Some spoilers below for those who haven’t caught up with The Boys via an Amazon Prime subscription, so be warned!
While The Boys Season 4 has obviously offered up its share of shocking moments, from that Super-clone centipede raunchiness to the same clone’s nude fight sequence, it’s also delivering some genuinely emotional arcs with Frenchie and Hughie. (I dunno that I’d want to call Firecracker and Starlight’s story emotional just yet.) For Jack Quaid’s protagonist, it’s all about his dear ol’ dad, whose comatose state has left Hughie reeling. But Simon Pegg appears to be gearing fans up, and used a particularly fitting song to get his tease across.
As viewers are aware, the fourth episode ended on a somewhat mysterious note, as Hughie’s mom appeared to have put his vial of Compound V into Hughie Sr.’s IV tube, even though the decision had just been made to not add further risk to his already doomed existence. (I don’t really understand how Daphne knew he had it, or how she knew exactly what it was.) Something extreme was definitely happening to his body, and if Pegg’s Instagram Stories post can be believed, the character will be back in a big and loud way.
While that still shot obviously doesn’t have any audio backing it up, it’s key to note that Simon Pegg used the Rage Against the Machine song “Wake Up” to punctuate that rather dour shot of the incapacitated Hughie Sr. And not just a couple of lyrics from the verses, or even one of the choruses. Rather, he used the section later in the song when the musicians are jamming out while singer Zack de la Rocha repeatedly screams “Wake up!”
If we’re looking at the song based purely on the surface-level reading of its title, then it’s already fitting, since Hughie and viewers are all on the same page in wanting Pegg’s character to rise up from his coma. That was definitely beginning to happen before the episode cut away to its final Homelander moment, too, but the question here is what version of Hughie Sr. will be waking up?
Because this is The Boys, which isn’t a show where characters actually get to be happy with any kind of frequency, it’s not difficult to think we'll need to read a little deeper into the use of “Wake Up" to try and suss out what's happening.
Rage Against the Machine is one of the most politically motivated bands on the planet, and have never shied away from that approach. But listeners haven’t always been so quick to listen beyond Tom Morello’s crunchy hooks and de la Rocha’s militant-tight vocals, and can completely miss the point of the band’s message. Which, as those who’ve clocked the review-bombing happening with Season 4 might agree, is somewhat similar to The Boys’ own audience.
So in this case, I have to imagine that we should be looking beyond the simplest meaning of “Wake Up” to consider the underlying meaning of opening one’s eyes up to what should already be obvious. Which would probably be applied to Hughie here, since he foolishly thought he could add fire to fire and come away with anything beyond ashes and regrets. If Supes are responsible for everything wrong with his life, as he put it with A-Train, then why would his first instinct to help his father be to utilize the very substance that makes them different? He’s desperate, of course, but he should have known from the jump that it was a dumb idea to bring that world directly into his dad’s bloodstream.
And while I realize that Hughie isn't the person who ultimately injected the Compound V into the IV, he opened the door for it to happen by having it in the first place. He probably also should have kept it in his pants pocket instead of in a jacket.
So for now, I can only hope that Simon Pegg's video was meant to be taken at face value, with "Wake Up" being a completely innocent bit of foreshadowing without any underlying horrors involved. Not a single one.
New episodes of The Boys air Thursdays on Prime Video. While waiting, check out what Eric Kripke told us about Starlight being part of Firecracker’s origin story, and head to our 2024 TV schedule to see what other big shows are on the way.
