A Messy Sophomore Year

As a series runs on it tends to run out of steam. This is a concept we’ve discussed before, and it’s one that should be familiar to anyone that’s watched any long-running television series, read a long-running novel series, kept up with a long-running comic series, or the like. The instinct to keep the story going long past its sell-by date simply because it’s popular and there’s money to be made can strongly outweigh ending the story at the right time or keeping the series from getting any kind of bloat. If you have a plan for a show you should stick to it, not stretch it out or force a bunch of side content into the narrative.

Gen V is, for all intents and purposes at this point, an extension of the main story of The Boys. When the first season of Gen V came out it was deemed online as “The Boys Season 3.5” and that was, in some ways, pretty apt. Characters from the main series wandered into the spinoff once in a while, and parts of the arc of Gen V were engineered to show how the world of The Boys was growing and evolving as the spin-off played out. This wasn’t just a show set in the same world exploring the lives of other characters. This was a series that would have implications on the main plot of the franchise.

It’s an interesting idea, something that makes the various The Boys shows (although not: The Boys Presents Diabolical) feel more akin to the MCU than just a collection of television shows. If you want the full story of the universe you can’t just watch one show or the other (just like you couldn’t watch one Marvel movie on its own). No, you need to watch it all. And Gen V: Season 2 continues that. It starts with the main character Marie Moreau, meeting with Starlight (the superheroine on the run from the bad guys in The Boys), encouraging her to become part of the resistance. The show then goes on and on about how Marie will become stronger than Homelander. This season is all about bringing The Boys to a close… which also makes it feel like less of its own thing and just a pale imitation of the main series. Perhaps it was better when these things felt a little more sectioned off…

It’s been a few months since the incident on Godolkin campus, where Marie (Jaz Sinclair) and her friends tried to stop bad supes from killing humans, only for Homelander to step in and end it, blaming Marie and her friends for being race traitors and having them locked up in a superhero prison. Somehow, off screen, Marie escaped the prison, leaving her friends behind. They tried to escape on their own, but failed, and in the process one of their number, Andre, lost his life, his brain exploding from the use of his magnetic powers.

But then, for seemingly no real reason, Marie’s friends – Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway) and Jordan Li (London Thor and Derek Luh) – are released from prison and deposited back at God U. There’s a new Dean of Students, Cipher (Hamish Linklater), and all is seemingly forgiven. Emma and Jordan, now freed, track Marie down and the three decide that Marie should come back to school so that Marie can be safe and protected and not have to be on the run. But this also lets Marie follow the orders she got from Starlight: look into what is going on at God U and look for something called “Project Odessa”. All of this ties into Cipher, and just might explain why the new Dean is at the school. And if so, it could spell big things for Marie, her powers, and the fate of the world.

If I’m being totally honest, this second season is a complete mess. A big part of the problem is that events occur in the season simply because the show demands it and not because it makes sense or is organic to the story. You can tell the writers liked the big cliffhanger of season one, putting our heroes in prison so that we’d sit on the edge of our seats trying to figure out how they’d get out of it. But then the show resolves it by not resolving it at all. Marie escapes off screen and has been running for months. Her friends get released because the Dean wants it for some reason. A major plotline that could have led to huge character growth – the characters coming together, figuring out how to escape, and then finding their path for themselves – is stripped from them before the season even gets going.

I’ve seen online people comment that a large reason this happens is because original actor Chance Perdomo, who played Andre Anderson, died between seasons, while the second season was just gearing up. This forced the creative team to throw out and rewrite a bunch of scripts because they were attached to the actor and didn’t want to recast him, instead killing his character off out of respect. I can appreciate the sentiment, but if that’s why the start of this season feels uneven (and, note, this is just speculation) then maybe they should have recast instead. What we got instead certainly didn’t work because it rushed past major points that would have helped the characters grow and evolve.

Cipher is introduced as a mysterious new Dean who has big plans for Marie. He wants her at God U, which is why, we assume, he let her friends out of prison so they could track her down and… warn her not to go back. But she has orders from Starlight that Cipher couldn’t possibly know about, so she decides to go back to the school, which is exactly what Cipher wanted. Except, there’s no way this plan should play out the way it did in a sane world because the pieces just don’t fit. It only strings together because the writers have meta knowledge about the whole story and decide to force these characters to follow moves that feel far outside their characters. It’s beats for the sake of a preordained story, not moments that actually suit the characters and their journey. And this happens time and again.

This is a problem the whole series, especially in the case of Marie. She wildly swings back and forth between a girl who is just trying to save her friends and one that will do anything to fight back. Is she a girl or a prop? A hero or a villain? Just a student trying to hide from the world or the next Homelander. It depends on the scene and what the writers want, but it never feels like Marie has any control over her own life or is doing things because it makes sense for Marie. She is just a piece on the game board moved around to do things as required, but it leaves her character flailing, losing all sense of who she was and why we liked her.

Really, this is the case for every character on the show, making stupid decisions and then watching the series let them off the hook more often than not despite how consequences are supposed to happen. None of them feel as fully realized or nuanced as they did in season one, all of them losing the innate qualities we appreciated. They aren’t kids at school this time around, a collection of characters with flaws and needs just trying to get by. Now they’re all pieces on a chess board, and any sense of them as characters working to learn and grow and evolve is lost. They don’t get to have their own lives because they all have to work in service of Marie’s story and how she’s going to, somehow, eventually defeat Homelander.

Even Cipher, who is the one really interesting character on the series, performed with aplomb by Hamish Linklater, goes on and on about how Marie is going to be the next Homelander. She has the power, she has the touch. She could be so much more than she is. On and on about this, telling us instead of showing us. The series feels the need to explain it so much to Marie, and to the audience, that it becomes a dull drone whenever characters open their mouths. Yes, eventually she learns to control her powers better and does some pretty impressive things, but it would have been more interesting for her to figure it out on her own instead of having the series explain it to us over and over ad nauseam. Not only would it have been more interesting but it would have let Marie be in control of her own growth instead of having someone else tell her how good she could potentially be.

Whether the death of Chance Perdomo really ruined the plans for the writers this season or not, it’s pretty clear that the creative team was flailing. My guess is that they wrote themselves into a corner last season, putting all their great ideas into the first season and not having much left to work with after. The events of The Boys: Season 4 certainly didn’t help and it left this team without many ways out of their mess. Having to scrap some of their scripts and change their plans after Perdomo’s death didn’t help matters at all, but I don’t know that they ever really had a good plan for this season regardless.

This is a story that feels like it can’t escape the events of the greater world it’s built into. The characters, who felt so interesting and real last season, have lost all sense of themselves this season. They’re rote, empty, shallow little vessels for the series to use as it sees fit and it ruins everything I liked about the show. Season one of Gen V was a breath of fresh air for The Boys, and I really appreciated the big swings it took. Season two feels very much like an extension of The Boys, a Season 4.5 if you will, and that’s a bad thing. There’s a set plot in mind for The Boys: Season 5 that will bring that series to a conclusion, and it’s pretty clear that Gen V is stuck playing into that instead of being its own thing. It makes this series feel like a lesser entry of the parent show, padding and fluff to keep the audience around without moving the story forward too far.

Gen V is at its best when it focuses on the characters and lets them live their lives in this fucked up and weird world. This second series never does that and it fail the characters, the story, and the audience all in one fell swoop.