Surprise! Or maybe not surprise, because as widely speculated — and spoilers past this point — Jensen Ackles returns as Soldier Boy in the closing minutes of The Boys Season 4. More specifically, his brief appearance is saved as the stinger for The Boys Season 4 finale end credits scene.
Unlike your run-of-the-mill Marvel end credits scenes, or even the post-credits scene on the Gen V Season 1 finale, The Boys doesn’t make you wait long. After the episode, titled “Season Four Finale” (previously titled “Assassination Run”) ends, we get a few brief credits… And then flash to what seems to be an underground chamber.
There, Senator Calhoun (David Andrews), who has just been made President of the United States after President-elect Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver) is accused of murdering Vice President-elect Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), leads in Homelander (Antony Starr) to show him was the chamber holds.
“How long have you known?” asks Homelander, to which the nervous Calhoun answers, “Only since this morning’s classified briefing. You were my first call. Hand to god.”
They head to the center of the room, where a glass and metal tube holds an unconscious person. Homelander looks at him, his expression struggling between a million different emotions.
“You gotta be f**king kidding me,” Homelander says. “This whole time.”
Then the camera pans to reveal that the body is none other than Soldier Boy. On the soundtrack, what is unmistakably an atonal, broken riff on the Captain America march plays.
The Boys Season 4 Finale Post Credits Scene, Explained
This season of The Boys has referenced Soldier Boy a few times, mostly in the form of a glimpse of his picture on the cover of Vought Men’s Magazine, or as a standee in an abandoned video store. However, while visiting TruthCon back in “Life Among The Septics,” we got the rare conspiracy theory that’s true: a booth devoted to the idea that the CIA has Soldier Boy.
And indeed, they do! At the end of Season 3, we discovered that Soldier Boy is Homelander’s biological father, thanks to a, er, donation of some genetic material made by the veteran Supe. Soldier Boy was captured by the Russians and put into hibernation for years while they experimented on him, adding a power beyond his strength and speed to make him slowly build up to destructive explosions.
In The Boys Season 3 finale, Homelander and The Boys teamed up to take him down, with Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) seemingly sacrificing herself to get Soldier Boy away from Vought Tower before he exploded. She faked her own death, Grace Mallory (Laila Robins) put Soldier Boy into hibernation, and that was the end of that. Until now.
As a side note, Jensen Ackles reprised his role on Gen V, but in that case, he was in the mind of Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) when the rest of the gang went inside her brain to wake her up from a coma.
So what does this mean for Soldier Boy’s future? Homelander doesn’t really love his “dad” so one would think he might just kill him and be done with it. But more likely we’ll either see Soldier Boy pop up for real on Gen V Season 2, which is currently in production… Or in The Boys Season 5. And fingers crossed, whenever that happens, we do get Ackles and Jared Padalecki with a Supernatural reunion. You know they want to do it — and the fans want it, too.
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