The grossest spectacles on The Boys are typically hard to forget, but one of the show’s most disgusting moments is hidden away in a seemingly innocuous season 1 subway scene. Amazon’s adaptation of the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson has gleefully embraced lewd debauchery and graphic tomfoolery over its first three seasons. The Boys has continued to up the ante, culminating in season 3’s “Herogasm” episode that featured a content warning before diving headfirst into a massively depraved supe party.
Even though The Boys season 3 outdid the previous two seasons in sheer grossness, that does not mean seasons 1 and 2 were easy on the palate. Mother’s Milk and Homelander both had some vastly different experiences with bodily fluids, and Hughie got covered in guts seemingly every other episode. The Boys is already infamous for its many gross moments, but a cast interview retroactively makes a season 1 scene even grosser.
Kimiko's Barefoot Subway Scenes Were Real In The Boys Season 1
In The Boys season 1, episode 4, “The Female of the Species,” Karen Fukuhara's Kimiko runs through a subway station and its tunnels with the titular Boys and A-Train in pursuit. According to Mother’s Milk actor Laz Alonso (via GQ), the scene was shot overnight "on abandoned tracks two stories under the regular tracks." That may not sound too bad, but Fukuhara quickly adds "there were mice and rats, and then I had to be barefoot." While Fukuhara was given prosthetic feet to use in-character, they never worked, so she really had to run barefoot through gross, rodent-infested subway tunnels.
When the episode streamed in 2019, the subway scene was not particularly notable. It was also overshadowed by the notorious Homelander season 1 plane scene which occurred in the same episode. However, the interview finally reveals the impressive feat Karen Fukuhara pulled off in "The Female of the Species." Now, it is clear the subway scene was actually one of the grossest, dirtiest moments to be shown on The Boys.
The Boys Just Keeps Getting Grosser (& That's A Good Thing)
While it is expected that The Boys continues to get grosser each season, it’s both surprising and amusingly on-brand for the show to also get grosser in retrospect. If time is a flat circle, as an HBO detective once joylessly intoned, then grossness is a flat circle on The Boys - and that is a very good thing indeed. The Boys is an incredibly smart, subversive, snarky series, but there have been many series that do those things well.
However, it is only The Boy season 3 that tasked its crew to build a massive replica of a male urethra and then used it for the season debut. There is one area where The Boys is still a leg up on other series, and that is the ability to be gross, graphic, and often both at the same time. Clearly, The Boys has embraced one of its most scandalous calling cards. The only question that remains is what The Boys will do next.