In the first scene of Gen V, Prime Video’s new spinoff of The Boys, we travel back to eight years ago: the day A-Train was announced as the first Black member of the Seven. To the other Black viewers watching from home, including the idealistic Moreau family, it was a huge moment: a sign that progress was possible, that things really were changing, and that maybe anybody could become a hero if they wanted it bad enough.
It turns out the main purpose of the scene is to establish Marie Moreau’s tragic past: She didn’t realize she had superhuman abilities until she was 12, when she got her period one day and found her menstrual blood floating in front of her face. With years of practice, she’ll learn to control those powers and become a skilled blood bender. But in this first appearance, she’s entirely at mercy to them. When her mother comes to check on her, Marie’s shock, horror, and embarrassment manifest as a jet of blood blasting at the door with the sharpness of a razor blade; it kills her mom, and a second blast kills her father, too.
Besides the information this opening scene conveys, though, it also gives us a pretty good idea of what this spinoff will entail. For one, we’re due for more cameos from the parent series (later proven with a cheeky credits appearance from Colby Minifie as Vought CEO Ashley Barrett). The main cast of Gen V may comprise entirely of new original characters, but the story is firmly rooted in the world of The Boys. While that show focuses on the most famous supes in America — and the relatively anonymous resistance group determined to expose and destroy them — this one gives us a more direct on-the-ground perspective. We see how the rest of the country thinks about supes.
Marie (Jaz Sinclair) is a bit like Marvin’s daughter from the original show: She worships the Seven and desperately wants to be a member herself, totally buying into all of Vought International’s messaging about heroism and prioritizing representation in a “post-racism world.” But if you’ve watched The Boys, you know from the beginning that the popular conception of supes is based on a lie. In this familiar but heightened version of America, superheroes are a tool of capitalism wielded by the nefarious corporation at the top, hired less to save lives than to bring in cash. Thanks to clever PR work, that lie gets swept under the rug. So does the violence that goes into maintaining it every day.
Annie January, a.k.a. Starlight, came to learn these tough truths the first day she was inducted into the Seven, and her character arc in general has emphasized that journey of disillusionment. But Marie, newly accepted to the superhero school Godolkin University after years spent at the Red River Institute (the group home for supes where new VP nominee Victoria Neuman grew up, as we learned in season three of The Boys), is further from the source. Her initial days here are already beginning to clue her into the fact that everything is not as it seems, but she doesn’t know the half of it yet.
What Marie does know is that any place must be better than Red River, where most young supes are destined to get hauled off to the Vought adult facility one day. This place looks downright idyllic in comparison: Sure, there’s a curfew, but it’s a hell of a lot more freedom than she’s used to. It’s basically an R-rated college version of Sky High: lit bongs floating through the air, horny 18-year-olds groping each other Herogasm-style, and an invisible RA patrolling the dorms.
We’re slowly introduced to the other students who will round out our main cast. There’s Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway), Marie’s fame-hungry roommate who regularly shrinks down to half an inch for her popular but low-brow YouTube show, “Fun Sized with Little Cricket.” (She describes it as “PewDiePie without the Nazi stuff.”) They also encounter Luke “Golden Boy” Riordan (Patrick Schwarzenegger), a pyrokinetic who’s ranked first at Godolkin and aspires to be “bigger than Homelander”; his mind-controlling girlfriend Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips); and his charming metal-bender best friend, Andre Anderson (Chance Perdomo).
When Marie visits the Lamplighter School of Crimefighting to inquire about her schedule, she meets Jordan Li (Derek Luh and London Thor), a gender-shifter who seemingly uses he, she, and they pronouns based on whatever form they’re inhabiting. Jordan works as a TA to Richard “Rich Brink” Brinkerhoff (Clancy Brown), a popular professor who also chairs the Crimefighting Department. They’re also ranked number two, though their “confusing” gender identity will likely keep the trustees from letting them reach the top spot.
Despite Marie’s sucking up to Brink, whose superhero self-help book makes him one of her longtime heroes, her lack of name recognition dooms her chances of majoring in crimefighting. For the students here, this is the reality: You either earn your way to chosen-one status and score one of the five coveted city contracts, or you channel your abilities into the performing arts and help Vought make money. Emma, who routinely gets hate mail when she isn’t being fetishized for her tiny size, feels like the clearest example so far of Godolkin’s failed promises.
Gen V is coming at capitalism from many of the same angles as its parent show, but I’m most interested in the satire that this new setting could afford. There’s a heavy emphasis on the “influencer” angle here, which feels fitting as long as the show doesn’t overdo it. And the villains, especially Brink, are like lower-level managers, bureaucrats who work hard to keep an inherently unjust system in place.
After an invitation to spend the night out with the popular squad — Luke, Cate, Andre, and Jordan — Marie does molly and makes a surprising connection with Luke, who lost his brother. He urges her to remember that “being a hero is not what you think.” Sure enough, the night goes horribly wrong when Andre attempts a coin trick to impress a woman at the club and accidentally cuts open an innocent woman’s neck. Luckily, Marie manages to save the day. It’s a pretty cool moment when she telekinetically funnels the blood back into the woman’s body, flashing back to her own trauma and producing a different outcome this time.
We’re led to assume this is the viral moment that will finally grant her admittance into crime fighting. And Brink’s monologue about how heroism requires sacrifice sounds reasonable at first. But then it becomes clear that the lesson is self-serving; Brink is more interested in using Marie to cover up the crimes of the other young hopefuls who were there and could be held responsible (especially after fleeing the scene of the crime). She’s blamed for the throat-slitting and promptly expelled, left to dwell on the worst moment of her life: when her sister walked into that blood-soaked bathroom eight years ago and called her a monster.
But everyone’s fortunes change in the final few minutes of “God U” when Luke confronts Brink — the mentor who has spent years grooming him for the Seven — and gives him the fiery hug of death, cutting short the life of our chief antagonist. Golden Boy himself dies, too, after Andre talks him down from his rage, and Luke decides he’d be better off dead. I appreciate his courtesy in taking to the sky to minimize the damage of his self-explosion, but couldn’t he at least fly somewhere else so his friends don’t get splattered with blood and guts?
It’s hard to know what to think of these final developments yet. I actually felt a little relieved by the death of Golden Boy, just because I’m not super interested in another Homelander clone, but killing off Brink seems premature. Gen V is setting up a lot of mysteries and conspiracies here, and I expect the plot to only ramp up in the episodes to come. But I do hope it remembers to slow down occasionally and remind us what this all means for the characters involved. In the end, this is still a show about young adults, who tend to be just as interested in their own personal lives as they are in saving the world. Sky High, for all its cheesy moments, understood that.
Extra Credit
• Cast-wise, everyone here seems pretty good, though nobody in particular really impressed me besides maybe Chance Perdomo. He was ridiculously charismatic in the one season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina I watched, and he’s playing a similar character here. Also fun to see him reunite with Jaz Sinclair from that show.
• The orientation video for Godolkin is classic The Boys satire, with Dean Indira Shetty (Shelley Conn), promising that the school will “accept you as the unique, culturally rich change agent that you are.”
• And lots of dick humor, which makes sense. I didn’t even notice the visual of Jordan punching Luke in his famous fire dick until my second watch.
• Luke keeps having visions of his dead brother Sam in the woods calling for help, which he later mentions to Marie in a moment of delirium, and we also hear a supe on meth begging not to be sent back to the woods. Something to keep an eye on.
• I like the touch that Jordan switches to girl form for the free drinks.
• The high-def penis in Emma’s graphic sex scene is shocking, for sure, but it might still pale in comparison to Termite’s scene from The Boys. But I’m intrigued by the gnarly bulimia angle of Emma’s shrinking abilities relying on vomiting.
• “Those blood powers of yours, they’re a non-starter in middle America. There’s no four-quadrant appeal there.”
