In this week's episode of The Boys, "Wisdom of the Ages," Homelander returns to the laboratory where he was raised and proceeds to torment and murder the staff who experimented on him as a child.
Frank is burned alive in an oven after turning the heat up on the young John to test his powers, while Marty is forced to masturbate in front of his fellow scientists after nicknaming a young Homelander "squirt" when he caught him doing the same as a boy.
When he fails to perform, Homelander lasers Marty's penis off by blasting a hole through the guy before the facility's boss, Barbara, shows up. She points out that John could have broken out at any time but chose to stay because of his need for approval.
As the episode ends, we learn Homelander has locked her in his old room and brutally slaughtered everyone, leaving Barbara surrounded by gore and body parts.
Talking to TV Insider, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke weighed in on whether Homelander achieved his goal in this episode and if the idea was for us to sympathise with the villain.
"His goal was to finally confront his feelings of vulnerability and humanity and his need for approval and love because he feels like that all originated from [his] time there. So he wanted to confront it and kill it. And was he successful? I think he thinks he was successful. The thing about Homelander is no matter how hard he tries to kill the part of him that’s human and become a god, he’ll never be able to because he’s human and as much as he’s disgusted by it or represses it, he has human emotions and I think that’s what’s slowly driving him mad is he’s someone who hates humanity and yet he is one."
"And I don’t need [the audience] to be sympathetic towards Homelander, I wanna go on record with a hot take that I do not condone or approve of any of his behavior. But I want them to understand him a little bit more and get why he is the way he is. I don’t like nor do I know how to write villains who are just evil for the sake of being evil. They’re evil because they have a really heavy disconnect between their internal life where they think they’re a hero and their external life when they’re definitely not. And so I’m interested in that space and, and what makes someone so self-deluded."
It was interesting to see what made Homelander the monster he's become in the present day, but hard to feel too sorry for him when his response to that trauma was mass murder.
Recently, Kripke shared his thoughts on The Boys fans viewing Homelander as a hero. You can find his comments in full here.
In The Boys season 4, the world is on the brink. Victoria Neuman is closer than ever to the Oval Office and under the muscly thumb of Homelander, who is consolidating his power.
Butcher, with only months to live, has lost Becca's son and his job as The Boys' leader. The rest of the team are fed up with his lies. With the stakes higher than ever, they have to find a way to work together and save the world before it's too late.
The series stars Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty, Jessie T. Usher, Laz Alonso, Chace Crawford, Tomer Capone, Karen Fukuhara, Colby Minifie, Claudia Doumit, and Cameron Crovetti. Season Four will welcome Susan Heyward, Valorie Curry, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
The first four episodes of The Boys are now streaming on Prime Video.