Review: The Boys, "Dirty Business" | Season 4, Episode 6
To quote Radiohead, this isn't happening
Hi-fives all around to those who watched all of the scenes with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Joe Kessler this season and thought to themselves, “Yeah, that guy isn’t actually there.” I watched this week’s episode with someone who had not remotely considered the possibility that Kessler was a figment of Butcher’s imagination, and they uttered an audible gasp when Kessler interrupted Butcher’s vision of his wife with a vituperative, “Shut your fucking cake-hole, bitch.” (Honestly, I’m a little jealous. That reveal apparently played like gangbusters.)
Yes, The Boys has been Fight Club-ing us all season with Butcher’s old war buddy, who was left to die by our protagonist way back in the day, and we even get the full montage of sequences in reality—sans Kessler—to drive home the point that Butcher has been talking to himself from the start. What makes it work—beyond the stunt of it all—is how the show sells the idea that Kessler is somehow more a part of Butcher than…