Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video
Are there people watching Gen V who haven’t watched The Boys? I expect there are some. This is a show that largely stands on its own as long as you have a basic understanding of the capitalist hellscape in which it is set. The idea here is that essentially all American superheroes are controlled by a massive corporation that cares more about monetizing their abilities than getting them the care they need; that’s something we can grasp pretty quickly because we live in a very similar capitalist hellscape.
Sure, viewers of The Boys will particularly appreciate cameos from that show’s characters, but most of Gen V is constrained to its own insular college-campus ecosystem, and that’s a good thing. It sets itself apart with no expectation that you need to watch one show to understand the other. When someone like VP candidate Victoria Neuman shows up to visit Godolkin University, fans will remember all the things she did (and the heads she exploded) to get to this position — but nonviewers will still recognize the threat she represents. Like Ashley Barrett at Vought, Neuman is a threat from somewhere higher up, above Godolkin. Dean Shetty may control the university, but Neuman could control the country.
But at the beginning of “Sick,” the stakes are already high. In the wake of the revelation about Cate’s prior allegiance to Dean Shetty, she’s eager to prove her loyalty to her friends. What’s happening beneath the school in the Woods needs to be exposed to the world — not just for the students getting recruited as subjects for Dr. Cardosa’s sick experiments but for the supes everywhere who could be in danger.
Admittedly, it’s pretty silly how Marie and Jordan learn about Shetty’s plans for an airborne supe-killing virus. While searching for proof of the Woods in her office, they hear Cardosa muttering to himself about “increasing the viral infection rate” and “killing them all.” But an even bigger revelation in some ways is the inciting incident for Shetty’s anti-supe crusade: Her husband and daughter died on the hijacked flight that crashed thanks to Homelander. That scene made for one of the most sickening, heart-sinking moments in season one of The Boys, and its effects are still reverberating years later.
When Shetty meets with Grace Mallory, we get our second big Boys cameo of the episode. (Mallory technically founded the Boys.) It makes a lot of sense that Mallory would reference her experience with Billy Butcher’s all-consuming vengeful rage; she and Billy are better acquainted with the subject than almost anyone. I hadn’t thought to compare Shetty with other Boys characters, but the scene frames her genocidal plan as a worst-case-scenario version of something Billy could come up with. There’s a thin line between anti-hero and villain.
Neuman is on campus for a town-hall discussion with Cameron Coleman (a.k.a. Vought’s Tucker Carlson), at which she gets booed by students. Now I’m not sure the political parallels completely hold together here. Neuman was introduced in The Boys as a progressive AOC stand-in, only for the reveal that she’s in with Vought. But the franchise has pivoted to framing her as a centrist claiming to have “full faith in the legal system.” I guess the idea is that the student body is united in its distrust but in different ways; conservative-coded characters like Rufus think Neuman is trying to control them with her talk of supe civil rights, while liberals are dissatisfied with her inadequate assurances.
Still, it takes a little squinting to see what the satirical aim is here. Do the students want more protection from supes or more protection for supes? Are we making fun of young activists at liberal-arts colleges or campus Republicans? (Both, probably.) Then again, Coleman’s hypocrisy in pointing to Neuman’s “anti-supe agenda” and referring to supes as a “persecuted minority group” is certainly true to Fox News. I’d just like a little more clarification about whether the show itself views supes that way.
After the protests threaten to get violent, Marie sneaks in and meets Neuman backstage. Here, we see another example of the temptations a parental stand-in offers: Neuman reveals that she has the same blood-bending powers as Marie and that she was even partly responsible for her admission to Godolkin. When Marie tries to come clean about the Woods so Neuman can actually do something about it, she gets some false assurances and a choice: reveal the truth to the world in some misguided attempt at attaining “justice,” or stay on the straight and narrow so she can one day join the Seven, find her sister, and enact real change with the veep’s help.
All the kids are dealing with the pressure to fight back against these parental figures who claim to want the best for them. Even before Andre knew the truth about his dad, Polarity encouraged him to think about success above all else. Brink served a similar role for Jordan and Luke. As for Cate, the temptation comes from Dean Shetty. In this episode, Cate sees that Shetty isn’t totally lying about her love for her — it wasn’t all just cynical manipulation — but it’s not enough for Cate to turn her back on her friends this time. After inviting them to Shetty’s place to hear the dean admit her genocidal plans, Cate definitively cuts ties, ordering her to slit her own throat.
Dean Shetty was the main villain this season, so it’s a little unclear where the show will go from here. Part of me wonders whether it was a mistake to kill off Brink so early, especially now that Shetty and Cardosa are also dead. Neuman is in possession of the virus, but she’s likely too major a character in The Boys for her to die in the finale — and even from a dramatic standpoint, that would mean a lot more to people who watched the original show than those who haven’t. But maybe the real villain of Gen V isn’t any single easily dispatched administrator or bureaucrat. Mind-control executions and lethally hot embraces are all well and good, but it’s much more difficult to eradicate a system.
• Marie and Jordan kiss, so I guess things are going well between them.
• Nice to see Sam have some fun on the ice slide and get a taste of normal college life, but his interest in the Neuman protests — plus his reaction to Cate killing Shetty — suggests his dark side could remain a problem.
• Andre isn’t there for Shetty’s death because he’s in the hospital with his dad, who started seizing during his interview with Cameron Coleman. They haven’t even spoken since Andre learned about Polarity’s involvement in the administration’s conspiracies, but it seems he’s realizing he can’t ignore him forever. Curious to see how the two of them move forward.
• Apparently, the whole school was invented as a way to study supes, which makes sense.
• The idea that even the well-meaning supes leave a “path of destruction” reminds me of the ambiguous morality of orogeny in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which I am currently very much enjoying.
• The episode ends with “Heads Will Roll,” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which is a classic on-the-nose (but funny) choice for this show.