Would it have killed Amazon to wait a few more weeks to announce the cancellation of Gen V? We’re slap-bang in the middle of The Boys’ final season, there are a ton of questions that haven’t been answered, and they’ve gone and put a massive spoiler front and center in a press release. Throughout The Boys’ ongoing fifth and final season, there have been a few coy throwaway references to Marie Moreau and the other Gen V alumni, but they’re always conveniently off-screen. Stan Edgar asked after Marie at a meeting with Starlight, but she happened to be unavailable.
As a big Gen V fan, I was excited to see those characters mix with The Boys’ characters in the flagship show’s final season. Gen V’s season 2 finale was a let-down on the whole, but it teased an exciting team-up between the Boys and the Gen V kids. So, it was disappointing enough that we were already more than halfway through The Boys’ final season, and there was still no sign of the Gen V cast.
But then, Amazon rubbed salt in the wound by abruptly cancelling Gen V in the midst of The Boys season 5. Before the Gen V characters even show up in The Boys, we know they won’t have any significant impact. In the wake of Gen V’s cancellation, franchise architect Eric Kripke clarified that the show’s demise was a business decision by Amazon, not a creative choice.
Kripke told Entertainment Weekly that he fought to keep Gen V on the air, and that storylines they’d formulated for the now-defunct season 3 could be repurposed into some of the other spinoffs. This all but confirms that The Boys season 5 will not end with Butcher releasing the supe virus and wiping out supekind — otherwise, there’d be no Gen V characters left to worry about.
Gen V Season 3 Not Happening Is A Big Disappointment
The second season of Gen V ended up being a bit underwhelming. Once Ethan Slater took over from Hamish Linklater as the big bad, the season plummeted like a lead balloon. The finale devolved into the kind of Marvel-style superhero smackdown that The Boys used to make fun of. But it’s still a shame that Gen V has been cancelled, because it was a great show in its own right.
It wasn’t just a neat addition to The Boys franchise; it was a genuinely compelling Y.A. superhero soap opera set in The Boys universe. Gen V brings The Boys’ brand of superhero satire to a college campus, so it’s basically The Boys meets Felicity, or The Boys meets Dawson’s Creek. Marie might be the most powerful supe in this entire franchise, and she’s reeling from unimaginable childhood trauma, and she’s just one of a dozen fascinating characters we were following in Gen V.
Gen V ingeniously used superhero tropes to touch on real problems that young people deal with. Marie’s blood-bending powers are inextricably tied to her menstrual cycle (especially since her first period killed her parents). Her roommate, Emma, is an Ant-Man-style supe who can change size by either purging or binging on food, and the writers have used that as a poignant comic-booky allegory for an eating disorder. Jordan’s gender-shifting power is an unmistakable metaphor for gender fluidity. These superhuman allegories allowed Gen V to address these issues without addressing them.
The plot formula of Godolkin University getting a new evil dean with an ulterior motive every few episodes started to get ridiculously repetitive, even in just two seasons. But Gen V was setting up bigger and bolder things off-campus for season 3, and now that it’s been cancelled, we’ll never get to see what those bigger and bolder things were (unless they can somehow be repurposed into Vought Rising).
Source: Entertainment Weekly
7/10
Release Date
2019 – 2026-00-00
Showrunner
Eric Kripke
