You can always count on The Boys to make a splash—or in some cases a squish, as it were. Amazon’s superhero show has become known for its novel takes on blood and gore, whether it’s exploring what it would mean to have a superfast hero run literally through someone, or the physics of driving a speedboat full blast through a beached sperm whale.

True to form, its third-season premiere, “Payback,” came through with one of the show’s most punchy scenes yet. (There are spoilers for the episode after this sentence. You’ve been warned.) In it, a previously unknown B-level superhero named Termite (Brett Geddes) gets amorous with a partner at a party. As things begin to heat up, Termite shrinks down, Ant-Man-style, in order to climb inside his partner’s urethra to give him extra-intense pleasure. (Apparently, Termite’s prostate massages are really next level.) Unfortunately, things don’t go exactly to plan. Termite sneezes and reverts to his original size, tearing his partner in half from the inside and leaving the mini-hero shellshocked just as he’s about to go up against The Boys’ Frenchie (Tomer Capone), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and Butcher (Karl Urban).

It’s a gasp- and gag-worthy scene that got viewers talking, and one that we wanted to know more about. WIRED talked to showrunner Eric Kripke about penile physics, “Thanus,” and why he says he works in a “dream factory.”

WIRED: Where did the idea for the Termite scene come from, and how did it come to life, so to speak?

Eric Kripke: The episode’s writer, Craig Rosenberg, is to blame. He also brought you [Season 2’s big dead] whale, as well as the dolphin [flying through the] windshield. So really, Craig can claim a lot of responsibility or blame for the greatest hits of horror on our show.

It evolves in the writers’ room, really. It’s weird to say it comes out of an organic, fairly logical process, but it does. It started with the big idea that we needed Frenchie and Kimiko to fight superheroes, so what superheroes should they fight? And what are the big superheroes we haven’t done yet on the show?

Someone said Ant-Man, and then someone else said, “Oh, my God, there’s that meme going around about ‘Why didn’t Ant-Man just crawl up Thanos’ butt and blow him up?’” So we thought, let’s give the audience that. Because Marvel can’t, but we can.

And then someone else raised their hand and said, “We already did an exploding butt in Season 1, and we would be repeating ourselves because of Translucent.” So once you take butts off the table, there are truly only so many orifices that work—I’d argue two, and the mouth is boring. That’s how you end up with the urethra.

How did that go over with the bigwigs?

Amazon was great about it. There wasn’t a lot of pushback. They know who we are at this point and encourage it.

How did you, um, create that scene?

My favorite fact about shooting it is that, even though it was sweetened with VFX, it actually is a practical giant penis. We built that sucker. It’s 11 feet high and 20 feet long, and that’s really the urethra tunnel. We built all of it at great expense, and the fact that we did is yet another reason I love my job.

You built the big dead whale in Season 2, I know, so I’m wondering what lessons you learned from working with that sort of practical set.

It’s such a new adventure every time, though the same people who built the whale built the penis. I don’t know if there was any particular lesson that transferred from one to the other, outside of this insane confidence that we could pull it off. Maybe that’s the thing: With enough smarts and focus, we could achieve any bit of madness. And that’s what we did.

When the audience first sees the penis, we’re really getting a headlong view, as it were. How much of that is CGI, and how much is practical?

It’s probably 50/50. It’s really there, and you really see the real one when Termite jumps into it and starts squeezing his way through the eye of the needle. That’s really happening, and he’s really doing that in the room.

VFX did a lot of ... funnily enough, excuse the terminology, but “skinning” is what it’s called, which is putting on a layer of more realistic pores and glistening the skin because of the oils in our skin. It’s all of those tiny details that make it come to life as a real penis, with blood vessels and all the little bits. They’re moving, too, because it’s an organic thing.

That’s just something that you can’t do practically. So we do more of the giant shape of it and the look of it, and VFX adds on this layer that makes it feel more like real skin.

Did you guys consult a doctor to find out if Termite’s actions really would feel good? What’s the extent of your research here?

Stephan Fleet, who is our visual effects coordinator, did an incredible amount of research. He kept saying to the various visual effects houses, “It’s not like you can’t find an image online.” Click online, and there’s 2 billion examples of a penis and every possible close-up that you can use for reference.

There was a lot of conversation about how, because the penis is laying on the table, if you’re being anatomically correct, the hole into the urethra is much higher than what we’re saying it is. It would be way higher than an actor could jump up into, where it naturally goes. We had to debate, like, “does he climb it? What does he do?” Finally, I just said, as an executive order, lower the hole. The audience won’t care. Lower it just enough that he can jump up and grab it. So, already from the beginning, we were taking certain liberties with anatomical accuracy.

The ends justify the means.

We’re in the dream factory, and it’s all about illusion.

Speaking of that, does your team have a tried and true formula for guts? How did you decide what looked real inside the walls of the urethra?

A lot of the gore is CG. In that particular case, for instance, the torso landing on the bed and all the bile and goo that’s all over the bed with the intestines, that’s almost entirely CG.

Why does Termite get bigger when he sneezes? What’s the rationale?

He just can’t control it. He sneezed and he had an involuntary reaction. He doesn’t choose to blow up at that particular moment. He doesn’t want to, but he just couldn’t help it because he sneezed.

That was really inspired by Annie Hall, where the Woody Allen character sneezes in front of the big pile of cocaine and it all goes everywhere. It’s just the notion that an involuntary reaction causes this [oversized] response.

Do you try to one-up yourself from season to season, or is that a trap? If this is just Season 3, where will you have to go in Season 7, for instance?

There’s for sure a trap in it, so we try to not do it. We literally never have the conversation of, “Well, we did this, so we have to go bigger.” Literally never.

The only thing we do in terms of evolving between the seasons is to feel a pressure and obligation to get deeper into the characters. What’s a new facet or a deeper facet or a more hidden and guarded facet of that character we haven’t seen yet? We’re peeling the onions back on these characters, and it’s a different level each season. How do we make sure the new level we’re exploring is deeper than the other ones, not parallel, not more surface, but more core to who they are as a person and more painful for them to face and deal with. That’s really challenging because each season you’ve got to get more thoughtful about their psychology.

All the other madness in the show usually comes from what a particular character is going through, and what the craziest way is to dramatize that particular character moment. I think it’s really necessary to look at the show that way because it’s really important that it be outrageous but not exploitative, and shocking but not gratuitous. The writers spend a lot of time agonizing over that line. Usually, the safest way to walk on the right side of it is to stay grounded in character, where there’s something more going on than just the madness here.

I was going to say, without giving anything away, the “Herogasm” episode is shocking, but it is exactly what you say. It’s all based in characters and development, or in the Boys’ world as a whole.

I’m in television, so I’m in the character business. It’s my job to make you love and be addicted to my characters, and that’s it. If I can do that, my show will work, and if I can’t do that, my show won’t. Every other thing is frosting, or something that we can use in marketing, because you have to be noisy and have to cut through all the clutter created by the other thousands of shows out there. Our shocking moments are very good at that, but in truth, they’re a Trojan horse. It’s a way to get people to talk. It’s a way to get attention ... and it’s noisy! But really, what the show is really about is these characters, and it’s about this satire of the current state of the country that we find ourselves in.

Have there been any technological developments since you started doing the show that now you think, “Wow, this thing I always wanted to do, I can do now,” or “This looks so much better than it used to during Season 1?”

Yeah, several. Visual effects, like everything in new media, is such a fast-moving technology that the stuff we were doing in 2019 is really almost, in some ways, rudimentary compared to what we can pull off now.

The blood is a really good example, actually. We had a hard time even three years ago making the liquidity of it feel right, and now it’s no problem. The computer programs that they’re using for liquids are getting way better.

So are digital doubles, where you have characters fly around who aren’t really there. They’re completely computer-generated, so they had to be pretty far back in Season 1 for that to be credible, but every season, you can get a little closer to where they are.

It’s fun to think about how that liquidity you’re using for blood probably came from some development someone made for, I don’t know, Raya and the Last Dragon.

It’s totally ridiculous, right? It’s like, they use an algorithm that was created for Soul, and from that we’re able to really amp up our exploding evisceration.