There’s No Coming Back for Homelander After This ‘Boys’ Season 4 Moment

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for “The Boys” season 4, episode 4, “Wisdom For The Ages.”

The big picture

• Homelander's dark past comes back to haunt him, forcing him to confront his cruel origins and shed his humanity.
• “Wisdom for the Ages” shows Homelander's downward spiral, pushing him to dangerous extremes with horrific consequences.
• the boys
  Season 4 delves into Homelander's complex character, showing his struggle to maintain power and manipulate his son.

the boys isn't pulling any punches in Season 4, forcing its vast cast of characters to come to terms with their pasts while considering their futures. Nowhere is this more evident than with Homelander (Anthony Starr). He is juggling a lot; planning a superpowered coup with the smartest woman alive, Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) and trying to shape their son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) in his own malevolent image. But the Homelander also faces a dilemma he can't laser-gaze his way out of: the inevitability of old age. Not only does this once again reflect the plight of his arch nemesis Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) is happening, but it also forces Homelander to try to “burn” what little humanity is left inside him. The last episode of season 4, “Wisdom For The Ages”, makes a horrible effort to show how willing Homelander is to lose his humanity.

Homelander offers brutal retribution to the scientists who experimented on him

“Wisdom of the Ages” takes Homelander back to where he grew up: the Vought test labs. At first, it seems like a casual visit. He cracks jokes, talks to two of the scientists, Marty (Murray Furrow) and Frank (Mark Cowling), and even carries a Carvel ice cream cake. But as the visit progresses, Homelander becomes increasingly cruel as he reflected on his past. He asks Frank to play a game of “waste paper basketball” while recalling how Frank played the same game when he locked a young Homelander in an oven to test his durability, and confronts Marty about the embarrassing nickname of ” Squirt,” which was born out of a cruel prank when Marty caught a young Homelander with his pants down.

Finally, Homelander delivers a pair of gruesome punishments to the two, as he locks Frank in the oven and ties Marty in the groin. It only gets worse, as Homelander confronts head scientist Barbara (Nancy Lenehan) and ends up locking her in the “Bad Room” where they will test their powers, surrounded by the corpses of the other scientists. In a season that includes a self-replicating Supe making his own “human centipede” and Sage getting a frontal lobotomy with the help of The Deep (Chase Crawford), this is one of the most horrifying moments.

“Wisdom for the Ages” could have shown an even crueler side to Homelander

Believe it or not, “Wisdom For The Ages” could have been even bloodier according to you the boys showrunner Eric Kripke. Kripke said the opening sequence was conceived with Homelander mentally and physically torturing the scientists from the jumpbut that Starr convinced him to take a different approach:

“The original draft had Homelander going down there and being cruel from top to bottom… It was very much like he was coming in there to torture these people and basically take the wings off flies. Ant called me and said, '” This seems wrong to me. I think there would be times where I would be very childish and sometimes I could be cruel, but I could feel bad for being cruel. I never know how I'm going to react next.”

Starr had the right idea. By having Homelander start off on a friendly note and then descend into full-on cruelty, it makes his actions land that much harder and keeps the audience on the edge of their seats as they and the scientists don't know what's going to happen next. That helps Starr gives one of the best performances as a Homelander throughout this episode. He is at once angry, hurt, vicious and darkly sarcastic, reflecting the complex feelings Homelander has about his childhood and his humanity. It is work that is definitely worthy of an Emmy.

'The Boys' Season 4 is slowly tearing away Homelander's humanity, and Ryan could be next

“Wisdom For The Ages” continues Homelander's downward spiral, which began in Season 2. She falls in love with Stormfront (Oh Cash), who turns out to be a literal Nazi, and his injury at Ryan's hands, along with his eventual suicide, pushes him over the edge. Throughout Season 3, Homelander begins to accept the idea that his powers make him better than others. This line of thinking ends up bleeding Gene V, since the Season 1 finale has Godolkin University invaded by “Supe Supremacists”; A homelander attacks Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) and sets him up even though he tries to stop him. He's also systematically eliminating anyone who gets in his way, getting Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) fired and using Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) for political power.

Motherland he's also trying to get Ryan on his side of thinking, encouraging him to think that humans are little more than obstacles. It's gotten to the point where Ryan accidentally killed a man and Homelander can't fathom the psychological toll that might take. With Butcher also trying to save Ryan before removing the mortal coil, the boys it has become a fight for Ryan's soul. Since Homelander is proving time and time again that there are no lines he's not willing to cross, continuing his crusade against him could get extremely ugly, even for the boys' standards

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