The Boys Finally Brings in Surprising Comic Book Character With a Major Twist

Spoilers for The Boys season three follow! The Boys has been bringing in characters from the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic series with each season but season three of the series just brought in one of the biggest fan favorites. In the most recent episode, The Boys head to Russia to look for the Homelander-killing weapon that has been tucked behind the iron curtain. After infiltrating the base, and before finding the proper weapon, The Boys stumble upon a cage with a Russian label and a little fella inside, none other than Jamie the hamster, but he's a little different than comic readers may recall.

In the pages of the Dynamite comic series, Jamie is Hughie's pet reclaimed from an abusive supe who used him as...well, an adult toy (recall the urban legend of Richard Gere if you need the imagery). For the Amazon Prime series Jamie is presented as a hamster hopped up on Compound V, giving him the ability to not only fly but crash through people. When confronted with Russian soldiers, Jamie makes quick work of them, slamming through the head of one of the soldiers before flying away to whatever adventures his heart desires next.

Originally, Jamie wasn't a super powerd hamster, just a regular one that came from a bad home. With the help of both Hughie and Annie in the comics he manages to have a pretty good life, though at a certain point he did get overfed....quite a bit. The little guy even appeared in the final issue of the series, still alive, but wasn't present for the twelve-years-later series, 2020's prequel/sequel The Boys: Dear Becky.

A super-powered hamster that eats his way through people's skulls may seem like crossing a line to some, but as The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke told ComicBook.Com in an exclusive interview: "Prime Video has literally never said no. But that said, I think the writers do an incredible amount of self-policing, believe it or not."  

"We really agonize over where's the line, because we never want to cross the line from outrageous into gratuitous or exploitive, or cheap or shocking for shocking sake," Kripke adds. "There's an incredible amount of anxiety, and hand wringing, and guessing, and second-guessing about where it should be, because really I think what we've realized is no one is really going to tell us no, so we have to figure it out for ourselves. I found the more you can take those bananas moments, but ground them into character, and to the point where you can't tell the character story without it. Those tend to be our best ones, so we aspire to that."

The first four episodes of The Boys Season 3 are now streaming on Prime Videos. New episodes are released every Friday.