Susan Heyward Has One Sister Sage Request For The Boys Season 5

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Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) is the most compelling new supe in "The Boys" season 4. Unlike Stillwell and Stormfront before her, she's the first woman on the show to successfully form a respectful alliance with Homelander — and by "successfully," we just mean she managed to survive the whole season around Homelander without getting lasered to death. That's pretty impressive; sure, Firecracker (Valorie Curry) has also tried her best to do the same in the fourth season's final episodes, but somehow we don't think it's gonna go as well for her. 

What makes Sage's survival of Homelander more impressive is how much she hid from him throughout the season; she knew A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) was the mole in the Seven instantly, but she never snitches him out. Her explanation in the finale is that she saw A-Train as controlled opposition; he was leaking info to the Boys, sure, but all that really did was cause a chain of events that led to Neuman's death and Homelander becoming the unofficial King of the World.

For some fans, that explanation seemed cheap. There are a lot of shows and movies out there that feature a scheming genius character who has everything go exactly to plan, even things they seemingly couldn't have known or predicted; for some viewers, Sage's reasoning behind letting A-Train keep being the mole felt like a clear example of this tiresome trope. But what if there was more to it than that? What if Sage was lying when she explained why she let A-Train live, or was at least hiding the full truth? If a July 2024 interview with Susan Heyward is any indication, this may turn out to be the case. As Heyward explained: 

"There's something about the history of A-Train that I feel I'd love to get deeper into — the way Sage is introduced in the first episode, A-Train has a really strong opinion about her. And she goes through a lot to protect A-Train over the course of the season... I think it could be really interesting to see what that backstory might be, why he had such a strong reaction to the idea of her joining the Seven. Maybe there's a more complicated reason she protected him as long as she did."

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Although there's been little in the show itself to imply that Sage feels any compassion for A-Train, we know Sage loves to play things close to the chest. She gave no indication that she planned for Neuman to die, for instance, even though that now seems to have been a vital part of her plan. If Sage is looking out for A-Train, if there's something deeper going on between them that the audience hasn't been made privy to, it sure would fit her character to not give any signs away. 

The Sage/A-Train relationship is particularly interesting considering how A-Train has recently experienced some major character growth and has ended season 4 as an ally of the Boys. It's debatable whether he's redeemed himself in full, but there's still something heartwarming about watching this man finally find his heart, even after his literal heart was replaced with a racist's back in season 3. If Susan Heyward's drawing connections between Sage and A-Train, maybe this is a sign that Sage isn't as down with destroying the world as she's made it seem.

When Sage was first introduced, a lot of fans theorized that she was playing Homelander, and that she'd be revealed to be secretly helping out the Boys the whole time. They were disappointed when the season 4 finale revealed otherwise, but maybe they were right after all. Maybe Sage truly does want to take down now just Homelander, but the rest of Vought while she's at it; maybe she thinks the only way to do this is to burn the system down first. Perhaps much like A-Train, there's more good in Sage than originally meets the eye.