Who was Quinn in The Boys? The 'King of Hell' horror holds a key to Soldier Boy's past
Episode 4 of The Boys' fifth and final season, "King of Hell", dropped on Prime Video on 22 April 2026 and delivered the show's most nightmarish creation yet: a rotted man fused into the wall of an abandoned Vought facility, tangled in roots and vines, radiating pure hate. His name is Quinn — and he rewrites everything we thought we knew about Soldier Boy.
Who Quinn actually is
Played by Kris Hagen, Quinn was a decorated Second World War soldier — a genuine combat hero — selected for Dr Vought's Compound V trials at Fort Harmony on 14 February 1944. There he met Ben, the future Soldier Boy, and despised him on sight: a rich kid with no combat record whose father had bought his way into the programme.
The experiment split their fates in two:
- Ben — adapted successfully to V-One and became America's first superhero, the celebrated Soldier Boy.
- Quinn — took the same serum and mutated catastrophically, ending up trapped in Fort Harmony for the next eight decades.
By the time Soldier Boy, Homelander, and the Boys converge on the facility hunting the immortality-granting V-One, Quinn has become something barely human — his spores inducing uncontrollable rage in everyone nearby, turning the characters on each other for most of the episode.
How he dies
Frenchie — immune to the spores thanks to a lifetime of chemical abuse — leads Soldier Boy to the source. Seeing Quinn cracks Soldier Boy's armour in a way almost nothing on this show ever has. Goaded into action, he unleashes his nuclear chest blast and incinerates Quinn, ending both the rage outbreak and eighty years of suffering in one flash.
The key to Soldier Boy's past
The episode uses Quinn to rebuild Soldier Boy's origin story: not a self-made war hero, but a privileged fraud who resented the real soldiers around him. Homelander twists the knife with a detail about Ben's brother — a decorated soldier awarded the Silver Star for bravery at Anzio, whose shadow supposedly drove Ben into Vought's trials in the first place.
That line sent fans straight to a theory: could Quinn be that brother?
The show stops short of confirming it, and Quinn's contempt for Ben's privilege cuts against the idea — but the sheer weight of Soldier Boy's grief in that final moment suggests history the episode leaves unspoken.
Handy, then, that Jensen Ackles is headlining Vought Rising, the 1950s-set prequel built to dig into exactly this era.