Review: The Boys, "King Of Hell" | Season 5, Episode 4

For a seemingly invulnerable, wannabe messiah, Homelander sure has a lot of people lining up all the time to tell him how weak he is. The first episode this season ended with A-Train laughing in the man's face, mocking how weak and pathetic he now found his former teammate, even as he gets his neck snapped. And Soldier Boy has now gone on a few rants to his son, scornfully calling out how "soft" and "needy" he is. And this week, we get Butcher, monologuing for an unseemly amount of time while Homelander sweats through radiation poisoning. "Did your dad put you in time-out?" he asks, before rolling, once more, through the laundry list of things anyone wanting to hurt Homelander says to him: That he'll never be happy, he'll never be a god, he's pitiful, insecure, and on and on. 

The irony here is that these are the verbal and emotional attacks almost every character on the series has dealt with at one point or another. Hughie has endured a king's ransom worth of sneering, dismissive insults about his weak disposition; Annie has been mocked and belittled repeatedly over the seasons; Frenchie, Ashley, Butcher, Deep, Ryan...it doesn't matter what side you're on, or what your powers (or lack thereof) entail. When someone wants to go for the psychological jugular, it inevitably comes down to trying to make the other person feel small: to feel pitiable, incapable of being given respect, understanding, and (especially) love. Whether you're an awkward human just trying to do the right thing or a sociopath with god-like power, the most painful cut is being told you are less than—and more than that, you deserve to be seen as such. 

"King Of Hell" leans into these moments of psychological frailty for the simple reason that its big set piece involves everyone giving in to their basest instincts. Violent, animalistic impulses take over our protagonists when they travel to Fort Harmony in search of any remaining V1, resulting in a brutal throwdown that, honestly, Hughie and M.M. are lucky as hell to have survived. We soon learn (assuming Frenchie is right, which, yeah, he usually is about this stuff) that it's the result of Compound V leeching into the groundwater, creating spores that fill any sentient creature unfortunate enough to enter the area with a terrible rage. Voila, everyone rips each other apart, it's food for the vines...and food for thought, as a whole lot of the verbal assaults they hurl at one another contain more than a shade of truth.