This story contains spoilers for Gen V and The Boys.
Make no mistake, this week’s episode of Gen V may have featured a familiar face in Claudia Doumit’s Victoria Neuman, popping over from The Boys, but Season 1’s penultimate episode was filled with surprises. As has become customary for Gen V, those surprises came with a lot of questions but, thankfully, we were able to sit down with showrunner Michele Fazekas to discuss everything that’s unfolding as we head into the Season 1 finale next week.
Gen V: What Does Senator Neuman Want With Marie?
Earlier in the season, Dean Shetty (Shelley Conn) made it clear that Marie (Jaz Sinclair) wasn’t to be used in any of Dr. Cordosa’s (Marco Pigossi) experiments. While her blood powers would have been of great use to the doctor and the contagion he was manufacturing at the behest of Shetty and Vought, there was a mysterious benefactor who had specific interest in Maria and her powers.
With Senator Neuman’s introduction into the spinoff series comes the revelation that she was Marie’s benefactor, but we — like Marie — still don’t really know why just yet. Something really curious about the pair is that while most Supes’ powers seems to vary from each other, Marie and Senator Pops-a-Lot seem to share the exact same abilities. Are the two more connected than meets the eye?
“Yes, but probably not in the way that you think,” says Fazekas. “They have a connection that is maybe not biological, but sort of historical. And there's a reason that Neuman has taken an interest in Marie that we're not even going to really get into until Season 2.”
O.K., so while we can probably expect plenty of reveals in the Season 1 finale, what Neuman’s got planned won’t be readily apparent. Got it! But what about the rest of the kids?
Neuman’s always got a plan, and Fazekas confirmed that the Vice Presidential hopeful’s town hall went exactly the way she wanted it to (outbursts, attacks, and all). As for the rest of the Top 5, Fazekas was mostly tight-lipped on what their futures may hold. She did offer a hint, however.
“I think anyone who she feels like is going to be useful to her, she's absolutely going to want to, not necessarily befriend, but at least sort of owe a favor to, or they owe a favor to her,” she says. “She calculates everything.”
Who Was Behind Polarity’s Stroke?
The disastrous town hall at God U was initially meant to be moderated by Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas), but the retired hero seems to suffer a stroke or some other medical incident prior and is rushed to the hospital with his son, Andre (Chance Perdomo), in tow.
Initially, I was certain that Neuman must have been behind the incident, but Fazekas debunked the idea right away. “That’s a separate story,” hints the showrunner.
If Neuman wasn’t behind the attack, it seems likely that Polarity wasn’t the target at all. It wasn’t that whoever instigated the medical emergency didn’t need to make sure Polarity wasn’t able to moderate, but perhaps instead needed to be sure that Andre didn’t return to his friends. While we can’t know for sure yet, this feels like one mystery that will get cleared up in the finale at the very least.
Have Cate and Sam Become Radicalized?
When Gen V started, guessing which of these students was going to go full evil was half the fun. But as we march towards the Season 1 finale, it’s become pretty clear that Gen V isn’t interested in black and white with any of its main characters.
“I think there will be a lot of unexpected things that will happen with any character, and I think a character that stays the same all the time is very boring,” Fazekas says of The Boys universe’s new players.
Cate (Maddie Phillips), for example, is so desperate to be loved that she’ll do anything to prove herself. First she betrayed all of her friends for Dean Shetty, then we see a triple cross when she forces Shetty to slit her own throat as a sobbing Marie desperately tries to save her. Meanwhile, Sam (Asa Germann) just wants to be accepted (and yeah, probably loved too), and seeing a group of pro-Homelander 20-somethings proudly proclaiming that they’re better than humans while throwing whatever power they can at what they perceive to be a defenseless congresswoman is a level of freedom he’s never experienced prior to this moment.
Sam’s path feels very similar to Ryan’s (Cameron Crovetti) in this respect. Ryan’s late mother Becca Butcher (Shantel VanSanten) kept his life relatively structured while they were in hiding from Homelander (Antony Starr), but after the young boy accidentally killed his mother and eventually found himself in the care of Homelander, he seemed to find himself tempted by the idea of being able to do whatever he wants. Season 3 of The Boys closes as a slow smile spreads across Ryan’s face after Homelander slaughters a human in the street and the crowd cheers.
“I don't know that we have consciously jumped into that,” Fazekas says of the parallels to Ryan. “But I do think there's some similarity between a Sam and a Homelander where it's like, you've been sort of locked up in this institution for a really a long time as a kid, and what does that do to you?”
The biggest benefit that the Gen V students seem to have over The Boys’ players is that they have each other. (That sounds twee — especially for anything in this universe — but stick with me.) Butcher and The Boys and Homelander and The Seven have all most certainly been through it. For multiple seasons, we’ve used their respective traumas to justify their, well, let’s just say assholery (not you, Homelander). But the students of God U, at least in the case of the Top 5 and Sam, have been through just as much hell as their older counterparts without becoming corrupted beyond the usual college rager.
Fazekas likens part of this to generational differences. “There's a level of emotional intelligence that's kind of amazing from the kids,” she says of Gen Z as a whole. And with that emotional intelligence comes a level of empathy that we’re not used to seeing in this universe. There’s always been nuance in The Boys, but Gen V offers a new depth when it comes to exploring the levels of how far a person can go towards the edge and still come back.
In the immediate, Cate feels like a lost cause. She took over the minds of her friends for months, made Marie relive her greatest trauma in Dean Shetty’s murder and, now that she’s off her meds, can read everyone’s minds at all times. Will the same Marie who pleaded for their friends to give Cate a chance to change have the same request now that Cate forced her to stand by as Shetty bled out?
We don’t know! It’s quite refreshing, actually. You can usually count on Butcher (Karl Urban) to be an asshole and Hughie (Jack Quaid) to make a sweet but stupid decision (and it’ll be hilarious), but we pretty much know all the ways Homelander’s gonna be a monster at this point (his shock value is largely fetish-based now). It’s not that The Boys is boring or predictable, just that it’s a bunch of old jerks who are very stuck in their ways. Gen V has a different vibe because these younger Supes don’t really have ways yet.
Here’s hoping that Cate and Sam can both be reached before things get too out of hand.
What Does Senator Neuman Want With the Virus?
Yeah, you know the showrunner wasn’t telling us a single thing about Neuman’s evil plan.
Her time on the episode (and likely in Season 1) closes on a meeting with Dr. Cardosa. She takes the contagion, confirms that he’s the only one who knows how to recreate the virus, pop goes the weasel and down the body goes. It’s a pity! His family seemed nice.
But what’s Neuman’s plan here? If the virus gets out, it kills anyone with Compound V in their blood (jury’s still out on those with the Compound V derivative V-24 that both Hughie and Butcher hopped themselves up on in Season 3). She’s a Supe herself, so her plan can’t be to unleash it. And it can’t be any weird America First bullshit because Supes are already a USA exclusive.
What do you say we speculate wildly in the comments?
