The fourth season finale of The Boys left most characters’ fates in question, as a penultimate season should do. This included Hughie, who had already been through too much, and Kimiko, who had only begun to know some happiness with Frenchie, and then there would be Ashley. The Vought International CEO had overheard Deep discussing that she knew too much and needed to be taken out, and that caused Ashley’s swift decision to mainline Compound V.
The injection led her to instantly fall to the ground in pain with her wig falling off, too. Remember the previous revelation that she had been tearing her hair out over the stress of working with Homelander?
In the fourth season finale, Ashley’s scalp also began to pulsate, and that’s all that this season wrote for her. If she lives, what would her power be? Colby Minifie spoke with Variety to reveal how, if Eric Kripke uses any of her ideas, the results will be “humiliating”:
“As we’ve seen, when V first enters your body, the historic visual on the show is that it enters your bloodstream and things start happening in your blood, and it takes over your body. So what we’re hinting at is something’s going to happen! We don’t know if she survives or dies, but I have pitched some things of what her superpower could be — they’re all humiliating. I don’t know what they’re gonna do, or how they’ll see that to fruition. But it will be something crazy.”
Since we don’t have a concrete answer from Minifie (and even if she knew, she surely couldn’t discuss the power at this stage), Reddit has been tossing possibilities around about her new incarnation, and the two most popular theories involve a Hulk-like figure or a character who would have — wait for it — powerful hair. This could also involve a Medusa-like situation used for thrashing enemies with snakes or turning them into stone, but hair-associated options seem appropriate for Ashley. As one Redditor described the situation, “[G]etting her hair back and it becoming her power is almost like a symbolic reclamation of this fear and anxiety.”
Snake-filled Medusa hair seems suitably “humiliating,” too.
Not only that, but super-hair would be a suitable weapon for attacking Antony Starr’s character. Squeeze Homelander to death or turn him into a statue, please. We will eventually learn more, but not possibly for the two years that it will take for The Boys‘ fifth and final season to arrive. At that rate, the second Gen V season will have come and gone, and the Vought Rising show might have already begun. Let’s hope.