Spoiler alert! This story contains minor spoilers about the events of The Boys Season 3 episode “Herogasm,” so you might want to be caught up before going any further!
This was the episode fans of The Boys comic books wondered if they’d ever get to see — and have been anticipating ever since showrunner Eric Kripke confirmed it was happening. “Herogasm” brought our favorite Amazon superheroes and anti-heroes to a remote island for the annual Vought-sponsored orgy for its supes, and succeeded in making what Kripke called “one of the more graphic hours of mainstream television that I think anyone will have seen.” The Prime Video series is known for having a loose leash, as far as violence, nudity, language, etc., but for this latest episode, there was specific concern surrounding the streamer’s stance on bestiality.
Not surprisingly, it was The Deep (Chace Crawford) who chose to get frisky with a sea creature (an octopus, to be exact) during Herogasm, and Eric Kripke told TV Line that there were some talks that took place with Amazon’s Standards & Practices Department about their policy regarding bestiality:
We had a lot of discussion this season about the scene with Deep and the octopus. For some crazy reason, Standards has a policy against bestiality. They’re so uptight, really [laughing]. The discussion of that scene and how we pulled off that scene actually triggered a lot of alarm bells at a lot of different levels at Amazon because you’re not supposed to show people fucking animals, and I get it. But my pitch to them was always like it’s so absurd [that] it wouldn’t be out of place in a Farrelly brothers movie. So it’s hard to call it prurient bestiality. It’s ridiculous. To my knowledge, I don’t even think octopi have orifices down there. So there was a lot of discussion of like what are the shots, and what can we do and what can we get away with?
Look, I totally get Amazon having a policy against bestiality, but The Deep is so intrinsically connected to the underwater world, his attraction to octopi doesn’t really seem that unnatural (wow, The Boys has perverted me in untold ways, hasn’t it?). But I think I can speak for us all and say that Homelander forcing The Deep to eat his octopus friend Timothy — as the sea creature apparently begged for his life — earlier this season was infinitely more traumatizing (even if PETA loved it).
While it’s up for debate whether Herogasm was the craziest thing The Boys has done in Season 3, Eric Kripke said previously that his jaw was “on the floor” every single day that they prepared for this episode, and he told TV Line he was “very surprised” at the lengths Amazon was allowing them to go:
When we first started prepping it with Nelson [Cragg], the director, and he was showing us what he had planned, I was just like, ‘Wow, are we allowed to show all of that?' They checked with Standards, and there’s like these hilarious rules about how often you can simulate humping and whether or not you can show an erect penis and how long you can show a private part. There’s all these rules, but we were within the bounds of what the rules were. So the answer was we could show it.
The Boys has always pushed the envelope as far as what it’s been able to show. Season 1 had Hughie killing Translucent via a bomb in his ass, Season 2 gave us that wonderfully disgusting scene inside a whale they’d just driven a speedboat into, and that scene with Termite in Season 3’s first episode? Oof, I’m still not over it.
We’re likely to get more of the same from The Boys Presents: Varsity, if Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reaction to son Patrick’s pics from the spinoff’s set is any indication. If you want to see what Eric Kripke and The Boys are going to pull off next, there are two episodes to go in this season, with new episodes available for streaming with an Amazon Prime subscription each Friday. Be sure to check out these other Amazon Prime shows, and see what premieres are coming up with our 2022 TV Schedule.
