Shout out to the Palace of Auburn Hills.
Part of what makes the universe of The Boys a lot of twisted fun is how it skewers the places, behaviors, advertisements, and people of our own, which is how we get Will Ferrell popping out of a shitbox ’90s Honda at the beginning of Season 4’s second episode (“Life Among the Septics”). A-Train is rightly pissed that Vought has reduced his biopic to a racial caricature, and Biggie’s “Hypnotize” competes for airspace with a treacly inspirational score as Ferrell’s “Coach Brink” implores superfast Reggie Franklin to return to practice. (This sequence also features a recurrence of PJ Byrne as Adam Bourke, who we last saw in the Boys spinoff Gen V, blowharding his way through teaching an acting class.) The movie shoot moment doesn’t really go anywhere, besides “Ferrell Streep” being a pretty decent zinger. But it does increase A-Train’s frustrations with Vought, Homelander, and the Seven, which the laser eyes wannabe god has transformed into on-call chaos zone gig workers.
When Homelander commands the Seven to commit murder, the current version of Noir wonders, are they just supposed to do it? Yes is the short answer. But whoever’s in the tactical battle suit should know that Homelander also ripped out the last Noir’s guts in a fit of rage, and there was zero accountability. On this show, it’s an in-universe understanding that people are shot up and butchered and turned into pink mist as often as they regenerate or simply reappear, and the remaining characters just move on. Even Homelander’s murder trial proved to be a formality, just as he assured Victoria Neuman. But bossing around the Seven and threatening Neuman are just meetings that could’ve been emails. Homelander’s real problem is indoctrinating his son Ryan into the everyday traveshamockery of life inside Vought International. The marketing dorks have developed the persona of “Homeboy” for Ryan, complete with a suit that riffs on his dad’s supe drip.
