Warning! Spoilers for The Boys season 4, episode 6 below.

Despite a few major revelations, The Boys season 4’s episode 6 is the series at its most reductive, highlighting some of its flaws as it heads towards a conclusion. We get another classic sting operation for the titular team as Tek Knight holds a gathering of rich right-wingers who will be pitched on Homelander and Sister Sage’s plan to take over the United States.

Elsewhere, Butcher is still at Victoria Neuman’s farm upstate, torturing her lab tech Sameer to coerce him into making more of the Supe virus. He only needs one dose, enough to take out Homelander, but Sameer warns that the dose could turn into an airborne virus that kills all Supes, effectively making Butcher complicit in genocide. He’s forced to weigh the choice and this culminates in a surprising reveal.

Butcher Is Doing A Lot Worse Than We Thought

On top of the V-related sickness, he’s also hallucinating

Butcher’s world gets blown wide open in episode 6 when Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character, Joe Kessler, is revealed to be a hallucination when he directly addresses Becca Butcher, who has been appearing to Butcher in key moments. It’s a reveal that’s been telegraphed from the beginning — in the image above, the perspective of Butcher from the point of view of the coffee cup hints at something deeper happening in the scene — but that only dims the surprise a bit.

It’s now very clear that a part of Butcher is willing to wipe out every Supe in existence if that means taking out Homelander and this only confirms that the former leader of the Boys may be too far gone. His quest to save Ryan and take out Homelander has fundamentally altered him and, like the V inside his body, is working like a poison as it moves through his system. Butcher may be getting ready to make some major sacrifices in the last two episodes of season 4.

So What The Hell Is Going On At Tek Knight’s Mansion?

The Boys’ latest mission puts many of them in compromising positions

The festivities at Tek Knight’s mansion are an easy set-up for a new mission. The objective: To bug the rooms so that they can hear what is being said between Homelander, Sister Sage, and various high-ranking politicians and billionaire types. Hughie is meant to plant the bugs in disguise as Web Weaver, a drugged-up Supe who is incapacitated by Mother’s Milk in a particularly disgusting scene.

Unfortunately, Hughie is only able to plant a few bugs before he’s lured to Tek Knight’s sex dungeon and tied up for some psychosexual torture. Turns out, Tek Knight’s desire for a sidekick is only so he can take out his sadomasochistic fantasies on someone in a superhero suit and, when Ashley joins, we’re treated to an extended sequence of Hughie’s torture.

The scene is played for laughs, but it’s not all that funny, nor is it as boundary-pushing or shocking as The Boys seems to think it is. That Hughie is essentially being sexually assaulted is of no concern in the scene and while that topic is not outside the show’s wheelhouse, it does feel especially strange in this instance. Peppered in with some vicious racism from Tek Knight (more “satire” I’m sure), and the whole dungeon scene leaves a bad taste. If it weren’t discomforting, it would just be boring.

Elsewhere, it is revealed that Homelander’s plan actually involves Tek Knight because of the latter’s empire of private prisons in the United States. Homelander and Sage plan to imprison political dissenters and Tek Knight is more than willing to help. As the only other revelation in the episode, it’s a startling one, and it illuminates more of Homelander’s plan that will presumably come to a head on January 6th, the date the finale is leading up to.

Elsewhere in Tek Knight’s mansion, Annie confronts Firecracker, MM has a panic attack, and Kimiko and Annie are able to save Hughie with the help of Tek Knight’s chained up sex slave. A-Train’s redemption continues when he runs MM to the hospital while Neuman formally sides with Homelander in front of the billionaire gatherers. In one last scene, Firecracker attempts to push Sage out of the way by revealing that she can now produce breast milk, much to Homelander’s chagrin.

While The Boys season 4 has proven entertaining at times, much of it has felt like the series is spinning its wheels while it crawls towards an endgame. The show ending with season 5 looks more like a good idea every day, as this latest episode proves my fears — there’s not much more shock value to be pulled from this series and there certainly isn’t any more incisive satire being aimed at the audience.

Much of the season’s political commentary (and this episode, in particular) is a copy-paste of real world situations — billionaires meeting in wood-paneled backrooms, a joke about one of those men who refuse to be alone with a woman who isn’t his wife, Tek Knight’s explanation of the prison industrial complex and his gleeful complicity, Firecracker’s Q-Anon-esque podcast and her brain-dead supporters. There’s no joke or commentary here, and it’s certainly not shocking — we’ve seen it all before.

I have faith that The Boys has some juice left in it. Butcher and Homelander’s inevitable showdown, the former’s reunion with Ryan (in whatever form that may be), the various fates of all the characters we’ve come to know over the past four seasons — these are all things that I can’t wait to see.

But as it stands right now, the show feels like it’s playing its cards too close to the chest when it comes to plot while flinging around on-the-nose commentary that’s as sharp as an overused knife. This latest episode solidifies those fears and The Boys will have to take significant leaps to escape this rut before the end of season 4.

The Boys season 4, episode 6 is now streaming on Prime Video.