‘Gen V’ Is No Longer a Warning. It's a Mirror

We’re two weeks and four episodes into the spinoff’s second season. We return to The Boys’ universe of shiny corporate fascism. This in-fiction world echoes back at us — magnified and Technicolor-bright — the current real-world regime’s broken-record anti-DEI, anti-woke, anti-trans ultra-nationalist narrative, right down to the “trans person in the bathroom” demonizing line. Subtle it is not and has never been—and right now, I say that’s good. Homelander appears on a shirt flipping you off with a smile, under the banner “Sorry, Snowflake.” The language of “resistance” appears in the flimsy activist counter movement. Homelander is invoked to inspire fear in order to maintain control. The term “race traitor” crops up.

No, subtle it is not. It’s the time-honored maneuver of satire: Show us the absurdity of our own world, dialed up to eleven—so big, so ridiculous, you can’t not see it. Except, in Gen V’s case, that up-to-eleven satire has a more poignant take-home: the real-life absurdity doesn’t need to be dialed up very far to get to eleven.

Of course, we can’t talk about Gen V without talking about Chance Perdomo. Chance, who helped originate the show in 2023’s season one as one of the core characters, died in a motorcycle accident in early 2024, on his way to begin filming the second season. His character, Andre Anderson, was not recast; rather, the season was reworked around his absence, the story revised, and production pushed back. To me, that feels like the right choice. It’s a choice that makes for an awkward narrative challenge, but the show does it right, if not seamlessly. This season is dedicated to Chance, and that dedication appears in the first frames, not in the more customary closing-credits placement.

Season two opens on the start of sophomore year, when our heroes Marie (Jaz Sinclair), Emma (Lizzie Broadway), and Jordan Li (London Thor and Derek Luh) have managed to escape the horrific detention center they’d been disappeared to at the end of season one. Cate (Maddie Philips) and Sam (Asa Germann) remain the golden (not incidentally, white and blonde) children of the university, though they’re fracturing at the edges within the safety of the twisted official narrative. Eventually, all the characters come back together on Godolkin University campus through different, fraught paths…with the exception of Andre, who pushed his powers past a fatal point to (unsuccessfully) help his friends escape.

Andre’s grieving father, Polarity, returns to teach at God U … with the mission of tearing it down, piece by piece. And wouldn’t you know it, with each brick that gets torn away, more explicit white supremacist and “superior” groups of people come to the surface. The shiny new face of that system is Cipher (Hamish Linklater), the mysterious new God U dean with a disturbingly nonchalant approach to brutality.

Marie, Emma, and Jordan can be sent back to the detention center at any time. No due process (go figure). Engaging in a system they know to be evil and destructive for the sake of self-preservation, the kids still become complicit in its activities. Even when they don’t comply completely—won’t shoot a video promo—their consent is manufactured for the public (deepfakes appear in the commercial instead). There are hints about darker forms of “enforcement” that golden-children Cate and Sam took part in during the season interval.

In this world, the only truth is the one presented on screens, not by the evidence of your eyes. If you haven’t read the epilogue to 1984 recently, maybe pick it up. Never mind. Just open Twitter.

Gen V, to be fair, is not a perfectly executed show. Contrived scenarios and illogical choices fuel an on-brand superhero-comic-style story, much like its parent show. There’s some clumsy cameoing to try to more explicitly align the plot of Gen V with The Boys. (See: Starlight appearing for precisely one scene to deliver helpful exposition.)

But the sting of its story is real, and really cathartic in this present moment to see laid out as This Is Very Bad, So Let’s Call It That.

At this point, it’s less of a warning and more of a mirror.

Gen V is now streaming on Prime.