Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a comic book legend, best known for playing John Winchester in Supernatural, and now he’s the latest new character on Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys – but is he even real or just Billy Butcher's hallucination?
While Joe Kessler ostensibly fills in the role of Butcher's old agency pal who has resurfaced to wrangle our broken hero back from the edge, a recent fan theory about him could change the way we see him and his role in The Boys season 4.
Who Is Joe Kessler Really?
Kessler shows up in season 4 episode 1 after Butcher is taken out of the leadership role for The Boys. While nobody trusts Butcher with the job anymore, Kessler appears with some much-needed support and, more importantly, a plan: he wants Butcher to get back on Ryan’s good side so they can train the boy to be a weapon against Homelander.
While Butcher is very much against the second half of the plan, he decides to try and get close to the boy anyway, hoping to protect him from Homelander's evil influence.
The show doesn’t go too deep into specifics with Kessler’s backstory, but it’s hinted that he and Butcher became friends during the War on Terror, and now he works as a CIA case officer… or does he?
Fans think Kessler is the same character as the comics’ Howard “Monkey” Kessler, who acts as one of Butcher’s informants in the CIA. In the comics, he doesn’t have much plot relevance besides the fact that he provides Butcher with info and he works for an intelligence agency.
Showrunner Eric Kripke, however, has insisted that series Kessler will be a mostly original character. “It’s more of a nod and feeling like we’re still in love with the comics,” he said. “Since he was a CIA guy, I said, well, we should call them Kessler and just do our version of Kessler… we’re always trying to nod that we’re paying attention.”
Could Joe Kessler Be Billy Butcher's Hallucination?
Kessler has only shown up for a few episodes, but fans immediately started speculating something could be off: what if he's just a figment of Butcher’s imagination?
The show already has Butcher talking to his dead ex-wife Becca, who has been pushing him to get Ryan back from Homelander; and while this is a useful narrative device to visualize Butcher’s guilt, it could be the a set up to reveal that Butcher has also been seeing other things that aren’t there.
Theorizing that Kessler could be a hallucination, The Boys fans pointed out that Butcher seems to be the only one who interacts with Kessler on the show, and there’s nothing Kessler has done that affected change on any of The Boys' plans independent of Butcher. What’s more, fans have pointed out that in the scene where Butcher buys Kessler a cup of coffee, the man doesn’t touch it.
With Butcher now revealed to have a worm crawling around in his head thanks to the Temp V, it’s possible that a hallucination of Kessler is just another side effect of it.
Other fans have even compared Butcher’s hallucinations—Kessler and Becca—to a devil and angel duo on his shoulder. Becca wants him to save Ryan for her; and Kessler wants Butcher to save Ryan for his own nefarious purposes.
Then again, with the "Kessler isn’t real" clues becoming increasingly obvious, it’s possible that the showrunners want to pull the rug from underneath the audience; but this might only apply if you haven't seen Fight Club.
For now, we've got three episodes left of The Boys season 4, and that's a lot of time for the Kessler hallucination theory to be confirmed – or not.
While some have been hoping that this season finally kills HL, it's likely the series will gear up for one final showdown, with Season 5 marking the end of the show.
Catch new episodes of The Boys now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.