More than seven years after the first season of The Boys premiered on Prime Video, the superhero TV series is nearing its end. But before its fifth and final season arrives in 2026, the show’s spinoff series, Gen V, will return on Wednesday after an almost two-year hiatus.
When Gen V made its debut in September 2023, it became the rare spinoff that rivals—and, at times, even surpasses—its predecessor. Even though the show shifts the franchise’s focus away from Homelander (Antony Starr) and the Seven to a younger generation of Vought-bred supes who enroll in Godolkin University, it has all of the pointed superhero satire, absurd raunchiness, and bloody action sequences that made The Boys stand out in an overcrowded superhero media landscape. But Gen V also tackles more serious subject matters related to college life, including mental health issues such as self-harm and eating disorders.
Gen V will continue without one of its talented young stars, Chance Perdomo, who died in a motorcycle accident on the day the actor was supposed to reconvene with the cast for the first table read of Season 2. Showrunner Michele Fazekas and her team decided not to recast Perdomo’s character, Andre Anderson, choosing instead to rewrite the season’s story lines and delay production to account for the changes. As Fazekas told Entertainment Weekly in July, Gen V seeks to honor Perdomo’s memory in its forthcoming episodes.
“[That was] probably the no. 1 thing we wanted to do,” Fazekas said, adding, “I remember being in the writer’s room and talking about how important it was to honor him. And then when you watch the show, he exists throughout the entire season. It was, in many ways, about Andre and about Chance.”
The loss of Perdomo (and, in the world of Gen V, Andre) hangs over Gen V’s second season as the series resumes with heightened expectations following the success of its first run. It’s been some time since we were on the God U campus, so ahead of the three-episode season premiere, here’s everything you need to remember from Season 1 of Gen V and the fourth season of The Boys.
Gen V, Season 1
Gen V follows Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) as she enters her freshman year at Godolkin University, a school that fosters the development of young supes as they pursue a career in entertainment or crime fighting. Marie, who has the (very graphic) ability to manipulate blood, is one of many God U students who aspire to land a spot on Homelander’s superteam, the Seven. The school features an intense ranking system that feeds into the competitive spirit at God U, with Luke Riordan (Patrick Schwarzenegger) at the top of the list. But shortly after Marie witnesses Luke kill the chairman of the university’s crime-fighting program, the promising young superhero—fittingly known as Golden Boy—publicly implodes himself on campus, setting Marie and her new friends on a path toward unearthing God U’s darkest secrets.
Marie teams up with Andre (Perdomo), who can control magnetism; Jordan Li (London Thor and Derek Luh), who can shift between genders, with their female form capable of producing energy blasts and their male form being indestructible; Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway), who can shrink or enlarge her body to extreme sizes; and Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips), a powerful telepath. After following clues left by Luke, they discover a Vought-funded facility called “the Woods” where students—including Luke’s brother, Sam (Asa Germann), who was believed to be dead—are imprisoned and experimented on. The scientists at the Woods are developing a virus that could control supes. However, the virus proves potent enough to kill supes instead, which makes it an even more powerful potential weapon.
More on Season 1 of ‘Gen V’
After Andre and Emma free Sam from the Woods, Marie and her crew eventually learn that Cate had been working with God U dean Indira Shetty (Shelley Conn) and using her telepathic powers to make them forget their discoveries. To get back in the young supes’ good graces, Cate brings them to Shetty’s home and forces Shetty to tell the truth about God U and its founder.
“This school is a front,” Shetty says. “Thomas Godolkin was a behavioral scientist. He built this place to figure out what makes supes tick. Their weaknesses, how to control them. You’re not here to study. The school is here to study you.”
Shetty—a human whose family was killed by Homelander in a plane crash (during the first season of The Boys)—had been using the Woods to further her quest to avenge her loved ones and kill Homelander, regardless of how many other supes have to die in the process. And so Cate forces Shetty to kill herself before leading Sam back to God U to liberate the other imprisoned students at the Woods and convince them to kill all the humans on campus. As Marie, Andre, Jordan, and Emma (who disagree with the anti-human sentiment) fight Cate, Sam, and their followers to bring an end to the chaos and prevent further bloodshed, the climactic season finale ends with a surprise appearance from Homelander himself.
The world’s most (in)famous superhero makes a grand entrance on campus at the conclusion of the conflict to seemingly bring Cate, Sam, and the other perpetrators to justice. But instead, he turns to Marie, calls her an animal, and asks her, “Do you like attacking your own kind?” He shoots her with a laser beam, which knocks her out. As seen on the Vought News Network, the incident is later framed as “the Godolkin Four Massacre,” with Marie, Andre, Jordan, and Emma held responsible while Cate and Sam are hailed as heroes for bringing an end to the tragedy and are named the new Guardians of Godolkin. Before the finale’s end credits begin, Marie wakes up in a mysterious, doorless facility wearing a hospital gown, with her trio of friends trapped in the same predicament.
In addition to the appearance by Homelander, Gen V features a number of cameos by other prominent characters from The Boys, including Vought CEO Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie), then–vice presidential candidate (and secret supe) Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), and the former leader of the Boys, Grace Mallory (Laila Robins). In the seventh episode of Gen V’s first season, Neuman acquires the supe virus from one of the psychologists running the Woods, which in turn becomes a key factor in the fourth season of The Boys.
Which brings me to …
The Boys, Season 4
The latest season of The Boys centers on the rising tensions in the country as Homelander aims to consolidate his power, and the Boys and Annie January (Erin Moriarty)—who has left the Seven and abandoned her superhero identity as Starlight—try to bring Homelander down once and for all.
In the wake of Homelander’s killing of a Starlight supporter at the end of Season 3, America is divided between Homelander’s legion of fans (the Hometeamers) and Annie’s Starlighters. Homelander recruits Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), the so-called “smartest person on the planet,” to the Seven, and she devises a plan to assassinate the soon-to-be president, Robert Singer (Jim Beaver), which will put Neuman in the Oval Office as his successor. However, Neuman has a fail-safe—the supe virus—in case Homelander ever attempts to betray her.
More on Season 4 of ‘The Boys’
Of course, that’s exactly what Homelander does; he and Sister Sage had always intended to make Neuman their puppet. But after an extremely messy series of events, which involves some suped-up killer sheep, Neuman is left without any doses of the virus. In the season finale, Neuman turns to Hughie (Jack Quaid) and the Boys to help her and her daughter escape Homelander, but Butcher (Karl Urban) interrupts their meeting and brutally tears Neuman apart. Butcher takes the only sample of the latest version of the supe virus, which the Boys managed to re-create, and leaves on his own.
After Homelander’s plan to assassinate the president-elect and replace him with Neuman fails, it seems as if all is lost for the leader of the Seven. But Sister Sage manages to turn their losses into gains by framing Singer for Neuman’s death and arranging for the new president, former senator Steven Calhoun (David Andrews), to swear loyalty to Homelander. In an address to the nation, Calhoun declares martial law and deputizes hundreds of superheroes across the country, who will all report to Homelander. And when Homelander takes the podium from Calhoun, he issues an ominous statement of his own.
“To the Starlighters, whatever rock you’re hiding under, we’re coming for you,” Homelander says. “I’m coming for you. Because today, a new age of superheroes begins.”
It doesn’t take long for Homelander to make good on his threat. Just before the episode ends, almost every one of the Boys is taken into custody by Homelander’s deputized superheroes. Sam and Cate make brief cameos in that capacity as they abduct Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), with Cate taking Frenchie away and Sam pulling Kimiko back as she screams in distress for her first spoken line of the series. Only Annie and Butcher escape unscathed.
When Fazekas unveiled the trailer for the upcoming season of Gen V at San Diego Comic-Con in July, she talked about the relationship between Gen V and The Boys as their interconnected stories progress.
“The shows talk to each other,” Fazekas explained. “So Season 4 of The Boys sets up Season 2 of Gen V. So now, Homelander has taken over America. Now, we get to see what that looks like—what that looks like [for] the country, what that looks like at the school, and then what the resistance is going to start looking like.”
Gen V, Season 2
Heading into the new season of Gen V, superheroes are running the country—and humans have all but lost any semblance of power. Annie is on the run, and as the Season 2 trailer has already revealed, she’s turning to Marie for help.
“Vought is resuming the research program called Project Odessa,” Annie explains to Marie. “That was spearheaded by Thomas Godolkin—and I need you to stop it.”
Although the previews of the new season withhold specifics about what happened at the Elmira Adult Rehabilitation Center, where the four Gen V heroes were being held at the end of Season 1, Marie has apparently managed to escape on her own. But now Starlight is asking her to return to campus for her sophomore year, where she’ll reunite with Emma and Jordan after Vought released them from the facility. With Shetty gone, they’ll be entering the new semester at God U under the leadership of Dean Cipher (Hamish Linklater of Midnight Mass and Legion), a supe who seems more fit to run the school in this “new age of superheroes” that Homelander has ushered in.
As this article indicates, the Boys franchise has become very much like the blockbuster superhero cinematic universes it constantly satirizes. As with the many TV shows and movies in the MCU (or the fledgling DCU), a viewer needs to be tapped into both The Boys and Gen V to fully understand everything that’s happening in this shared world. As The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke once described it, the timeline for these shows is more like “cars on a train than it is a plate of spaghetti.” And with the stakes rising as these series head toward a final destination in The Boys, the next car on the train is Gen V.
Teasers have already shown that the forthcoming season will feature even more familiar faces from The Boys than the previous eight-episode run did, including Starlight, Sister Sage, the Deep (Chace Crawford), Black Noir II (Nathan Mitchell), and Firecracker (Valorie Curry). What remains to be seen is whether Gen V will be able to tell a satisfying, self-contained story or whether it will be forced to make concessions and divide its attention to serve the agenda of the mainline series, an issue that many MCU projects have encountered. With class back in session at God U this week, we’ll find out soon enough.
