The Boys: Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy Has A Surprising Super Power

Spoilers for this week’s episode of The Boys follow! Amazon’s biggest new addition to the third season of The Boys was also a reunion as Supernatural star Jensen Ackles joined his collaborator Eric Kripke to take on the part of Soldier Boy. Though we got a fair bit of Ackles’ character in last week’s three-episode premiere, Soldier Boy made his triumphant return to the present day in this week’s episode and he brought with him a surprise new set of powers. While Butcher and The Boys were drawn to Russia in search of a supposed Homelander killing weapon, upon arrival they found out that weapon IS Soldier Boy.

When Butcher and his team infiltrate the Russian base that supposedly holds the big weapon they find themselves a couple of surprises. Not only are their armed Russian guards, resulting both Butcher and Hughie revealing to the team that they’ve taken the Temporary Compound V, but there’s also a V’d up Hamster and none other than Soldier Boy locked inside a tube. After they release him, the hero takes a couple of steps out and then begins to glow, letting out a major blast of heat that sends Kimiko flying through a wall. When Frenchie goes to check on her they realize what Soldier Boy is capable of, when he hit her with that radiation he zapped all of the Compound V out of her system, removing her super powers and making her human again.

“We need him to become an existential threat to Homelander,” Kripke revealed to Variety about Soldier Boy’s new powers. “We said, what would be the scariest thing to Homelander? And the scariest thing in the whole world to Homelander is just to be a regular dude. So giving Soldier Boy these blasts of sort of radioactive, walking-Chernobyl power that are frying the Compound V out of supes’ systems is going to make him very, very scary to Homelander. And that was really the goal. And then once we had set on that, we said, oh, wait, Kimiko this whole time is dying to get away from her powers. Let’s have him blast her.”  

Soldier Boy exited the episode and ran off to….no one quite knows where, but considering his status as a weapon against Homelander, The Boys and Butcher will no doubt continue to look for him no matter where he goes. The first four episodes of The Boys Season 3 are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes are released every Friday.