The Boys Season 5, Episode 4, “King of Hell,” introduces one of the show’s most horrifying creations yet in Quinn, a new character and minor villain played by Kris Hagen. The fourth episode takes several major characters to Fort Harmony, an old Vought medical facility where V-One trials were carried out on the likes of Soldier Boy. And while it’s no longer used, it turns out that some horrors still lurk there. Warning: SPOILERS ahead for this week’s episode.
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With Homelander, Soldier Boy, and several members of the Boys converging at the facility, things quickly begin to go wrong. There’s something off about the place, and it makes the characters turn on one another. It transpires that it is the influence of Quinn, a former V-One test subject who, over the decades, has been left at Fort Harmony to horribly mutate, becoming a human-plant hybrid who is stuck to the walls, his vines taking over. It’s his hate-filled spores that affect the characters, which eventually leads to Soldier Boy killing him, but how are the two connected?
Is Quinn Soldier Boy’s Brother?
What we learn about Quinn is that he was in the same Vought trials as Soldier Boy, but while the latter was successful, the former clearly was not. Very few survived those early experiments, so it’s a surprise that Quinn is alive at all, if he can really be labelled as such. We also know that Quinn was a former soldier – and unlike Soldier Boy, he was a legit one who saw real combat. He hated and resented him for being a rich, spoiled kid, but that’s all we’re told.
Interestingly, this comes in the same episode that we’re told Soldier Boy had a brother… who was also a real soldier. He received the Silver Star for bravery at Anzio, and it was jealousy that led to the future Payback leader begging his father to let him partake in Dr. Vought’s trials. Given that, could Quinn actually be Soldier Boy’s brother? The timing of the mention from Homelander would certainly make sense, as would much of the history between the characters. The only issue is that it’s implied Quinn hated him in part for being rich, which wouldn’t quite make sense if they were part of the same family.
It is also possible that Quinn really is just another Vought test subject (and to clarify one other theory that some have suggested, he is not Bombsight, who is revealed to be still alive and made it out of Fort Harmony with V1). It doesn’t need a familial connection to work, though Soldier Boy’s tearful response to killing him does set up there being more to it than we’ve been told. We’ll presumably learn exactly what that is in Vought Rising, the 1950s-set prequel that will be led by Jensen Ackles, and in which we can now expect to see Quinn as well.
New episodes of The Boys release on Wednesdays on Prime Video.
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