Soldier Boy’s Devastating Explosion Power In ‘The Boys’ Wasn’t Always Part Of His Arsenal

When Jensen Ackles stepped into the third season of ‘The Boys’ as the bearded, brooding Soldier Boy, audiences got an immediate taste of something genuinely terrifying. After being inadvertently awakened from his induced coma in a Russian lab, Soldier Boy exited his pod and released a powerful radiation blast from his chest that hit Kimiko Miyashiro and left her powerless and wounded.

That single moment kicked off one of the show’s biggest character mysteries. The question of whether Soldier Boy’s explosion power was always part of his Compound V origin or something stitched onto him later has shaped how fans understand his arc, and the answer completely reframes his place in ‘The Boys’.

From WWII Icon To Compound V Test Subject

Benjamin, the man behind the Soldier Boy mantle, was Vought’s earliest superhuman success story. Born in 1919 to an abusive industrialist father, his official Vought-propagated backstory portrayed him as rising from poverty through hard work and bravery, masking a reality of privilege and trauma that influenced his combative, self-aggrandizing personality.

His original power set was effectively a darker version of Captain America’s. At the time he originally took Compound V, Soldier Boy was one of the most powerful supes alive, and he remained that way for most of his life. V has different effects on different humans, and he was lucky enough to receive super strength and durability. He was also a trained hand-to-hand combatant, which gave him an edge that pure strength alone could not provide.

For decades, Vought rode that propaganda wave. Soldier Boy was the USA first and greatest superhero before Homelander and the former leader of the superhero team Payback. His early days were spent building an all-American mythos through movies, magazine covers, and choreographed military appearances.

The crucial detail in all of this is that his radiation blast was nowhere on the original list. He was not able to do this because of Compound-V, and Vought’s files have no mention of the explosions either. The explosion power simply did not exist when he was at his peak under Vought’s banner.

The Russian Experiments That Turned Him Into A Walking Nuclear Reactor

The transformation started with one of the most cynical betrayals in the show. After Payback handed him over during a Cold War mission, Soldier Boy spent decades inside a Soviet research facility being systematically pulled apart by scientists. Russian scientists spent several decades performing experiments to test his durability, and ultimately failed to harm him.

Their methods went far beyond brute physical testing. Radiation Generation came after being exposed to high levels of radiation while being experimented on by the Russians, and Soldier Boy’s body appears to have started producing radiation on its own, this ended up effectively turning him into a walking nuclear reactor. The torture had a side effect nobody saw coming.

His new physiology essentially rewrote what Compound V originally gave him. As a response to being overly exposed to radiation, Soldier Boy’s body started creating radiation of its own, turning him into a walking nuclear reactor. He came out of that lab with an entirely new ability stacked on top of his old one.

This is also the piece that connects him thematically to other pop culture brainwashed soldiers. The Boys season 3 teases that Soldier Boy’s new power is the result of years of Russian experiments, making him similar to the MCU’s Winter Soldier, although Eric Kripke’s version pushes it into far darker, more nuclear territory than anything Bucky Barnes ever dealt with.

How The Explosion Power Actually Works In ‘The Boys’

The radiation shows up in two distinct ways across the season. The beam is incredibly destructive, powerful enough to completely vaporize a normal human, reduce another Supe to a charred corpse, fling a Supe as durable as Kimiko through a concrete wall, and destroy multi-story buildings with ease. That is the standard chest-mounted blast fans saw at Herogasm.

The bigger version is the full-body detonation. Self-Detonation is an even more powerful discharge that occurs when Soldier Boy releases all restraint and fully detonates. This was first demonstrated after he killed Crimson Countess, overwhelmed by emotional distress, he unleashed a large-scale explosion. He nearly used the same trick to flatten Vought Tower in the season finale.

There is also a uniquely terrifying side effect. Soldier Boy’s ability to produce radioactive beams of energy is powerful enough to burn the entirety of Compound V from the bloodstream of a Supe, effectively killing them or, in the case of Kimiko, Maeve and the attendants of Herogasm who survived, turning them back into normal human beings. This is what makes him singularly dangerous, even compared to Homelander.

The catch is that the power is not fully under his control. The amount of radiation that his body creates can also be affected by his emotional state. When Benjamin’s PTSD is triggered, his emotional state can get out of control, causing him to lose control over his powers. He is a weapon with a permanent hair-trigger.

Why The Comic Book Version Never Had This Ability

Anyone coming to the show from Garth Ennis’s source material had to do a serious mental adjustment. Soldier Boy’s explosive powers in The Boys season 3 are a brand new creation for the show, as this was not part of the character’s abilities in the comics by Garth Ennis. The page version was a very different creature.

In the comics, Soldier Boy was essentially a punchline. In The Boys comic book series created by Garth Ennis and Darick Roberston, Soldier Boy is rarely anything more than a joke. Desperate to join The Seven as a member of the Supe minor league squad Payback, Soldier Boy will do anything the group wants to get a spot on the team, and his abilities did not even come close to Homelander’s tier.

That mismatch is exactly why the showrunners reworked him. Kripke noted that Garth Ennis’s version was “a completely bumbling loser,” but the series required a supe with comparable strength to Homelander for dramatic conflict. The explosion power was the cleanest way to elevate him into legitimate threat territory.

The result is a character with a whole new identity heading into the final stretch. It’s already confirmed that he will play a major role in the show, with The Boys Season 5 releasing on April 8, 2026. Whatever Soldier Boy becomes in the endgame, that radiation blast he picked up in a Russian cell will almost certainly be at the center of it.