Ranking The 12 Most Brutal Moments In The Boys Season 4

There are violent shows, there are shows that become famous for their violence, and then, in a separate league somewhere between “Mortal Kombat” fatality animations and full-blown splatter cinema, there is Prime Video’s “The Boys.” Eric Kripke’s adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic series has become infamous for placing absolutely no restraints on the destructive potential of superpowers, pushing Superman-like strength to brutal results with a level of wicked ingenuity and imagination that approaches cosmic horror — and in some cases fully evokes it.

Season 4, which began on June 13, 2024 and wrapped up on July 18, may have just been the most violent season yet; there’s an expectation at this point that the show will keep finding ways to one-up its own gory setpieces. But it was also a savage season for many other reasons, some wholly unrelated to gore. Here, we’ve organized some particularly grueling moments into a ranking of brutality, with “brutality” defined as a combination of physical nastiness, emotional intensity, and contextual anguish. 

In ascending order, these are the 12 “The Boys” Season 4 moments that are hardest to watch.

One of the most engrossing aspects of “The Boys” is that it’s secretly a horror series, with a deranged, ruthless, undefeatable serial killer at its center. What makes it completely unique and uniquely nerve-racking, as serial killer media goes, is the fact that the killer can pounce in an instant, without warning, without even having to move. Every scene in which Homelander (Anthony Starr) is around non-supes is fraught with tension, knowing he can shoot lasers and end any character’s life whenever he wants.

Still, every time he does it, it’s just as startling as the first time. Of the many murders Homelander commits over the course of Season 4, none feel more frighteningly banal than the moment in which he unceremoniously offs Vought employee Anika (Ana Sani) halfway through her interrogation by Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) and Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) in episode 3, “We’ll Keep the Red Flag Flying Here.” All it takes for poor Anika to get on Homelander’s bad side is an apologetic admission that she’s been in contact with Annie (Erin Moriarty) — he doesn’t even let her finish talking before sending a laser beam clean through her skull, much to Sage’s annoyance. Like a nightmare out of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” it’s a scene that weighs heavy not with gore but with the misery of inevitability; Homelander kills whoever he wants, whenever he wants, and no one can do anything about it.

Sheer absurdism is part of the package on “The Boys.” The world of the show is nothing like ours and everything like ours, and that’s what makes it intriguing. Season 4 featured a major example in the continuing relationship between The Deep (Chace Crawford), the Seven’s very own Aquaman send-up, and his octopus lover Ambrosius (voiced by Tilda Swinton). Originally a very outré shock gag, Deep’s affair with Ambrosius soon blossomed into a genuine romantic relationship, and in season 4, that relationship has grown complex enough to become strained — and ultimately tragic.

What’s more, the strain in question is exactly like the strain of any relationship with a selfish jerk like Deep; he eventually grows bored of Ambrosius and cheats on her just as he did to Cassandra (Katy Breier). The difference is that Ambrosius is an octopus, and as such, she is entirely at Deep’s mercy. Therefore, when she confronts him about his distance in episode 7, “The Insider,” he is able to simply break her tank, lock the door, leave her to suffocate, and get away scot-free. The moment in which Ambrosius gasps for air and tells him she loves him through the door is positively revolting. That such pathos is being worked up over a talking octopus only makes the whole thing harder to process emotionally and more harrowing as a result.

Much like the previous two entries on the list, Ryan’s (Cameron Crovetti) begrudging killing of his stunt coach Koy (played by actual stunt coordinator John Koyama) in the season’s second episode, “Life Among the Septics,” is more upsetting for the emotional and dramatic context in which it occurs than for the gruesomeness of the gore itself — but, in this case, the gore is very much there as well.

To address the emotional context first, what makes the scene so heartbreaking and  tough to watch is the feeling of shattered hope and innocence. Up until this moment, there’s been some lingering hope that Ryan might be able to distance himself from his father’s ways and become a genuine good person, or at least not a murderer. The bond he forms with the kind-natured stunt coach is proof enough that he, unlike Homelander, still has a soul. Watching Homelander pressure him into killing Koy for real during their would-be publicity stunt is like watching Ryan shed his goodness in real time. It becomes clear that, when push comes to shove, Homelander still holds sway over his son. The fact that Ryan kills Koy by throwing him so hard against a building that he splatters on the wall like a tomato doesn’t make things better.

The fourth episode of season 4, “Wisdom of the Ages,” featured, arguably, the only moment so far in which Homelander directed his bottomless capacity for cruelty and violence against people who had done something similarly heinous to bring it on themselves — the elderly Vought scientists and employees who made his childhood a living hell. But even when getting back at people who actually quote-unquote “deserve it” for a change, Homelander’s sheer psychopathy makes it impossible to extend him any sympathy.

As his revenge against Marty (Murray Furrow), the employee who once caught him with his pants down in his room and laughed at him, Homelander forces Marty to pull out his penis and start masturbating in front of the staff. He then forces everyone else in the staff to laugh at Marty, and he lets out a scary laugh of his own that was improvised by Starr. The sequence is excruciatingly drawn-out and utterly lacking in comedy or levity — the show emphasizes Marty’s anguish and humiliation, as well as his understanding that he’s almost certainly about to die. Then, Homelander lasers Marty’s genitals before dealing a fatal blow. Sure, the guy was complicit in torturing a child for years, but that doesn’t make Homelander’s sadistic pleasure in playing with him like a mouse any less difficult to watch. “Cruel and unusual punishment” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Fans have come to expect over-the-top violence from “The Boys” at this point, but even more than that, they’ve come to expect that violence to be histrionic. It’s not enough for blood to gush and heads to pop and limbs to fly around; to fit on “The Boys,” the violence needs to be accompanied by shrieking, grimacing, quick editing, loud noises, demoralizing ridiculousness — the kind of stylistic pandemonium that you’d associate with a Sam Raimi joint or a “Final Destination” flick. So it makes sense that, in season 4, “The Boys” went ahead and included a sequence that could have come straight from the “Final Destination” franchise itself.

Unlike most violence on the show, the ice skating massacre in “We’ll Keep the Red Flag Flying Here” is not perpetrated — at least not directly — by supes. Instead, following a kickoff by Homelander (who else), it’s mostly human doing, just a set of unfortunate cause-and-effect relationships mixing with panic to create a full-blown waking nightmare. After Homelander accidentally saws an ice dancer in half with his laser vision, the rest of the cast panics and starts frantically running around, maiming and killing each other with their boot blades. It’s too ridiculous to be truly harrowing, but the intensity and glee of the violence is still off the charts — the closest “The Boys” has yet gotten to “Family Guy” levels of gore for its own sake.

After an entire season of mystery over the precise nature of the tumor-esque mass that has contaminated him following his overuse of Compound V, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) finally gives in to his new nature and unleashes his powers on the season 4 finale. Butcher’s new power is shooting super-strong black tendrils out of his chest — and the moment in which he finally puts that power to use is the most jaw-dropping thing in a finale with a shocking body count.

We’ve seen our share of bisections on “The Boys,” many of them carried out by Homelander via lasering or super-strength (more on one of those in a minute). But seeing a person getting their torso aggressively separated from their legs by giant vines is another level of scariness. “The Boys” going full Lovecraft was probably not on a lot of people’s bingo cards for this season. The suffering person it happens to is none other than Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), a character who seemed all but guaranteed to stick around to the very end of the show. It’s hard to even wrap one’s head around what “The Boys” will look like now that Neuman is gone and Butcher is off on his own with a supe genocide agenda. The moment that thrust the show in that shocking new direction couldn’t have been more shocking either.

Oh, Kimiko. Originally the most underwritten and neglected character of “The Boys,” painted in Season 1 as a galling Silent Asian Woman action stereotype with not even a clearly-defined home country to her name, she was fleshed out mightily in subsequent seasons, and season 4 finally revealed her tragic backstory. But that development came at a great cost. Opening up to human connections and making peace with her own vulnerability, in particular, meant that Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) would have something to lose again. Sure enough, this being “The Boys,” she did.

The blossoming romance between Kimiko and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) is one of the strongest aspects of season 4, and the way in which it revealed a new side to Kimiko — one capable of caring, loving, and communicating intensely despite her proclivity for isolation — also served as buildup for the biggest emotional knockout of the season. When Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) makes Frenchie forget Kimiko and come with her, Kimiko, restrained by Sam (Asa Germann), finally breaks out of years of traumatic mutism to shout “No!” repeatedly. Just like that, four seasons of gradually regained hope come crumbling down. No physical violence is involved, but it’s still one of the meanest, most gut-wrenching things this show has ever done.

Things have never been remotely easy for Hughie (Jack Quaid) on “The Boys,” but season 4 tormented him in a whole new way, with a problem completely removed from the world-threatening stakes of the Seven vs. Boys conflict: His father’s stroke and resulting coma. A warm presence on the show from season 1, Hugh Sr. (Simon Pegg) spends most of season 4 in a hospital bed — until Hughie makes the desperate decision to inject him with Compound V, that is.

The consequences of that idea, abandoned by Hughie but carried out by his mother Daphne (Rosemarie DeWitt) anyway, are ghastly. As seen in episode 5, “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son,” although the compound reawakens Hugh Sr. and seemingly cures him, it also gives him the power to phase through solid matter without the attending ability to control said power, not to mention a dementia-like state of mental confusion and forgetfulness. Soon enough, he’s racing through hospital walls in a panicking state and hurting people by accident — which comes to a head when he ends up smack in the middle of the torso of a bedridden patient, killing him instantly. The gore is disturbingly creative as gore on “The Boys” is wont to be, but the true horror of it is the sense of impotence, as Hugh Sr. suddenly finds himself encased by human flesh, having caused someone’s death, not fully aware of how he ended up there or what’s going on.

With her combination of super-strength, ferocious fighting skills, and near-full regeneration capabilities, Kimiko is one of the most powerful characters on “The Boys” and the team’s go-to muscle. Over the years, the show has had plenty of fun with the possibilities entailed by Kimiko’s regenerative powers, showing her recovering from the most vicious levels of gore imaginable without a scratch, to the point where viewers have learned to not flinch when she gets hurt. But Kimiko is not immune to pain, and that contradiction between safety and agony reaches new heights in “The Insider.”

To keep the supe-killing virus developed by Dr. Sameer Shah (Omid Abtahi) – a key plot point carried over from “Gen V” – from spreading to Kimiko’s body, Frenchie is forced to amputate her leg with a hand saw decidedly not fit for cutting through flesh. There’s blood and awful noise aplenty, and even heightened stakes in the question of whether Frenchie will get the job done in time to save Kimiko, but what really separates this from every other scene of Kimiko getting injured is the degree to which we’re made to feel it. Even without her speaking or screaming, Frenchie understands every ounce of pain that Kimiko is having to withstand, yet he must press on — and we understand too, yet we must keep watching. It’s a collective endurance test that reconfigures our understanding of Kimiko and her powers, assuming you’re able to get through it without looking away.

If this were a list of the most squirm-inducing scenes on “The Boys,” not necessarily accounting for physical or emotional brutality, Webweaver (Dan Mousseau) could well take the cake with the extended sequence in which he asks Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) to insert a heroin enema into his anus, only for MM to mistakenly aim for his web hole instead. If we’re talking sheer gore, meanwhile … well, poor Webweaver also comes out on top.

The most extreme and upsetting instance of gore in season 4 of “The Boys,” while not quite as horrifying and dark on an emotional level as the top two moments on this list, still packs the kind of wallop that this show became famous for delivering. No point in belaboring the description: In “The Insider,” Homelander interrogates Webweaver alongside Firecracker (Valorie Curry), doesn’t like his confession about lending his suit to the Boys and collaborating with Butcher, and proceeds to grab him by the neck and the shoulder and rip him longitudinally into two halves. It’s slightly slower than most of Homelander’s murders, and he relishes it in typical sadistic fashion, clearly enjoying the fact that Webweaver never expected to be killed like that – who would? The fact that it happens while Webweaver is having an explosive web diarrhea, blood mixing with the spilled web fluid on the floor, only makes everything worse. Ugh.

For all the fantastical violence taking place in pretty much every nook and cranny of “The Boys,” nothing can beat the slow-encroaching realization of finality at the side of a hospital bed for sheer devastation. Just look at Hughie: The man has seen horrors that most people couldn’t begin to comprehend, and yet, when the time comes to inject his father with an euthanizing drug on “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son,” it looks like the most difficult thing he’s ever been through.

The scene in question, acted marvelously by Simon Pegg, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Jack Quaid alike, is unusually simple for the emotional climax of an of “The Boys.” Hughie injects the drug into Hugh Sr.’s veins, holds him along with his mother, and comforts him as he slowly fades away. Hearing Hugh Sr. babble semi-coherently while clinging to some measure of comfort in being with his family somehow feels more heartbreaking and cruel than any other death on the series. It’s a scene that understands an oft-forgotten rule of cinematic storytelling: What’s truly scary isn’t the flesh or the blood in and of themselves, but the pain of the human beings made to bear the brunt of violence. There’s nothing more violent than the need to let a loved one go.

Remember when “The Boys” featured an extended depiction of full-on sexual assault in great visual detail? To its credit, the show understands the nature of what happens to Hughie in episode 6, “Dirty Business,” later showing that he’s been deeply scarred and traumatized by the experience. But still, before we get to that point, we have to endure the scene itself. Though the show may be distressingly willing to think sexual assault is funny, it’s the kind of scene that would be totally understandable for any viewer to not want to stomach.

It could be charitably argued that Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) and Ashley (Colby Minifie) aren’t abusing Hughie intentionally (not at first, anyway, in Tek’s case), as they believe he is just Webweaver refraining from saying his safe word. Regardless of whether he initially consents, the lived reality of it for Hughie is that, from the moment he fails to make them stop, he’s being violated, hurt, humiliated, and stripped of his agency and power over his body in all manner of ways. It just keeps going on and on and on and on. Annie and Kimiko’s arrival stops things from getting even worse with the addition of bloodshed, but even without a drop of blood, this sequence leaves a bigger knot in the stomach than anything else in “The Boys” Season 4.