Why Valorie Curry's Firecracker Is So Sick In The Boys Season 4

"Sick" can mean a lot of things in the context of "The Boys." Season 4's newcomer Firecracker (Valerie Curry), for instance, is sick in a lot of ways. She's sick in that her whole life seems to be centered around getting revenge for a single mean girl incident that happened to her in her early teens. She's sick because she's peddling far-right conspiracy theories with seemingly full conviction, purely because those lies benefit her career. She's sick because she slept with a 15-year-old. But for the purposes of this piece, we're gonna stick to Firecracker's physical illness in the latter section of season 4. Why is Firecracker coughing so much?

The literal answer is easy: she's sick because she's taking a drug that helps out mothers who struggle with breastfeeding, except she's not a mother and she probably shouldn't be breastfeeding anyone, let alone a grown man with severe emotional problems. Is it a smart idea for Firecracker to take breastfeeding medication to blunt-force her way into Homelander's good graces? Well, let's just say she probably should've looked into what happened to Madelyn Stillwell (Elizabeth Shue) before going through with that plan.

Sigmund Freud would have a field day with poor Homelander, who spent the finale of season 3 trying to kill his father and the rest of the series yearning for his mother's love. Homelander was raised in a soulless testing facility, held captive by scientists with very little empathy or foresight, so he never had a mom to raise him. He doesn't really know what a healthy mother-son relationship looks like, so he fetishizes the entire concept into the form of breast milk. Breast milk is love as far as Homelander's concerned, and it's one of the only things in the world that can break through his sadistic exterior.

When it comes to exploring this aspect of Homelander's character, "The Boys" has played the long game. In season 1, the show gradually peeled back the unhealthy dynamic between him and Stillwell, showing him spying on her as she breastfeeds her newborn child. The season ramps up the weirdness with the growing implication that Homelander's got a one-sided beef with Stillwell's baby, and the reveal that she already knows about his breastmilk/mommy fixation and is using it her advantage.

With each passing season, "The Boys" has made sure to one-up itself with the milk stuff. Season 2 featured that unsettling sequence where Homelander licks up a bottle of now-deceased Stillwell's freezer breastmilk; season 3 has him drinking cow's milk by the bucket, and now season 4's had Firecracker squirt surprise breast milk onto his face as a seduction technique. I don't even want to know what season 5 will bring.

There's no explanation given for why Firecracker's so certain that Homelander can be swayed by her breastmilk. She doesn't seem to know what happened with Stillwell, for instance, nor was she present for Homelander's milk binges in seasons 2 or 3. Still, the idea that she found out about his fetish somehow isn't too hard to believe; at least, it's no more a plot hole than "How did Stillwell know about his milk fetish?" was a plot hole in season 1.

My theory is simply that Homelander's milk fetish has long become an open secret throughout the Vought corporation. When Ashley walked in on Homelander drinking Stillwell's milk in season 2, both her and Homelander's reactions implied that this is just one of those things Homelander does that everyone knows about, but choose to never make an issue about to his face. It's even likely that the rumors about Homelander's milk fetish spread all the way out to Firecracker's neck of the woods, so she could've learned about it long before she officially joined the Seven. This would make a lot of sense, because given what we know about her new medication, there's a good chance Firecracker was playing the long game here...

Firecracker is taking Metoclopramide, a real-life drug designed to combat nausea, vomiting, and migraine headaches. It's commonly prescribed to people going through chemotherapy, so when Frenchie finds a bottle of Metoclopramide pills among her belongings earlier in the season, a lot fans assumed we were in for some sort of cancer-related reveal.

But Metoclopramide also has a well-known side effect of helping women lactate. Sure, it's not guaranteed to make you lactate, especially not with a woman who hasn't recently had a child, but it is technically possible that taking consistent, extra-strength doses would allow Firecracker to easily breastfeed Homelander at a moment's notice. 

Because Metoclopramide isn't primarily intended for lactation, however, there's a lot of debate over whether it's even worth it for new mothers to try the drug. Most agree it's not worth the trouble, especially when baby formula is available. Potential side effects include fatigue, difficulty in swallowing, heart arrhythmias, and a condition called Tardive Dyskinesia which causes muscle spasms throughout the face and body. None of these quite match the disruptive coughing Firecracker suffers from in the season 4 finale, but we can assume that supes' bodies can sometimes respond to medications differently than regular humans. 

In addition to Frenchie discovering her pills a full two episodes prior to her breastfeeding reveal, Firecracker's gambit was heavily foreshadowed from pretty much the moment she joined the Seven. The backstory of her sleeping with a 15-year-old implied that she might already be familiar with playing a creepy seductive mother role, not to mention that it was clear early on that she would do anything (and we mean anything) to get on Homelander's good side.

Also foreshadowed early on was the inevitable downside of Firecracker's scheme: Homelander is only enraptured with her for a short time before he finds some reason to turn on her. Even if the Metoclopramide hadn't made her cough so much, he likely would have lost interest in her the moment she turned out to be anything other than a perfect, ego-soothing, unflinchingly supportive woman. It's an impossible role to play forever, which is why the best survival strategy around Homelander is to not even try it.

We can see this with how characters like Butcher, Sage, and Stan Edgar have all survived Homelander's wrath far longer than they probably should've, almost entirely because they're not afraid to stand up to him. It's a quality that Homelander finds interesting and admirable, despite his obsessive need to be worshipped. But someone like Firecracker, who presents herself as someone who only exists to serve Homelander, will get no such mercy from the man the moment she steps out of line.

At the 2024 San Diego Comic-Con (via ScreenRant), Valerie Curry explained why her character decided to seduce Homelander with such an, uh, unique method:

"Yeah, she would do anything for Homeland, but also she's great at intuiting what people need and she will give whoever's in the room whatever they need in the moment to keep them on her side. She's a survivor and I think that's the way that she has always survived. [...] And it's funny, Colby [Minifie] and I joked that, I don't know why Ashley didn't think of this first. [...] Why has nobody thought of this? It seems really obvious and it would've been a really easy way to get some control over this. A horrible man."

It's a testament to Firecracker's brand of ambition that she manages to outdo Ashley in this department, even though sucking up to Homelander is basically 99% of Ashley's job at this point. Is this an example of Firecracker being cleverer than Ashley or one of Ashley being wiser? After all, Firecracker's technique may have given her more power over Homelander than Ashley's ever had, but perhaps Ashley's learned a thing or two from what happened to Stillwell and knows it's not worth the trouble. 

As for what Curry thinks should happen with Firecracker in season 5? The actor hasn't minced words, telling ScreenRant:

"I mean, I hope to see her dead. She has it coming from any number of people, but I'm really curious to see how Firecracker behaves from a place of desperation now that she realizes that she has very good reason to be afraid of Homelander. She realizes that she is as much a prisoner as she is empowered by Vought. It's something she can't get out alive now, and she knows that."