The Boys Season 4, Episode 6, “Dirty Business” includes another deeply terrifying and disturbing scene — and it’s not the one in the “Tek Cave.” The superhero-centric political satire created by Eric Kripke is proving to be frighteningly relevant in ways the producers, directors, actors and other storytellers could’ve never imagined. Homelander, Sage and Vice President-elect Victoria Neumann are trying to stage a coup, and in Episode 6, they face their biggest obstacle to seizing power: “the one percent of the one percent.”

But before getting into that sidebar at the Federalist Society party, “Dirty Business” features an important reveal: Billy Butcher’s long-lost friend Joe Kessler is just a vision. All his conversations with his former black ops buddy have been a result of the Compound V-enhanced tumor in Butcher’s brain. It’s not that much of a surprise, however, since fans theorized Kessler was a hallucination. But Season 4, Episode 6 gives fans more than enough to talk about and some things they might want to forget.

The Boys Shows That With Power Comes Depravity… Again

Above and Below Ground, the Real Power in The Boys’ World Is Disturbing

In Season 4, Episode 6, A-Train is on a path to redemption by helping the Boys and countermanding Homelander’s plans. He informs the group about a party at Tek Knight’s mansion for the real-world right-wing group the Federalist Society — which they want to infiltrate. Hughie has to impersonate the Spider-Man-like hero to infiltrate the party and plant listening devices. And since Tek Knight was Hughie’s favorite hero, he can’t resist when he’s invited to the “Tek Cave.”

While there, Hughie is subjected to intense sexual acts, which are the kind of kink the rich and powerful of this world enjoy. When Kimiko and Annie eventually rescue him and try to torture Tek Knight, they are only successful by attacking what he cares about: his wealth. Thanks to his former sidekick (chained up in the cave in a latex suit), they make high-dollar donations to liberal organizations as a way to learn what role Tek Knight is supposed to play in Homelander’s plans: because he owns a bunch of private prisons, they will be used as internment camps for dissenters after Homelander institutes his coup.

Everything about this sequence is disturbing, though much of it is the gross-out depraved comedy The Boys is known for. Yet The Boys’ version of Iron Man is no laughing matter. He tells A-Train that his family earned their money by capturing people who fled chattel slavery, and he continues to enrich himself through private prisons (where slavery is still constitutional, in fact). That highlights the different levels of power at play. When Firecracker compliments Vernon’s home, he tells her it’s not from “entertainment money, this is real money.” It’s the kind of wealth and power Compound V can’t get people, and the only real obstacle to Homelander’s plans.

The Boys’ Political Satire Highlights Homelander’s Lack of Intelligence

His Coup Would Fail Without Sage or Victoria Neumann

Homelander is counting on Sage and Neumann to help him convince the gathered billionaires — including Senator Calhoun — to back his coup. President-elect Robert Singer thinks Neumann plans to use her power to kill him, but the group’s actual plan is to threaten the Cabinet into using the 25th Amendment to remove him the office. This would allow Neumann to take over as President and then reveal herself as a “super-abled” individual. Yet when Mother’s Milk shoots Sage in the head, she suffers brain damage… and thus can’t assuage the concerns of the gathered one-percenters.

Kripke has said Homelander is a Donald Trump analogue, and this scene shows the limits of that particular skill set. Left to make his pitch on his own, Homelander uses right-wing buzzwords to lay out the “threat” Singer poses. It doesn’t work on these people, though, because they understand how the world works. Or, as one of the attendees puts it, Homelander should “save the boogeyman shit for the idiots watching” Vought’s propaganda news network. When it comes to the real questions and concerns dismantling American democracy raises, he has no answers for them — because he doesn’t understand himself.

What saves this part of “Dirty Business” is Neumann’s monologue. She launches into a speech that says the assembled parties should get to do whatever they want because they are billionaires. “Anyone who has a ‘live, laugh, love’ mug shouldn’t have a say in how the country is run,” she tells them. Neumann says that people are a “labor force” and that “corporations are the real superpowers” in the world. She promises that under her administration, they would enjoy no regulation or checks on their power. It’s a terrifying moment because of how prescient it is and how relevant it is to real-world politics and current society.

The Boys Finally Gives Viewers Insight Into Characters’ Motivations

Why Sage and Neumann Go Along With Homelander Is Explained

Before giving her speech, Neumann approaches Sage, after having “abortion mansplained to me” by Senator Calhoun (quoting former Missouri congressman Todd Akin). Neumann asks Sage what viewers have been wondering all season: why are they “cozying up to” these terrible people? Sage is the most intelligent person on Earth, after all, and she finally explains why she’s going along with Homelander’s plans. She’s working her own angle, but it’s not far off from Homelander’s. Her motivation to help him is a simple one: rage.

She tells Neumann about how her grandmother was dying of cancer, and “the doctors didn’t care about saving some old ex-Black Panther.” At 11, it took her three days to discover the cure for cancer. She presented her research — and the doctors laughed at her, calling her adorable. Her grandmother “died screaming in pain.” She goes on to say she could cure cancer, reverse global warming and solve the rest of humanity’s problems. She doesn’t do this, however, because in her eyes humanity doesn’t deserve it. “And the lines at Voughtland are too long as it is,” she adds. So, no matter how horrible Homelander is, he isn’t ignoring or laughing at Sage. This is in contrast to the emotional struggle Firecracker is going through, forcing herself to smile at the party — and what she puts her body through to become “special” to Homelander.

Neumann buys into Sage’s plan because she remembers “what it’s like being a little girl who no one… listens to.” Because of his arrogance and stupidity, Homelander is giving Sage and Neumann a path to the kind of power Sage believes they couldn’t get otherwise. Because the rich and powerful — including Homelander — don’t really see women like Sage or Neumann anyway, they can have “one hand in their pocket and the other slitting their… throats.” Put another way, the main political motivator for this group is greed and selfishness. Sage and Neumann just want to get theirs.

The Deep and Black Noir Show Why They Enable Fascism

Their Feelings of Shame and Inadequacy Are Expressed Through Violence

A great running gag in The Boys Season 4 is how the new Black Noir can’t figure out his character’s “motivation.” While the rest of the Seven are off at Tek Knight’s party, Noir and The Deep are left alone in Vought Tower. Noir is angry and ready to quit. Hilariously, he talks about how ridiculous the idea of a “Black ninja” is, and he mentions the original Black Noir’s obsession with “Buster Beaver.” Apparently, Noir’s apartment was full of childlike drawings of the cartoon character. However, as The Deep reveals Black Noir’s “true” motivation, it explains why people enable fascists like Homelander.

After being fired from the Seven, it seemed like The Deep was headed for a redemption arc. Yet rather than wanting to be a “hero,” he simply wanted to be in the inner circle. The Deep has long been a joke in The Boys, and he knows it. It bothers him when people laugh at him. He tells Black Noir 2.0 that whenever he hurts or kills people, “they’re not laughing anymore.” To guys like The Deep, the fear people have for supes lis the only kind of “respect” he’ll ever get. “Violence is power,” he tells the new Noir, who seems to understand that line of thinking.

Of course, The Deep is stuck in a cycle of abuse, particularly from Homelander, who threatens and humiliates him at every turn. Yet because he can visit that violence on others while still living in the grandeur of Vought Tower and the Seven, it’s all worth it to him. Like Sage and Neumann, Deep follows Homelander because it benefits him and allows him to visit the pain he feels to others. The Boys is full of gross-out, darkly comic moments, but it’s storylines like the ones in Season 4, Episode 6, “Dirty Business” that make the Prime Video series a sharp and incisive study of how people can be so terrible to one another.

The Boys Season 4 streams Thursdays on Prime Video.