Brilliant Planning Gave The Boys Season 4 The Best Montage Reveal
Oi! You! This post contains spoilers for “The Boys.”
Season 4 of the hit Prime Video superhero satire series “The Boys” was a pretty rough ride, with some of the show’s most depressing and disturbing moments yet. Almost everyone on the team known as “The Boys” had a tough time of things, and no one is in a particularly good place by the end of the season. The Boys’ leader, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), is having an especially difficult go, as he’s dying because of his prolonged use of Temp V, which gave him superpowers for awhile but also infected him with a rather violent parasite. That parasite has some pretty unusual side effects, chief among them hallucinations of an important figure from Butcher’s past: Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). The biggest problem with that is that Butcher doesn’t realize that Joe is a hallucination for a very long time, and until nearly the end of the season, neither does the audience.
It’s a testament to the writing, direction, and performances just how powerful it is when Butcher realizes Joe isn’t really there, a monumental twist that feels like the final major crack in Butcher’s already crumbling psyche, but there was some amazing forethought that helped bring the montage of that shocking reveal to life.
A bit of brilliant planning to shoot alternate takes
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Eric Kripke explained just how they came up with the montage where we see all of the scenes of Butcher talking to Joe, except now there’s no one there, crediting one member of the crew with some brilliant foresight:
“That was producing director Phil Sgriccia’s brilliance. He laid out a rule to all the different directors: Whenever you shoot a scene with Jeffrey and Karl, you have to do a take where Jeffrey steps off and reads the lines off camera so that there’s nobody there. He said, ‘Because I know as an editor I would want that when that reveal comes.’ It’s a testament to how smart Phil is.”
Sgriccia was absolutely on the money, because the visual synchronicity of seeing Joe there and then not is pretty much the easiest and most intense way to reveal to the audience that he’s just a figment of Butcher’s imagination as the parasite tries to exert its violent control on him. It’s pretty heartbreaking given everything that Butcher has been through and the losses he’s already faced in his life, but it also shows just how far gone he is from reality. As the series moves into its fifth and final season, Butcher’s deteriorating body and mind might end up making him the ultimate villain.
Joe is the devil on Butcher’s shoulder
In the comic series “The Boys,” by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, Butcher ends up becoming the big boss for Hughie (Jack Quaid) to defeat, going from the young man’s father figure to the man he must kill (Freud would have a field day with that one). The series doesn’t appear to be going in the exact same direction, having made changes to Butcher’s arc and his character, like using his dead wife Becca’s son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) as a grounding point to help keep Butcher human. His close connection to Ryan may be the one thing that keeps him from becoming the same kind of monster that he’s always hunted, but given Kripke’s history of handling daddy issues in his shows, anything could happen.
“The Boys” season 4 was a pretty big bummer, but it is setting things up for what could be its best act in the final season. With performances like Urban’s and well-planned and executed moments like the Joe reveal montage, the stage is certainly set for one emotionally powerful finale.
