One in every of The Boys’ largest claims to fame is simply how sick and twisted it’s prepared to be, particularly relating to intercourse. In Season 1, a feminine supe unintentionally exploded a dude’s head along with her vagina whereas he was taking place on her; in Season 2, we watched in horror as Homelander crushed one other man’s head whereas having public intercourse with a Nazi. The Season 3 premiere dialed issues up even additional by having an Ant-Man-inspired supe crawl inside his lover’s urethra, solely to unintentionally increase to regular dimension whereas he was up in there. (The consequence was horrifying.)It’s comprehensible why the present retains doing stuff like this; every time they do, they’re rewarded with a wave of largely constructive (if bewildered) headlines. There’s additionally the novelty that comes with profiting from the present’s grownup ranking. The family-oriented MCU will not be allowed to discover how somebody like Ant-Man would use his powers within the bed room, so The Boys is ready to fill that hole.However there’s at all times the danger of getting an excessive amount of of a gross factor, and Season 4 has lastly taken The Boys into that territory. This week’s episode, “Soiled Enterprise,” includes a storyline the place predominant character Hughie (Jack Quaid) is tied down and sexually tortured for what should’ve been not less than half-hour. The episode mercifully cuts away from the worst of it, however we see and listen to sufficient to know that each his tormentors—the returning Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) and Vought CEO Ashley (Colby Minifie)—come on him in some unspecified time in the future, and Hughie doesn’t get pleasure from any of it.The sequence will not be technically an prolonged rape joke, as Hughie is in disguise. His tormenters suppose he’s a consenting BDSM-loving supe, somebody with an agreed-upon safeword he might use at any second. However when it comes to the way it performs out, with the humor resting a lot on Hughie’s terror and his apparent discomfort, it’s mainly nonetheless a rape joke. It matches comfortably alongside the continued popular culture record of male characters being sexually assaulted for the laughs, the type of low-cost, lazy strategy to comedy you’d actually hope The Boys could be above.Why would the writers do that? What would possess them to dedicate a lot of the episode to such an disagreeable, dragged-out sequence? The apparent reply is that they have been making an attempt to do a follow-up to “Herogasm,” the Season 3 episode that revolved round a literal supe orgy. That episode was fairly stunning even by The Boys’ requirements, with big stretched-out penises, flying dildos, octopus intercourse, and with the germaphobic MM being splashed with a bucketload of semen. It was a nasty, headline-grabbing episode, and likewise probably the most critically-acclaimed installment of the season; it is sensible that The Boys would wish to market this newest episode as its non secular successor. However the true attraction of “Herogasm” was how the advertising and marketing served as a enjoyable misdirection. The advertisements promised a bunch of over-the-top sexcapades, however the episode was actually all about giving us among the most necessary moments in all the present. A-Prepare apologized to Hughie, then killed Blue Hawk. Annie stop the Seven and went public about Soldier Boy and Homelander. Hughie and Annie seemingly broke up. A suped-up Butcher fought Homelander instantly for the primary time ever, and he almost received. This was one of the jam-packed, thrilling episodes in all the present, and it managed to be a shock due to all of the sexual bait and swap.“Soiled Enterprise,” in the meantime, has no such trick up its sleeve. There are a couple of enjoyable plot developments all through the remainder of the episode, like Sister Sage’s ill-timed mind harm or A-Prepare’s continued alliance with the Boys, but it surely’s not a lot. There’s nothing thrilling sufficient to scrub out the dangerous style that’s left from poor Hughie being pressured to take a seat bare-ass on a chocolate cake. The episode echoes loads of the gross-out moments from “Herogasm,” together with MM as soon as once more being hit within the face by a supe’s bodily fluids, however this time there’s nothing of substance surrounding the storyline.The Boys has at all times been gross for grossness’ sake, however we’ve reached a degree the place the joke is getting outdated. The spark is gone, and all that’s left is the belief of how infantile one of these humor actually is. Even worse is the rising suspicion that The Boys is an oddly sex-negative present, one which has intrinsically linked each non-vanilla intercourse act to utter depravity. Simply as soon as it’d be good to see a supe have kinky intercourse in a method that doesn’t damage somebody’s life, or which isn’t used as visible shorthand to ascertain the supe as evil.Most disappointing, nevertheless, is the best way “Soiled Enterprise” establishes how aimless the present’s been with Hughie’s materials this season. Hughie was as soon as the present’s predominant character, somebody with a satisfying, simple arc of going from a meek younger man to a hardened badass. Season 3 tried to modify issues up with a storyline about Hughie attempting to be too laborious, too highly effective on the expense of his humanity. It was messy and poorly dealt with, however not less than it was one thing. It was a step up from Season 4’s strategy, which is to easily torture Hughie as a lot as doable. Only one episode after Hughie watched his father succumb to dementia and must be euthanized, “Soiled Enterprise” has Hughie tied down in a sexual torture chamber. At this charge, I don’t even wish to know what the following episode’s gonna do to him. The saving grace of “Soiled Enterprise” is that Annie (Erin Moriarty) and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) don’t snort once they uncover Hughie’s predicament, as so many lesser reveals would have them do. They deal with Hughie’s ache severely, going out of their option to torment Tek Knight afterward, allegedly to acquire info however not less than partly out of a want for some karmic comeuppance. Tek Knight, whose powers of deduction suggest that he discovered in some unspecified time in the future (or not less than suspected) that Hughie was not a consenting sexual accomplice, is punished simply as severely by the narrative as a lot of the different rapists in The Boys or Gen V. Watching Tek Knight finish the episode being strangled by his servant isn’t sufficient to justify the entire storyline, however we’ll take what we will get.“Soiled Enterprise” must be a wake-up name to the present that one thing wants to vary. You may solely throw in so many gross-out intercourse scenes earlier than the joke lastly will get outdated, simply as you possibly can solely torture Hughie for therefore lengthy earlier than followers surprise if you happen to don’t know what to do with him. As The Boys heads into its fifth and remaining season, hopefully it is aware of we’ve gotten our fill of “Herogasm”-style episodes. Please, for the love of god, don’t give us a spherical three.