Spoiler alert! Major spoilers ahead for The Boys’ Season 4 episode “Dirty Business.” Stream the series with an Amazon Prime subscription to catch up.
If there were a Venn diagram that showed the number of people who watch The Boys alongside Grey’s Anatomy fans, I honestly don’t know how much overlap there would be. Stick me right in the middle of those circles, though, because even though the Seattle medical drama has been around longer, I’m just as entranced by the hyper-violent, comic book-based world of evil superheroes. Assuming there are others out there like myself, I probably wasn’t the only one who was immediately reminded of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s stint on Grey’s when that major plot twist was revealed on The Boys’ latest episode, “Dirty Business.” So was that callback intentional?
Much of “Dirty Business” revolved around the Batman-spoofing Tek Knight and Hughie infiltrating the Tek-Cave sex dungeon. Butcher (Karl Urban), meanwhile, continued his work with JDM’s Joe Kessler on attaining more Supe-killing virus in hopes of taking out Homelander. When Kessler voiced his plan to kill not just Antony Starr’s big bad, but all Supes, we got the shocking reveal that Kessler was merely a hallucination brought on by Butcher’s worsening brain tumor. Holy Denny Duquette, Batman! Did Eric Kripke intentionally craft that plot to mirror Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Grey’s Anatomy role? The showrunner told The Wrap:
No no. That’s funny though, because Denny was a ghost for a minute. We wanted an angel and a devil on Butcher’s shoulder this year… to dramatize the human and inhuman sides of him that were at war with each other.
It may have been unintentional, but the similarities hit me so hard and so immediately that I actually gasped watching the episode. Jeffrey Dean Morgan first appeared on the ABC medical drama as Denny Duquette in Season 2. The patient fell in love with his doctor, Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl), and despite her efforts to get him the life-saving surgery he needed, Denny died one of the most shocking deaths in Grey’s Anatomy’s history.
However, Denny Duquette returned in Season 5, appearing to Izzie in hallucinations (some of them quite racy) that we eventually learned were a symptom of a brain tumor.
The interesting thing in this situation is that on Grey’s Anatomy, we knew Denny couldn’t be real because we’d watched him die, and it was the brain tumor that was the huge plot twist. On The Boys, however, we knew about Butcher’s brain tumor, but the fact that Kessler wasn’t real was the big surprise, despite the fact that we knew Butcher was hallucinating his wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten). Eric Kripke mused:
The notion that [Butcher] will know the angel is imaginary, but what if he thinks the devil is real? That could help find us a good midseason twist.
I’d say it was a pretty good twist, complete with Fight Club-esque flashbacks to previous scenes that showed Butcher talking to himself anytime we thought he was conversing with Kessler.
Some fans of The Boys have been complaining about Season 4, but I’ve personally been enjoying seeing the fun moments like comic book references that would make great spinoffs, even if there have also been some pretty bleak moments like Sister Sage’s lobotomy twist and the straight-up depressing symbolism behind Hughie Sr.’s superpower.
There are only two episodes to go in The Boys’ penultimate season, so strap in and hang on for what promises to be a doozy of an ending for one of Amazon Prime’s best original series.
