Jack Quaid reveals how The Boys influenced his reaction to criticism of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Well-known for parodying real-world issues and the comic book genre, The Boys centers on a world where superhumans have been commercialized to the public as heroes, with their darker natures carefully concealed by the corrupt corporate overlords at Vought International. Featuring graphic violence and explicit nudity on a near episodic basis, showrunner Eric Kripke has continued to push the boundaries of the series' outrageousness in season 3, culminating in the introduction of the infamous “Herogasm” episode. Based on a similarly named event in the comic books by Garth Ennis, the episode depicts an annually held Supe orgy.
Surprisingly, one of Quaid's other projects, Star Trek: Lower Decks, featured an episode last year that received attention for a similar reason. The season 2 episode, titled “I, Excretus," saw the crew of the Cerritos tested inside a series of holographic simulations. Transported back to an iteration of the ship infected by the psi 2000 virus, dramatically lowering the inhibitions of all crew members, officer Beckett Mariner is confronted by the sight of her many naked colleagues engaged in an apparent orgy. Spotted in a particularly compromising position during the scene was Quaid’s character Brad Boimler, whom he has voiced in Lower Decks since 2020.
Now, during a conversation on the Jessie Gender YouTube channel (via CinemaBlend), Quaid reveals that his frequent involvement in outrageous scenes in The Boys left him bemused by audience criticism of the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode. Check out his full comments below:
That was an interesting time in my life because that episode came out and then it was kind of like, I don’t know, I’m on The Boys, so it’s like there's an orgy in every episode, seemingly, so orgies don’t phase me anymore. So that episode came out, and it was almost like a week until the quote-unquote controversy kicked in, and I don’t know, it’s like whatever. It seemed to all of a sudden be very like, ‘Oh, this is offending me,’ when I was like, ‘Whatever.’ But then again, I come from being on The Boys, so it’s very normal to me.
The episode with the orgy in it came out I think pretty close to when I was shooting the 'Herogasm' episode of The Boys, so I think it further added to that idea of, ‘What? No big deal. What’s the big deal? I’m seeing crazier stuff every day in my real life.’
With The Boys so regularly steeped in obscenely graphic content and parody for the last three years, it is perhaps easy to understand how Quaid could find the criticism of Lower Decks’ comparably mild (and animated) season 2 episode perplexing. As Quaid talks about elsewhere in the interview, Star Trek has several classic episodes that are similarly raunchy, so it's very much within the tone of the franchise. It could be that seeing such an episode in animated form surprised viewers, though Lower Decks has made no secret of the fact it's geared toward adults.
While another so-called orgy scene may be unlikely in the upcoming Star Trek: Lower Decks season 3, it is almost comically inevitable that The Boys season 4 will again feature sexually explicit content. With production on the new season set to begin shortly, it could become clear soon what stories await Quaid's character.
Source: Jessie Gender (via CinemaBlend)