Victoria Neuman's Death Is The Boys' Most Disturbing Kill & Changes Everything

Amazon Prime Video's "The Boys" is easily one of the wildest and most graphic superhero shows to ever exist. From the moment A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) turns Hughie Campbell's (Jack Quaid) girlfriend (Jess Salgueiro) into a Jackson Pollock painting in the series premiere, the irreverent superhero show has provided its audience with gory, gruesome, and downright disturbing Supe-assisted deaths, each more unsettling — albeit creative — than the last. Many of the show's worst deaths occur at the hands of the homicidally unhinged Homelander (Antony Starr), who kills so often and effortlessly he thinks nothing of laser-frying his boss and part-time lover Madalyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) while her baby cries in the background or mercilessly deafening Blindspot (Chris Mark) before apparently leaving him to bleed out.

As a closeted Supe, hypocritical anti-Supe activist Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) logs plenty of her own grisly kills using her power of hemokinesis (blood manipulation). This power is on full display in Season 2's "Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker," when Neuman causes the heads of at least 14 people — including Shockwave (Mishka Thébaud) — to violently pop, painting a crowded courtroom with blood, Gallagher-style.

Although Neuman's morality and motivations seem much less uncomplicated than those of Homelander and Stormfront (Aya Cash), she is every bit as evil, which should make her well-earned death feel like a satisfactorily tidy comeuppance. But it's also the worst thing Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) has done to date, and because of the way he kills her, Neuman's death instead serves as a signpost that Butcher has likely sealed his own fate by becoming the very thing he set out to destroy in the first place.

While other Supes on "The Boys" are almost caricatures of evil, Neuman's corruption is more complex. Stormfront is an unapologetic bigot; Homelander is the king of narcissists; and The Deep (Chace Crawford) is a case study in fragile masculinity — but Neuman's dark motivations are far less obvious.

Adopted by Vought CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) as a child, Neuman was raised and groomed to protect the company's interests, something she accomplished through her work as founder of the Federal Bureau of Superhuman Affairs (FBSA). As an anti-Supe crusader and politician, Neuman's contributions in terms of weeding out bad Supes are tangible, even if all the while she is working to influence government policy in support of Edgar's political goals for Vought.

All of this comes to a head after she's outed as a Supe and her double-dealing against Homelander goes awry. Backed into a corner, she works out a deal with the Boys for her child's protection, an agreement that brings her face-to-face with a violent and Compound V-charged Billy Butcher. Unfortunately for Neuman, Butcher is committed to bringing down every last Supe. And unlike Kimiko or Annie/Starlight (Erin Moriarty), Neuman has killed far too many people without impunity. This makes her a marked target for his supercharged wrath — wrath he turns on the politician when he unexpectedly kills her in the safe house.

Even if it's horrifying to see Neuman killed in front of her own child, it's fitting that the woman who graphically killed so many by popping their heads on live television would die in a gratuitously gory way. That's exactly what happens, mere seconds after Neuman shows up at Boys HQ with her daughter Zoe (Olivia Morandin) in tow and agrees to help take down Homelander. Just as she's come to an agreement with Hughie, a Compound V-powered Butcher shows up to unilaterally declare there will be no deals for her, immediately turning on the now-VP-elect.

Extending his tentacles, Butcher twists them around Neuman's body, binding her arms and legs completely and covering her eyes to prevent her from using her blood manipulation abilities. As the others look on in helpless shock, Butcher slams her into a work table. When Zoe tries to stop him with her own Supe abilities, Butcher tosses the young child like a bag of potatoes, luckily knocking her out so she doesn't witness the horror to come.

After threatening Kimiko and Annie into submission, Butcher lifts Neuman above the room before ripping her body in half, raining blood and organs on the others before discarding her body like so much detritus. As her body hits the floor, the Boys' map for the future evaporates, leaving them scrambling and on the run without a plan.

With her many questionable motives, duplicitousness, and ever-growing kill tally, Neuman's death was hardly unexpected. But the fact that she seemed to be at least potentially on the precipice of a redemption arc makes her demise just a little more shocking, particularly given the fact that it was done with her child — the one semi-pure thing about her — present. It's almost like the show's way of reminding us that under the influence of superhuman abilities, everything is corruptible — even family and love. 

More importantly, Neuman's death serves to signify how far gone Butcher truly is in one of the most controversial scenes in "The Boys" Season 4. With every dose of Compound V he takes, his humanity has further waned, transforming him into the very thing he hates the most. He's not just a Supe, but the kind of Supe who would quite literally rip apart a family without a second thought. To wipe out the other corrupt Supes, Butcher has chosen to become one himself. In so doing, Butcher has created a self-fulfilling prophecy: to wipe out every last Supe, he will, himself, have to die. Butcher's dark turn also suggests that Butcher's death in the series will mirror the ending of the comic series, which sees him stabbed to death by one of the people he's closest to — Hughie.