The Secret Clue You Missed In The First Episode Of The Boys

The second season of Amazon's The Boys didn't start well for our heroes: They're enemies of the state, they can't see their families, and they're hiding underneath a shop while their boss Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) is nowhere to be found.

The only hope in the darkness was in discovering a connection between Vought and the "super terrorists" that Vought claims must be stopped at all costs. Vought wants to use the existence of super terrorists to strong-arm the American government into giving The Seven unilateral control over how super terrorists are handled. The Boys' best hope lays in proving that Vought is behind the existence of those super terrorists in the first place.

Armed with all the information they've got, Hughie (Jack Quaid) and company reach out to CIA Dept. Director Susan Rayner (Jennifer Esposito). Rayner is about to put all the pieces together when, boom — her head explodes. It takes a whole season to find out who is responsible for the head exploding but the show secretly told us the answer in the very next scene.

We find out for certain in the season finale "What We Know" that Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) has secret superpowers, and that she is behind the head explosions. In the final minutes of the season, Neuman is ironing out an agreement with the head of the Church of the Collective Alastair Adana (Goran Visnjic) for the church to receive tax-exempt status when Adana's head suddenly pops like a balloon. The show cuts to reveal the milky white eyes of Neuman staring at Adana's office from afar.

The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke spoke with Variety about the first of several literal mind-blowing scenes with Variety, and revealed that the truth behind the secret was there almost immediately from the jump. "We worked really hard on that character to really feel like she's going to be an ally, but from the beginning we knew that she was the head-popper," said Kripke. "Actually, if you watch episode one, [the Boys are] in the van after Raynor's head pops, and they're saying, 'Who could do this?' and we cut to Victoria Neuman. So we've been dropping in clues from the beginning that it's her."

We don't know yet what Neuman's long game is going into season 3, but Kripke does. "There are some reveals and twists and turns, and similarly to what we've done with a lot of other characters from the books," says Kripke. "Vic Neuman was a man in the books and he ends up getting deeper and deeper into politics as the comics go on. It's the frightening notion that there might be a supe heading deep into American politics, which is screwed up enough already. So we start to play Victoria in that way in Season 3."