In the original comics, which were created by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson, Jamie is a hamster without superpowers. His origins are a lot gnarlier than the version on the show: Jamie lived inside the anal cavity of a guy named Blarney Cock, a racist supe with a penchant for stealing painkillers from children’s hospitals. After Blarney’s death, Jamie pops his head out of the supe’s butt and Hughie takes him home as a pet.

“He’s actually fairly present in the books,” Kripke says. “He’s a solid supporting character. So when we were breaking the story in the Russian lab [for the show] and there’s a lot of creepy Compound V testing on Soldier Boy, [we thought,] what other testing would they have been doing?” He adds, “It started to make sense that there would be hamsters in there, and we all just at once said, ‘Oh my God! It could be Jamie. We can finally bring in Jamie!'”

Jamie’s big moment in the show comes after the Boys are attacked in the Russian lab. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) watches in horror as the hamster, now out of its cage, shoots himself into the eyeball of an assailant and wriggles its way into his head to munch on his brains.”

Fukuhara says the hamster “was a great actor.”

“Jamie’s a homie!” the actress exclaims. “He saves Frenchie. I don’t know where he goes after that, but I’d like to think maybe he could be a new addition for the Boys. Who knows?”

Now that Kripke has introduced Jamie, he desperately wants to bring the critter back in future seasons. “I have no idea how to get him back into the story, but I do not want this to be the last of Jamie,” he says. “Like, there’s this superpowered, bloodthirsty hamster loose somewhere in Russia! I’m dying to figure out how to get him back in this story. Gotta do it.”