Spoilers follow for this week’s episode of The Boys! After taking a major beatdown at Herogasm the week before, Homelander was left licking his wounds in Vought Tower. The biggest blow to his ego was yet to come though as this week’s all-new episode of the series when a major revelation about his origins was revealed to the audience. Since the early days of the show, references to Homelander being made/born in a lab have been, and now we know where the pieces came from. Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy, the tough-talking, hard-hitting OG supe that was revealed to be alive this season, is actually the biological father of Homelander.
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Homelander’s origins have been explored in part throughout the show, largely in the vague terms of how he was “made in a lab” and raised inside of one. Flashbacks to Homelander as a boy are shown in the first two seasons, with other references to his early years made by the character in season three, but the revelation that he’s the biological son of Soldier Boy is a major wrinkle for the show. The twist first comes in a surprising form, as Black Noir has a truly deranged flashback of what happened in Nicaragua with Payback (all reenacted by cartoon animals from a Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurant).
The seed is planted here as Black Noir recalls being told by Stan Edgar that getting rid of Soldier Boy isn’t such a bad idea, revealing that Dr. Jonah Vogelbaum “has a replacement” and they’re convinced that he’ll be stronger than Soldier Boy, and he can fly. It’s obvious they’re teasing Homelander here but then the show outright says it. After hunting down Mindstorm, the psychic character whispers something to Soldier Boy which we later learn is that he was thrown to the Russians by Vought because they’d made his replacement.
In the final scene of the episode Homelander gets a phone call from none other than Soldier Boy who tells him the truth, revealing that in 1980 he went to Dr Vogelbaum’s lab for a genetics experiment, revealing that he….handed over a sample of his sperm, only to learn that Vought took that and made a kid…Homelander.
“Turns out Vogelbaum made a kid, born spring 1981,” Soldier Boy says. “My boy. If they had just kept me around, I’d have let you take the spotlight. What father wouldn’t want that for his son?”
Throughout the season Billy Butcher has been eager to exploit Soldier Boy’s powers to defeat Homelander for good, but the revelation that they’re related adds a big wrinkle to that plan.
The first seven episodes of The Boys season three are now streaming, with just one left before the season concludes. Amazon Prime Video has already renewed the series for season four, with production starting later this year.
