That Major Starlight Clone Twist in The Boys Season 4, Explained

Episode 7 will catch everyone off guard.

The following story contains spoilers for The Boys season 4, episode 7, “The Insider.”

WE’RE AT THE tail end of another action-packed, violence-filled, unsubtly satirical season of The Boys, and with just one episode left in the season, things are really gearing up for an explosive ending. And in this show, we can’t really be sure what’s going to happen, especially after the shocking twist that ended the season’s seventh and penultimate episode, “The Insider.”

A lot went down in this hour: A-Train’s redemption arc was completed, as he saved Butcher and Annie from The Deep and Black Noir II’s wrath (at Homelander’s order), revealing himself to The Seven as the leak and putting his own life at grave risk. Sister Sage was expelled from The Seven for withholding A-Train’s identity as the leaker, as Homelander and Firecracker’s dangerous relationship continues to grow stronger. But perhaps most notably, The Boys discovered that the plot to assassinate President-elect Singer and install Victoria Neuman as the new President hinges on an assassination plot involving a dangerous and powerful shapeshifting supe (that character is not named here, but in The Boys comics, Malchemical is the name of a sadistic shapeshifting supe).

We come in contact with the shapeshifter a couple times early in the episode: first, we see Sister Sage handing him a blue folder, claiming he smells like alcohol. Then, as The Boys look to track the assassin down, they discover a battered woman hidden in his closet… only to realize that the woman is actually the shapeshifter. As they give chase, the shapeshifter touches an old woman in the hall before disgustingly peeling off their skin in clumps (in a process that feels straight out of a David Cronenberg movie), transforming in real time into that woman before escaping; they have turned into an entirely different person. The Boys realize, then, that this assassin is more than just a “Lee Harvey,” as mentioned earlier in the episode—the killer could literally be anyone.

And, unfortunately, that twist winds up playing a major role in the ending of the episode, and the direction things could be headed in Season 4’s finale episode, titled “Assassination Run.”

What was happening with the Starlight Clone twist at the end of The Boys Season 4, Episode 7?

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Unfortunately for our heroes, the shapeshifter—again, working for Homelander, Neuman, and their evil plan—has a major upper hand by the end of the episode. When Butcher, Annie, and MM are tired and figuring out what to do at a bar, Starlight is approached by a fan (who the credits identify as simply “Karen”) to take a selfie, which she obliges. This feels like a nothing moment, until we realize at the end of the episode that this was, in fact, the shapeshifter taking a second to scan and steal Annie’s identity.

The Boys is smart about the way it plays this twist. The show always has so much going on, that by the time things come all the way around at the end, the shapeshifter was far from the top of our mind. But in retrospect, it makes sense; Clone Annie, in her intimate moment with Hughie (which, is not a moment of consent, we should add), is acting off. But unless if you were distinctly remembering and thinking of the shapeshifter, you wouldn’t have reason to suspect anything—just as Hughie didn’t. But the show crosscuts to reveal that the shapeshifter stole Annie’s identity, knocked her out, locked her up, and took her place. She now knows about the plan to give Neuman the virus, she knows about Hughie’s failed attempt to get Neuman to halt the plan, and she made her way into the safe to steal whatever information is on Hughie’s laptop. It’s all very bad.

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But it doesn’t stop there. Not only is the real Annie replaced and locked up in some unknown facility, but it seems likely that the shapeshifting assassin plans to carry out the murder of President-elect singer in Starlight’s body. If that were to happen, not only would Neuman be able to rise to power, but Starlight—the biggest opponent to Homelander’s position and following—would be painted as a hypocrite and a murderer. It would be a death knell on more than one count.

We’ll see what happens in the finale of The Boys season 4; this is rarely a show that plays things down the line exactly how we suspect. But we can say with certainty right now that things are not looking great for the good guys.