The Boys turns a scarring episode of human bodies into a diabolical mess of goopy sanitizers.

When The Boys premiered in 2019, the Amazon original dealt an immediately impressionable blow to the audiences with its shocking episode 1 plot twist ending. The road to the finale ever since has been paved with bloody fights, grisly deaths, and disturbing s-x scenes.

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The Boys – Billy Butcher vs Homelander [Credit: Prime Video]

But after sitting through four diabolical seasons of the twisted superhero series, one thing becomes quite clear to the fans of The Boys, and that is, shock value has taken precedence over quality storytelling as far as the writers’ room is concerned. The fact, however, may not necessarily be a bad one, especially in the current age of sensitized media and the ubiquitous Cancel Culture (more on that later).

Erin Moriarty is No Longer Surprised by The Boys Shenanigans

If an actor was ever allowed the right to be horrified by their on-set surroundings, it should be those comprising The Boys cast. The amount of exposure to unhealthy concepts and graphic set pieces that the crew has been exposed to should be enough to scar a person for one lifetime. But Erin Moriarty says otherwise, especially after one hilarious mishap on the set of the infamous Season 3 episode, Herogasm.

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The Boys – a still of Erin Moriarty from Season 3 Episode 6 Herogasm [Credit: Prime Video]

Filmed in the height of COVID, the *rgy episode had to be supplied with bottles of lubricants as well as hand sanitizers, and given the similarity between the two liquids, the impending disaster that descended on the set was one of diabolical proportions. Recalling the day on set, showrunner Eric Kripke claimed (via Entertainment Weekly):

Dotted all over the set are these huge bottles of lube as set decoration, but also dotted around the set are huge bottles of hand sanitizer because of COVID. So literally every 10 minutes you would hear someone just yell, ‘Oh, s***!’ because they thought they were sanitizing their hands, but they just got a huge gooping handful of lube. So, maybe that sums up what it’s like trying to shoot an *rgy during COVID.

However, the real blow was dealt to Erin Moriarty who arrived on set ready to tackle another weird day in the world of The Boys. What she did not expect, however, was to witness the sheer scale of nakedness on display in such unapologetic proportions.

By day five, I was walking around, like, a house full of naked people and I was like, ‘Yeah, they may as well be dressed.’ I was walking around and touching all of these dildos and I go to use some hand sanitizer. And I pressed the pump, and the entire crew went, ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ And what it was, was lube. Because there were different lube and condom stations throughout the whole house — you know, because it’s a massive orgy — and I was like, ‘Oh, my god. That just reflects and symbolizes so much.’ 

What it symbolized was Erin Moriarty growing desensitized to the entire view in front of her, as the actress herself admitted with regard to the Herogasm episode. Even though that entire arc was one of the few wildly over-the-top sequences that relish using shock value to achieve its purpose, The Boys still holds the honorary position of being the only series that has gotten away with openly ridiculing the reality of the world around itself.

The Boys Presents an Unapologetic View of the World

When Adam McKay set out to adapt The Boys into a movie in 2010, the green audience of the era would have found the comic book adaptation repulsive and out-of-touch despite the suspension of disbelief. In the decade since then, the world has gone on a downhill arc of self-imposed humiliation and nonsensical destruction — be it through politics or the entertainment industry with its endless reboots and interconnected universes.

Antony Starr as Homelander in Gen V [Credit: Prime Video]

The Boys takes advantage of the chaos that permeates the society of today. The series no longer operates on a suspension of disbelief but cuts to the chase straight away by presenting a diabolical reflection of the world that we currently live in.

The satirical take on oversensitized masses and abusing the power granted by Cancel Culture has also become a somewhat central theme to the series. This is personified in the arc of Sister Sage who gleefully feeds misinformation to the media and the masses while Homelander romps around drawing a caricature of everything that is wrong with the current socio-political climate of today.

The Boys Seasons 1-4 are available for streaming on Prime Video.