Gen V Season-Finale Recap: You Are What You Do

In my recap for last week’s penultimate episode of the season, I wondered where we could go from here. The murder of Dean Shetty left the show without a central villain — and while Victoria Neuman’s theft of the supe-killing virus samples suggested a raising of the stakes, it wasn’t clear exactly how the show would handle it. After all, most of Gen V is constrained to the college campus where it’s set. Larger geopolitical events typically feel more at home in The Boys.

After the events of “Guardians of Godolkin,” it seems like the virus is indeed now part of The Boys’ domain, a shift confirmed by Eric Kripke and Michele Fazekas. That works fine for these two interconnected series, though it does feel a little odd that this finale barely touches on the virus itself. In retrospect, a significant component of that story existed mainly to set up the next story for the parent show, especially Neuman’s introduction.

Instead of dealing with the ramifications of the virus, the finale largely deals with Cate and Sam’s liberation of the test subjects who helped produce that virus. Marie is cautiously onboard, at first, before she realizes what that entails. But it quickly becomes clear how serious this is when Cate and Sam successfully release all the prisoners, encouraging them to punish the people who kept them locked up. In practice, that means basically any non-supes on campus.

All hell breaks loose, and everyone enters damage-control mode. But that means something different to everyone. Ashley, in the middle of a meeting with the board of trustees, is in a panic before anything even goes down; Shetty is missing, and the Neuman town hall was a shitshow, so they need to promote someone to the Seven as a distraction. But once the Woods patients are turned loose and the bodies start piling up, the need for a distraction becomes much more pressing. She suggests that whoever kills the rogue supes will join the Seven, going so far as to call Marie and promise a meeting with her sister in exchange.

I’ve always wondered if one of the main student characters from Gen V could hop over to The Boys as a new member of the Seven, so I was very intrigued by this idea. In a longer episode — once again, this finale doesn’t even hit 40 minutes — it might’ve been really interesting to see the core group competing once again for the top spot, torn between appeasing the administration and exposing it. Instead, Ashley’s offer to Marie ends up not mattering at all because of the sequence of events. While these brisk run times can be a boon for narrative momentum, I do often wish this show would slow down (a wish I’ve also expressed in my recaps for The Boys). This episode barely has any time to address Marie and Jordan’s burgeoning relationship, a fact even the show’s X account acknowledged today.

There’s some disturbing real-world resonance to the imagery of people getting massacred on a college campus, encouraged by the content warning at the top of the episode and Cameron Coleman’s diatribe at the end. Cate and Sam get in on the bloodshed, too, with Cate livestreaming the mind-controlled suicide of Vought’s social-media advisor while Sam goes after Adam Bourke.

Emma does manage to stop Sam before Bourke ends up a bloody mess on the stage but gets emotionally eviscerated in the process: Sam tells her that she’s not a hero after all and that she only cares about people liking her. Maybe that was true at one point, but we’ve really seen Emma grow into a heroic role throughout this season. When she shrinks in response to extreme emotional distress, it shows that she might be able to use these powers without puking, but it also means she still can’t do it without hurting herself in some way. I’m both dreading and looking forward to seeing where that goes.

The confrontation, combined with some hallucinations of his disapproving brother Luke, leads Sam to briefly reconsider what he and Cate are doing here. But rather than reflecting and making some hard decisions, he ultimately just requests that Cate help him out by taking it out of his hands entirely. So she orders him to “feel nothing,” and the massacre continues, only partially affected by the supe-disabling sonic whistle Marie triggers.

Luckily, Andre makes it back to the quad to help Marie and Jordan quell the attacks. Cate turns Maverick against Marie, but she manages to get around his invisibility and knock him out by sensing his blood the same way she did with Neuman. That might be the coolest use of her powers in this battle, but even more satisfying is the moment when she calmly faces the haunting memory of what she did to her parents, harnessing the blood from the many carcasses on the ground to stop a mind-controlled supe from destroying a helicopter full of people.

Meanwhile, Andre tases Sam and tries to get through to Cate, reminding her of their ability to do amazing things when they’re working together. Now, without hearing much from Cate at the end of the episode, it’s hard to know Andre’s words even begin to work on her. Cate’s arc has been one of the most interesting and complex of this first season but also one of the most jumbled. In the last few episodes, in particular, it feels like her allegiances have shifted over and over, and it’s sometimes difficult to know how far gone she is.

When Marie sees Cate reaching out to take Jordan’s hand, seemingly an obvious trick to control them, she reacts immediately, accidentally/not-accidentally blowing Cate’s arm off. Then Homelander shows up, his first appearance on this spinoff, and puts a definitive end to it all, lasering Marie in the chest after calling her an “animal” for attacking her own. (Homelander hates supe-on-supe crime.) When all is said and done, 12 people are dead (though it feels like more as it’s happening), and Vought has somehow pinned the crimes on the four students who tried to stop it. They’re quarantined somewhere now while Cate and Sam, deemed the “new Guardians of Godolkin,” get all the glory.

This remains an imperfect show, at times a little emotionally simplistic and contrived. But while I often wanted Gen V to take its time and develop the characters more, I had a really good time watching this solid debut season. It’s a welcome complement to The Boys, helping fill in more details of the world during the off-season, but what I like most might be the ways in which the two shows differ. Here, you never stop forgetting that these people are barely adults yet. Like most kids, they just want to be heroes. But out there in the real world, especially at a corrupt institution like Godolkin, they’ve begun to realize just how easy it is to be a villain.

Extra Credit

• Cate makes one guard eat his own hands. So that’s a sound I won’t be able to forget anytime soon.

• Also, the medication she was taking actually limited her abilities, so the Cate we see in season two could be even more unstoppable than she already is, even with only one hand. Then again, the show seems a little inconsistent on how much physical contact Cate even needs for her powers to work. Based on her last scene with Shetty and her encounter with the social-media adviser in this episode, it seems like she only needs one moment of direct contact, then she can keep giving orders. But how long can she maintain control without making contact again?

• “British accent” is listed under “additional skills” for Andre, which makes sense considering Chance Perdomo grew up in the U.K.

• Someone suggests Maverick for the Seven since he’s the son of Translucent. I’d forgotten that relation, but apparently Maverick was present at Translucent’s funeral in season two of The Boys.

• It turns out the powers Andre inherited from his father are slowly killing both of them, though that doesn’t affect Polarity’s expectation that he’ll take up the mantle. It should be an interesting story to explore next season!

• Based on Billy Butcher’s mid-credits cameo, he’s the one who listened in on Grace Mallory and Shetty’s conversation in the last episode.