Spoilers ahead for ‘Wisdom Of The Ages’

Hughie has a big decison to make CREDIT: Prime Video

The Boys digs into Homelander’s origins in the fourth episode of season four.

Developed by showrunner Eric Kripke, the satirical superhero series follows a group of vigilantes as they try and take down superpowered individuals who abuse their powers.

In season four, Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) is running to become vice president of the US, under Homelander’s thumb (Anthony Starr). All the while, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) is looking to save Becca’s son so he doesn’t grow up under Homelander’s wing.

New cast members in the fourth season include Susan Heyward as Sister Sage, Valorie Curry as Firecracker, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Joe Kessler.

What happens to Hughie’s dad inThe Boys season 4 episode 4?

Jack Quaid as Hughie in ‘The Boys’ season 4. CREDIT: Prime Video

After suffering a stroke at the start of season four, Hugh Campbell Sr. (Simon Pegg) has been in hospital on life support. The incident leads to his son, Hughie (Jack Quaid), coming face to face with his mother Daphne (Rosemarie DeWitt) for the first time in years.

With his chances of survival looking slim, Daphne states that she wants to take Hugh off life support, much to the dismay of Hughie. In a bid to save his life, Hughie makes a deal with A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) to secure some Compound V, the drug which gives humans superpowered abilities, with the intention of injecting it into his father.

After Billy Butcher attempts to talk him out of it, Hughie decides against giving the Compound V to his father at the last minute in hospital. His decision, however, is rendered meaningless when his mother Daphne injects Hugh with the serum herself.

While Daphne’s motivations for injecting Hugh are unclear, this could be seen as her trying to make amends after walking out on both Hughie and his father years prior – something touched upon in a conversation earlier in the episode.

The biggest question now is how Compound V will affect Hugh. The blue liquid typically unlocks a seemingly random superpower within humans, along with super strength. It’s unclear though, considering Hugh’s condition, if it could have some nasty side effects.

What happens to Homelander in episode 4?

Homelander (Antony Starr) revisits the laboratory where he grew up as a child, in what becomes an exercise in revenge therapy. He kills two of the scientists who tortured him in the past, locking one in an oven while blasting the genitals off the other.

Barbara, an executive at Vought International who has known Homelander since he was a baby, joins him in the laboratory to try and defuse the situation. After a heart-to-heart chat, where she notes how she hard-coded Homelander with the need for love and approval to make him more human, a furious Homelander responds by murdering all the other scientists in front of her in the “bad room”.

At the end of the episode, we see blood-covered Homelander ascend up the elevator, all while a slew of dead bodies surrounds Barbara – who has presumably been left alive so she has to live with the shock, in the same way that Homelander has had to for all these years.