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The Boys Showrunner on Hughie/Season 4 Backlash: "I See The Point"

The Boys Showrunner Eric Kripke reflected on Season 4 and how some fans took issue with how Hughie (Jack Quaid) was treated.

While there was a whole lot to love about Prime Video and Showrunner Eric Kripke's The Boys, like many, we had some issues with how Hughie (Jack Quaid) was handled. In "Beware the Jabberwock, My Son" (directed by Shana Stein and written by Judalina Neira), Hughie and his mother, Daphne (Rosemarie DeWitt), finally had their father and husband back – until the brutal reality behind Compound V reared its ugly head once again, leaving a confused and angry Hughie, Sr (Simon Pegg) leaving a bloody trail in his wake until the moment when Hughie and Daphne finally get to say their final goodbyes – with Hughie putting his father to rest for the final time.

That brought us to "Dirty Business." Having barely finished spreading Hughie, Sr.'s ashes along the walking tour of locations from the 2002 Jennifer Lopez film Maid in Manhattan, Hughie and the gang head out to crash Tek Knight's (Derek Wilson) bigwig shindig for the powerful ultra-right that also saw Homelander (Antony Starr), Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Sage (Susan Heyward), Firecracker (Valorie Curry), and Neuman (Claudia Doumit) in attendance. With that kind of firepower, M.M. (Laz Alonso), Annie (Erin Moriarty), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and Hughie devise a plan that sees Hughie going undercover as the supe Webweaver, who was invited to the event for an unknown reason.

It doesn't take long before we learn what the reason is, as Hughie/Webweaver is given a tour of the Tek Cave, a sex dungeon where Tek Knight "auditions" new sidekicks in some pretty "intense ways" – and where Ashley (Colby Minifie) has been getting "entertained" for quite some time. To maintain his cover, Hughie goes along with being restrained and having some truly brutal stuff done to him – so much so that we're not sure if what we saw or what we imagined was going on between scene cuts was more horrific. Fearing that he's been found out, Annie, M.M., and Kimiko go searching for Hughie inside the mansion – but things don't go quite well, with Annie getting delayed by Firecracker and A-Train having to rush M.M. to the hospital after he suffers a panic attack after shooting Sage in the head.

Well, they were right because Tek Knight did realize who Hughie actually was – and then Tek Knight made it clear that he was going to go David Cronenberg/Crash on Hughie to make up for his lack of… holes. Thankfully, Annie and Kimiko make the save before the three of them (along with Tek Knight's chained-up previous sidekick and his butler, Elijah) take Tek Knight out of the game permanently. Near the end of the episode, Hughie opens up to Annie that he's not fine after all (especially after the events of the past two episodes), and the two embrace. And then there's the moment when a Shapeshifter posing as Annie has sex with Hughie, another example of a sexual assault (SA).

That's a lot for one character to carry over the course of a pretty short period of time in the show's universe. Taking into consideration just how dysfunctional The Boys continues to be individually and as a unit, it makes no sense whatsoever to send Hughie undercover after having just lost his father – and that's why it made sense to me. To paraphrase Giancarlo Esposito's Stan Edgar, for a team that stumbles as much as they do, it's surprising that they're still alive. Making bad decisions and somehow still getting results along the way is their MO – but there's always a price to pay.

When I watched what was going down with Hughie in Tek Knight's cave, my first reaction was a shocked laugh and smile – not because anything was funny about it but because of the shock of it all. But it didn't take long for the sympathy and disgust to kick in for what Hughie was going through – from his father dying to him being a victim of SA by his favorite childhood superhero. And then assaulted again by someone pretending to be the woman he loves. During an interview with Variety, Kripke offered his perspective.

Asked about Tek Knight's sex dungeon and how the decision was made to have Hughie go from the tragic events of the previous episode to – as the interviewer notes – "having him [SA] by his childhood hero after his dad just died." In his response, Kripke said that it was a "dark way" to see the scene and that the show's creative team had a different perspective on it. Here's a look at Kripke's response to the question in its entirety:

Well, that's a dark way to look at it! We view it as hilarious. Obviously, Tek Knight is our version of Batman, and we wanted to really play around with that trope: Batman's fascist underpinnings as a really wealthy dude who hunts poor people and then profits off the incarceration. So that was one. Tek Knight was already set up to be a freak, so we were kind of already halfway there. Then the notion came up of, he should have a Batcave — but let's be honest, the Batcave would be a sex dungeon. Like, even the real Batcave is just this side of being a sex dungeon. It's really dark, and there's rubber suits everywhere. It's not that much of a push to add a couple dildos and then a weird urinal that turns into a face mask.

And in the comics, there's a great storyline where Hughie goes undercover disguised as a superhero. That was a story that Jack had always asked us to do. So part of it is, always be careful what you ask the writers for. Then we finally had this Webweaver character, and the idea of Spider-Man going down to be kink-tickled in the Batcave is just too good to pass up. I'm sorry, I just couldn't leave that on the table.

Following that, Kripke shared how Hughie, not knowing the safeword that would get them to stop, only added to the "beautiful comedy setup" of the moment. "I love that it's just such a perfect setup that he doesn't know his own safe word. It's just like a beautiful comedy setup that he's trying to find it the whole time," he explained. That's where he loses me – because I'm not sure anyone should view those moments as "hilarious" or anything about them being a part of some "beautiful comedy setup."

What Hughie went through wasn't something voluntary – he endured it for the greater good of the mission. It was degrading, dehumanizing, and, at times, difficult to watch – but "hilarious"? Kripke's words made it sound like the writing team didn't see the depth of the moment, focusing more on the shock value – something that I've never said about the streaming series before. In fact, the show is usually complimented for doing the complete opposite. Later in the interview, Kripke touched upon what Hughie has been experiencing this season and what that could mean for him heading into the remainder of the season:

His story in this particular episode is the kind of denial and compartmentalization a lot of us have when we're dealing with the death of a loved one. And if you look throughout the episode, he's always just saying, "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm totally fine. I'm fine." Which is what a lot of people do before you finally can sort of open the door to the pain you're feeling. And I think that's part of healing. So I think he's going to go on and really try to absorb and learn what his dad and his mother taught him about forgiveness and really try to take that into the season. Because he really does have the most mature and human arc out of all the characters this season.

More than a year later, Kripke was asked to revisit the fourth season and his thoughts on the backlash to Hughie's treatment by some of the fans. "I always really appreciate and respect the fans' opinion. And I see the point…I think so much of the show is Hughie's coming-of-age and really growing from the kid you met in the pilot to this fully functioning adult and badass in the final episode. And you really have to go through a gauntlet and a crucible to become that," Kripke shared during an interview with The Direct. "And so, he had to go through a lot of tough times that season to really finally have that final push into maturity. So it was all like justified to the character. Like, did it get a little too gnarly at times? Probably, yeah, but I think…we always start with what's necessary for the character, and I think he needed to go through a lot of that to become his fully realized self, which is really the heart and soul of the voice."

RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) is the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization, operating the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800-656-HOPE, online.rainn.org / rainn.org/es) in partnership with more than 1,000 local sexual assault service providers across the country and operates the DoD Safe Helpline for the Department of Defense.

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