The Boys Season 4 Sister Sage Lobotomy Twist Explained By The Series Showrunner And Star

The wildest part of "The Boys" is its brazen interest in how superpowers can impact a person's sex life. Because so much of popular superhero media is meant to be at least somewhat family friendly, this was a topic rife for exploration, and showrunner Eric Kripke took full advantage. From an Ant-Man ripoff crawling inside his lover's urethra to an Aquaman knockoff having sex with a squid, "The Boys" has never been afraid to get weird with it.

Has this quality of the show always been well received? Not quite; "The Boys" has often been accused of overindulging in shock value and gross-out humor. And after its recent extended BDSM sequence with Hughie (Jack Quaid) in season 4, it's been accused of treating the sexual assault of male characters way too flippantly. The show also has a growing reputation for being oddly sex negative; almost any kind non-heteronormative sex is treated by the show as a sort of visual shorthand for depravity. 90% of the time, if a "Boys" character's having sex, that either means they're evil or something horrendous is about to happen to them.

Still, there are plenty of storylines where the show's willingness to go NSFW pays off. A big recent one is the romance (well, "romance") between the Deep (Chase Crawford) and Sister Sage (Susan Heyward). The Deep finally finds a human woman who wants to sleep with him; the only catch is that she has to temporarily lobotomize herself in order to be okay with it.

As the smartest person in the world, Sister Sage is the rare supe whose body is just as fragile as any regular human's. The only super part of her body is her brain, which is not only hyper-intelligent but can regenerate from any sort of trauma inflicted upon it. Sage explains to the Deep that by sticking a metal rod through her eye socket, into her brain, she could give herself just the right amount of brain damage to enjoy having sex with him. 

The sequence of Sage instructing the Deep on how to do this is deeply uncomfortable and not sexy at all, but it does at least shed some light on Sage as a character. She's someone who's attracted to the Deep on a physical level, but wise enough to know how repulsive he is personality-wise. Her solution to this conundrum is brutally pragmatic; she does something to herself that would make anyone else squirm in pain and discomfort. It's a disturbing parallel to her big plan for Homelander throughout season 4, which requires quite a bit of discomfort to accomplish.

This, in turn, sheds some light on the Deep, emphasizing that he is shameless and unflappable in his quest to get laid. It also shows how little personal connection matters for him during sex, despite how personal his relationship with squid girlfriend Ambrosius (Tilda Swinton) might originally seem. The Deep's down to have sex with a woman who is quite literally lobotomized; he's not turned off at all by the vapid, almost childlike personality Sage has while she's recovering from brain damage. Admittedly, fans have long since known that the Deep's a terrible person, but this scene unravels yet another layer of his sleaziness.

"[Showrunner Eric] Kripke and I talked a lot about Sage's sense of isolation," Heyward explained to Variety. "How her brain is a blessing and a curse because she's trapped among all this information all the time and she can never really escape and just be. And so I think [the risk of losing her eye with a lobotomy] is worth it, for her sanity, because if she doesn't get a break from her brain, she's gonna go even crazier than she already is."

She also described filming the scene as "really fun to shoot," despite it being a little hard to keep her eye open as a prop came close to it. (Thankfully, as Kripke clarified later in the Variety interview, "No icepick ever got close to Susan's eye.") It helped that she's a longtime wearer of contact lenses, which might be the best way to train your eyelids to not fidget during this sort of scene.

Describing his experience filming the lobotomy scene, Chace Crawford recalled, "That was squeamish inducing, for sure. It was a technically challenging little bit and we were shooting all of it until that moment. Just doing it was so intense. Truly phenomenal, very weird kink though."

Kripke's reasoning behind Sage's penchant for self-lobotomies was pretty similar to Heyward's interpretation of the character. "When you have a room full of over-educated, miserable writers trying to imagine what it would be like to be the world's smartest person, you immediately get to, 'Well, that would be awful. You would do anything to be stupid for a couple hours so that you could just be happy,'" he explained. "We started talking about, 'Is she huffing paint? What is she doing?'"

Of course, huffing paint would be too easy, as are any of the other drugs that help temporarily lower one's IQ. That would be too normal and straightforward for a show like this. Rather, Kripke saw this as an opportunity to shed some light on an antiquated medical procedure, one that was disturbingly common for women throughout the mid-20th century. As he explained:

"I've been sort of obsessed with frontal lobotomies because it's a real thing. They don't really do it so much anymore obviously, thank God, but in the '50s and '60s, this was done thousands and thousands of times. Rosemary Kennedy is one of the most famous to receive them. It really is like a f**king ice pick in the corner of your eye and they literally just scrambled your frontal lobe. It's insane to me that was a real thing and so I wanted to show that."

The most important factor inspiring the ice pick sequence, it seems, was how gross it all was. "People just get so weird about eye stuff and so I knew that that would be one where people are really going to cover their eyes watching," Kripke said. "The fact that it's as disturbing as it is is all the credit to the visual effects department."

This, combined with the awareness it subtly spread about the medical world's shameful history of lobotomies, made the ice pick an easy choice for the writers. When asked if there were any other options they considered, Kripke answered, "No, it mostly involved huffing things."

This might all seem like a case of the show being gross for grossness' sake, but the violent nature of Sage's habit also laid the groundwork for a pretty important plot point later on. In "Dirty Business," Sage is prevented from speaking on Homelander's behalf because MM (Laz Alonso) shoots her in the head. If it weren't for her and the Deep's messed up romance, the audience wouldn't properly understand what was going on with her after that moment. They'd be wondering how she was still alive, and they'd be confused the next episode when her intelligence returned to normal. 

Without the ice pick, Sage's "Dirty Business" storyline couldn't have happened. Without that storyline, Homelander's partnering with Firecracker couldn't have happened either, nor would A-Train have been needed to take MM to the ER. The ice pick scene wasn't just shock humor; it was setting up the first domino in a consequential sequence of events. 

Perhaps the most consequential event of the original ice pick scene is the punchline of the Deep finding out about his coworker Black Noir's affair with Sage in the finale. After Noir returned with a chattier supe under the mask this season, he and the Deep developed a fun (if chaotic) buddy-cop routine over the course of the season, with Noir being the reluctant straight man to the Deep's cartoonish villainy. This friendship hits a hurdle, however, when the Deep finds out that not only has Sage been sleeping with Noir, but she hasn't been lobotomizing herself at all beforehand.

Noir is confused and horrified when he hears what Sage and the Deep have been doing, but that's nothing compared to the devastation Deep's going through: He had just broken up with (well, murdered) his squid girlfriend Ambrosius, and his one comfort was his belief that at least Sage could be there for him now. But here, the Deep's realizing that not only does Sage not share any real affection for him, but that she also finds him uniquely repulsive in a way that applies to none of her other lovers.

It's the perfect blow to the Deep's ego and a nice way of underlining season 4's recurring theme that redemption is firmly out of the Deep's grasp. A-Train might be able to grow and become a better man, but the Deep is still the gross loser he was back in season 1. Sage's ice pick habit was a fun, disturbing, roundabout way of making this point clear.

"The Boys" will unveil its fifth and final season on Prime Video at a yet-to-be-determined date.