It is easy to roll your eyes at the idea of Amazon trying to form the “VCU,” the Vought Cinematic Universe spawned out of its hit, The Boys, now with one spin-off, Gen V, and potentially others to come.
Fortunately for them, and all of us, Gen V is not a bad cash-in on the original. In fact, judging by these early episodes, it may actually be even more compelling than The Boys itself. At least that’s how I felt at the end of this three episode intro.
Gen V follows a group of college students attending “God U,” a place to train superheroes into either potential Seven contenders, or to instead play for the cameras in Vought’s media arm. As we learned from The Boys itself, these kids all have parents who injected them with Gen V as kids to give them powers, and as such, yes, plenty of parental issues abound, and it’s practically the main focus of the series.
While the series is just as bloody and raunchy as The Boys, if not more so, it also has what I would consider more of a heart at its core, as the central group of students are all “good guys” rather than The Boys focusing so heavily on its villains, namely, of course, Homelander.
Jaz Sinclair is Marie, the lead, who has blood powers that manifested out of nowhere during puberty. Patrick Schwarzenegger (yes, that one) is Golden Boy, top ranked collegiate hero sailing toward one of The Seven’s empty spots with his fiery powers. We have metal-bending, mind-control, shrinking (which produces one of the most memorable superhero sex scenes since well, the last shrinking superhero sex thing in The Boys) and a host of new powers we haven’t seen in the series yet.
These are all really good characters, however, and while you would imagine this might descend into good versus evil Hogwarts house type stuff, soon you realize that the students have to band together to push back against what’s really going on at the college, sinister things happening in a lab underground where…okay we sort of already did something like this in The Boys.
I will say right now, what the show lacks is a clear villain, other than Vought and “adults” as a whole. The two lead options are…not present for long, and now by episode three I’m not sure who exactly the kids are fighting back against other than namely guards with power-dampening weapons and the dean who’s clearly in on it. Not to say you need Homelander 2, necessarily, but I mean, you need some sort of cohesive villain here, and the show doesn’t have it yet. At least not this early.
However, I think the core group of students make up for that, and produce more compelling heroes. The show deals with guilt, eating disorders and even nonbinary issues in a way that doesn’t feel preachy, but slots into the context of the overall series expertly.
It’s a little hard to get deeper into it without spoilers, but I think you’ll be hooked by the end of the first episode, and you’ll have two more to go after that in this initial launch period. It has lost none of the gore and grossness of The Boys but it feels like it’s added something that was missing from the main series.
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