full of powerful, condescending white men. A lesser show might’ve featured the joke of her being given a drinks order by one of these guys.
That her motivation is clarified in such a short conversation lets us know she is, in a way, just another Homelander with her own insane twist. Despite the subterfuge, super heroics and secret words in the secret cave, her conversation with Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) might be the most interesting and enthralling part of the episode. The humour that comes from Sage getting another head wound is something that can be taken or left depending on tastes.
We get gifted with a little more of the new Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell), before he swiftly leaves the screen again. His threat to leave, which is waylaid by The Deep (Chace Crawford), is a nonstarter as the character seems to have been left in by mistake.
Deliberately invokes the tone of a Saturday morning cartoon show.
It’s as if the writers thought it’d be a good idea to put this new version of Noir into the show before realising they didn’t have the time to do anything with him. It’s a shame, as the old Black Noir was a character ripe for comedy, action and tension, and the same could be the case here but what little time he does get almost feels like an ad break for another show before coming back around to the regularly scheduled programming.
Then we come to the most divisive part of Dirty Business. Hughie, left without backup in Tek Knight’s secret sex cave, is sexually assaulted. It’s obvious both why some might find the entire scene hilarious, and how others might find it shocking (and not in the usual good way). Starting off innocuously enough and producing belly laughs for both Hughie and viewer, the sequence takes a much darker turn. But the episode refuses to budge in relation to its tone and so events become horrifying without the show ever really changing its stance on what is happening to the character.
That the show attempts to show the ramifications of this in a very short scene afterwards isn’t really enough; it’s as if The Boys realises at the last minute what it put Hughie through and tucks a little asterisk at the end of a line.
The Boys has never been a show to shy away from taking a position in regards to the current political climate, and in recent episodes has actually been scarily prescient. So it’s strange that it would treat sexual assault as a vehicle for comedy. The show has also been well regarded in terms of including at least a certain amount of realism when it comes to what the world would be like with super heroes. So it also seems bizarre that Dirty Business comes along and deliberately invokes the tone of a Saturday morning cartoon show. A much-rumoured Fight Club-style revelation at the end doesn’t save the day. A curious misstep.
The Boys is available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Matthew D. Smith likes to overshare his views on movies and TV shows whenever and wherever he can. Indulge him, and follow him on Twitter or listen to the podcast he co-hosts with Leslie Wai.
