The Boys Season 5 Finally Addresses The Annie Shapeshifter Plot Controversy

Spoilers for "The Boys" Season 5, Episode 4, "King of Hell" follow.

In Season 5 of "The Boys," Annie January/Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is at a low point, feeling like a failure for not saving enough people from Homelander's (Antony Starr) regime. 

Back in the Season 4 finale, she had to abandon her boyfriend Hughie (Jack Quaid) to be captured. Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) clocked in the Season 5 premiere that shame kept Annie from rescuing Hughie earlier. In Episode 3, Annie briefly thought Hughie had died and she emotionally collapsed. After that, the stress finally got to her and she took off. Annie is absent from the Boys' mission in Episode 4, during which Hughie expresses some frustration with her — a frustration that a lot of the audience will share.

Back in "The Boys" Season 4, Annie was abducted and impersonated by a shapeshifter (also Erin Moriarty, who talked with TVLine about that acting experience) who slept with Hughie several times. When Annie escaped, she was furious ... at Hughie, for not noticing the imposter. It's as if she didn't understand her boyfriend had been raped by deception. Critics and fans called it victim-blaming.

In this episode, Hughie opens up to Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) about Annie acting like she was the one most traumatized by his own near-death experience. "I got bad-touched by a shapeshifter last year, and [Annie] still found a way to make it about her," Hughie adds. 

This is the show retroactively addressing its own problematic writing from the Season 4 finale. The writers of "The Boys" must've heard the criticism, given they went out of their way to bring the storyline back up in this specific way. But it also doesn't seem like they want to dwell on it, either.

As I wrote at the time, the problem was how "The Boys" Season 4 finale framed Hughie's sexual assault — by not treating it as sexual assault. Annie acted like Hughie had cheated on her, and the show seemed to agree with her. The writers didn't even seem to consider that Hughie would feel violated and traumatized too. It was all the more disappointing because, in Season 1, the show handled a story about Annie being sexually assaulted with empathy and ultimately empowerment. 

Back to Season 5: During Hughie's conversation with Kimiko, he says "[Annie] can be such a f**king b**ch," shocking even himself. You see, the lab the Boys are investigating holds a supe who can amp up people's aggression. The Boys wind up at each other's throats as their anger escalates to murderous rage. Hughie's venting about Annie was an early symptom of this. I would hope this doesn't mean the writers are suggesting Hughie's issues with Annie are things he should've just sucked up and kept buried, but that is a possible reading. 

Moreover, since this episode is all about the main characters' conflicts with each other exploding, it would've made sense to have Annie and Hughie together; let the tension between them boil and clear the air. Hughie could've even confronted Annie herself about how she reacted to the shapeshifter impersonation, but he doesn't, and I doubt he will with only four episodes of the show left. "The Boys" has a habit of framing Hughie in a bad light to make Annie look better (see also: when Hughie became obsessed with "saving" Annie because he felt emasculated in Season 3), and the final season hasn't exactly rectified it.

"The Boys" is streaming on Prime Video.