‘The Boys’ Season 5 Episode 4 review: “King of Hell”

There is a room in Fort Harmony where the walls have grown over a man. Vines run from his body into the ceiling, the floor, the corridor outside, the forest beyond the fence line. And it marks a slow 70-year colonization of an abandoned atrocity site by a person Vought experimented on and forgot to kill. His name is Quinn. He radiates pure hate. He seems to do this involuntarily and constantly, and everyone who enters his radius starts telling the truth about how much they resent the people they love. Also, even though he’s been here since the 1950s, no one from Vought has come back to check on him.

This is the kind of image The Boys does better than many of its contemporaries. Even in a filler haunted-house episode during its final season, it finds time to show us the horror of systemic evil and its rot. Quinn didn’t mutate out of malice. He mutated because Frederick Vought ran experiments on human beings in this facility. Soldier Boy survived, and Quinn became whatever the failure state of that process looks like after seven decades of solitude and rage. He is the evidence. He is also the episode’s best idea, and “King of Hell” — the fourth episode of The Boys Season 5, now fully into its midseason stretch — has the wisdom to use him sparingly.

The Prophet of America.

The episode’s sharpest material lives in the Vought writers’ room, funny enough. Here, Firecracker has assembled Ashley, Oh Father, a producer named Courtenay, and The Worm — the soil-eating supe from the premiere — to solve the following problem. Only 22% of the American public would theoretically accept Homelander as a messianic figure, as God himself. And they need to get that number above 70%.

The solutions the room generates tell you everything about how this operation thinks. Homelander could part the sea to send refugees back. He could fly to global holy sites for selfies. Or even perform a miracle on live television, as if he hasn’t done that already with his powers. Every suggestion frames the divine as content to be consumed by the public. And the room evaluates each one on the same axis. Does it test? Will it move the number? The fact that Homelander may actually be capable of parting a sea doesn’t make this more frightening than the meeting itself.

They land on “Prophet” because “God” crosses a line the market won’t clear yet. This incremental logic — don’t ask for everything, ask for the next plausible thing, wait, ask again — is the episode’s central argument stated as a branding exercise. The “Democratic Church of America” packages Homelander’s authority inside the language of patriotism. Which means dissent becomes apostasy and apostasy becomes anti-Americanism and anti-Americanism gets you into a Freedom Camp.

Firecracker even says a shaky “congrats” when Homelander announces he’s the next Jesus Christ. Her face does the work of thirty expository lines. Homelander then tells Firecracker he saw an angel (omitting Stillwell’s name and the milk, thus curating even his own psychotic break for consumption). He doesn’t want to serve God, he tells her. He wants to be God. She agrees because she’s terrified. This is the engine of every authoritarian inner circle the show has depicted thus far. They’re not true believers. They’re just people who have calculated that agreement costs less than resistance. At least for now.

Fort Harmony and other old experiments.

The Boys Season 5 Episode 4 sends both its hero and villain teams to Fort Harmony simultaneously, running them on parallel tracks through the same facility without letting them find each other until the third act. The structure creates at least some dread by showing two groups of people trying to solve the same problem — secure or destroy the remaining V1 — in a haunted house that turns them against each other the deeper they go.

Frenchie figures out the cause faster than anyone else because he’s the only person whose brain chemistry the spores can’t touch. A lifetime of comprehensive drug use has rendered him immune to Quinn’s hate-field. Which the episode plays as a joke and then lets sit as something more complicated by the end. Frenchie’s drug history has always been the show’s site of his most serious damage. The guilt, the violence, the years he spent as someone else’s weapon. The fact that the same history makes him the only functional person in the building is the episode’s most quiet irony. His worst years protected him from the worst of this place.

The Boys turn on each other on a dime, overtly expressing frustrations they’ve held onto for a long time. They’re not only unbearably angry but also honest. The forced-honesty device has a long genre history and the episode knows it. Hughie clocks the spores as a Last of Us resemblance and Frenchie playfully dismisses the whole show as “The Walking Dead with mushrooms.”

But the truth the spores surface matters regardless of the mechanism. Hughie turning on Butcher — the person who has defended him across four seasons of estrangement — registers the genuine depletion of whatever Butcher has been drawing on. Kimiko reminding Frenchie that she is not a damsel, that she has never needed his protection to constitute her value, is the show correcting a tendency that has always threatened to reduce her to the person who waits for someone to save her. Still, she has to correct the record under the influence of a fungal hate-cloud of all things.

Tears of the Soldier Boy.

It’s not a great episode, but its finest sequence does ask Jensen Ackles to do something the show has rarely asked of him. He gets to play a man in honest grief, and without irony. Without the armor of contempt that Soldier Boy deploys against everything he can’t control.

Quinn and Soldier Boy shared the Fort Harmony trials. Quinn failed where Soldier Boy succeeded, and there’s even a hint that Quinn was either his brother or someone even closer. Whatever Quinn’s failure looked like — whatever it cost, whatever it produced — the show holds back most of the specifics, because Vought Rising is on the horizon. But it gives Ackles the residue of the connection, at least.

Starting with the way Soldier Boy recognizes Quinn immediately and something vulnerable cracks inside him. He even shows reluctance to use his powers to kill a man who has been fused to a wall for 70 years. Quinn has been here the whole time. Soldier Boy has been elsewhere: frozen, defrosted, famous, contemptible, useful. Quinn became the wall. The gap between those two outcomes is what Soldier Boy has to sit with after he fires.

Homelander later finds him crying. The episode doesn’t explain why Homelander chooses not to retaliate for the uranium cell. It lets the image carry the weight, instead. We simply see a man who has spent the entire season being told he’s pathetic finding his father weeping over someone he apparently loved. And something in that image seems to reach whatever vestigial piece of Homelander still wants a father who can be real. Who can love him like that. Thus, he walks away. And Soldier Boy barely registers his departure.

The Butcher-Homelander cell exchange — Butcher through the bars, Homelander weakened by enriched uranium, both of them previewing the finale confrontation at reduced stakes — works because Karl Urban plays it as a man stating facts rather than landing blows. He tells Homelander that the V1 won’t make him happy. This is true. He tells Homelander nothing he achieves will make him happy. This is also true. Homelander converts both truths immediately into rage, of course. Because he has no other processing mode for accurate information about himself.

Annie’s father and the show’s argument for ordinary decency.

Starlight’s estranged-father storyline runs parallel to all of this in a register the season arguably doesn’t have time for but still needs. It’s quieter, warmer, more invested in the possibility that ordinary people contain sufficient resources to resist what Homelander is building. What he’s selling.

Annie’s father left when she was young because her mother’s obsessive conviction that Annie’s powers made her literally divine had become impossible to live inside. The episode presents this without exoneration, as he left in a way that obviously cost Annie something real. But the show does give his storyline enough compassion for what the mother’s mania must have looked like from inside it to make him a human being rather than a villain.

He also introduces Annie to a half-brother who has fallen fully into the Homelander manosphere. And the show smartly frames this as the contemporary epidemic of young men discovering political religion through content pipelines. The half-brother exists primarily as a symptom. The father exists as something more useful. As a person who retains his decency inside a system designed to erode it. Who disagrees with a fellow cop about Homelander and doesn’t shoot him over the disagreement.

The lesson Annie takes — that the people she loves constitute reasons to keep fighting, not liabilities to protect herself from — sends her back to Hughie. And naturally Hughie tells her she picked the right day to miss (a fun little meta-joke considering how little function the episode has within the larger season’s main plot). Again, The Boys Season 5 periodically needs moments like this. Moments where two people can choose each other in a world that rewards every other choice. Without making the choice feel easy or inevitable.

Mambo No. 5 in Season No. 5.

The Boys drive home from Fort Harmony having secured nothing. Bombsight, one of the original V1 survivors, got there first and took the remaining samples. The virus remains weeks away from completion. Homelander escaped the uranium cell unscathed. The relationship fractures that the spores forced into the open haven’t healed so much as entered a temporary armistice. Nevertheless, they all listen to “Mambo No. 5” on the drive back, which the show deploys with perfect tonal precision. The song is relentlessly cheerful. It’s circular. And it’s a song that keeps listing names and never arrives anywhere. It describes their situation exactly.

The Boys Season 5 Episode 4 closes on the broadcast. Oh Father introduces the Prophet of America to a crowd that cheers on cue. Three thrones on the stage. Homelander opens his mouth to deliver his first message from God, and the episode cuts to black before he speaks.

This is the correct choice. And it’s where “King of Hell” most clearly earns its title (a reference to a title from the comics, to be clear, but it still functions well enough here). The show understands that the content of Homelander’s first prophetic utterance matters less than the fact of it. The spectacle of a man who beat his son near to death last week standing in divine light before a crowd of believers this week. Having traveled between those two images via focus groups and a writers’ room and a media machine that runs 24 hours a day. All on the logic that 22% of anything can become 70% of everything if you give it enough time, money, and a sufficiently incremental ask.

The Boys Season 5 Episode 4 is now streaming on Prime Video.

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Images courtesy of Prime Video.