Gen V Recap: 5 Things To Know Before The Boys Season 5

The TV landscape is getting more and more annoying in the streaming age. Shows are more accessible than ever, but they take years off in between seasons, the seasons themselves are ridiculously short, and every show eventually gets spun off into multiple shows. That last one is the most irritating, because it can impact the experience of the original series.

Any Star Wars fan who gave The Book of Boba Fett a miss due to its poor reviews would be baffled when The Mandalorian season 3 premiered, and Mando and Grogu were suddenly back together, traversing the galaxy in a brand-new ship. You’d think you’d missed a whole season in between (when, in reality, you’d only missed two-and-a-half episodes of a painfully mediocre spinoff).

Prime Video’s flagship show, The Boys, started off as a cunning satire of the current state of superhero media, mocking Kevin Feige’s 10-movie “phase” announcements and the endless slew of spinoffs and crossovers. But now, it has two spinoffs of its own — a standalone animated anthology, Diabolical, and a college-set “sidequel,” Gen V — and at least another two spinoffs on the way.

So far, The Boys hasn’t made a misstep. Both of its spinoffs have lived up to the original show, they haven’t detracted from the original show, and they’ve both been worthwhile additions to the overall saga. But not everyone has the time, or the inclination, to watch spinoffs and offshoots. Maybe you only want to watch The Mandalorian; maybe you only want to watch The Boys.

If you never got around to watching Gen V, there are a few things you need to know as we head into The Boys’ fifth and final season. First and foremost, the Gen V kids are now newly minted members of the Boys.

The Gen V Kids Have Joined Forces With The Boys

The most important thing to know from Gen V going into The Boys season 5 is that the characters from Gen V have joined forces with the characters from The Boys. The Boys will probably have some quick exposition explaining who these new additions to the team are, but it’s important to know that there will be some fresh faces in the lineup.

The show that started out making fun of Marvel’s endless crossovers is forming its own supergroup. Just as the Guardians of the Galaxy joined forces with the Avengers, the college dropouts of Gen V have joined forces with the Boys.

In Gen V’s frankly underwhelming season 2 finale, the kids had to flee from their school following a seminar with the dean that turned into a Hunger Games-style deathmatch, at which point they met up with Starlight and A-Train. So, going into the final season, the Boys’ bench has gotten a little bigger.

Thomas Godolkin Attempted A Plan To Control Homelander

The big bad of Gen V’s second season was Dean Cipher, played by a scene-stealing Hamish Linklater. Linklater made up for what was generally a lackluster season of television with an all-time great villain performance. After becoming the dean of the university, Cipher basically turned it into a military academy, training supes to be soldiers in his upcoming war.

The big twist is that Cipher, the supervillainous dean, is actually just a regular guy being controlled by Thomas Godolkin, a renowned Vought scientist and the founder of Godolkin University. Thomas was preparing an army of supes as part of a diabolical plot to control Homelander. His ability to control other people — and, by extension, control their superpowers — made him think he could body-snatch Homelander.

But he needs backup, hence the supe army. Now that Homelander holds a major position of power in the U.S. government, it’ll be even harder to get to him.

Marie Moreau Became One Of The Boys' Strongest Supes

The lead protagonist of Gen V, Marie Moreau, has the power of “blood-bending,” and it’s exactly as gross as it sounds. She can telekinetically manipulate people’s blood, so she can burst her opponents’ blood vessels or replenish an open wound or even use her own blood as a weapon (as you can imagine, The Boys’ VFX team has a lot of fun with those bursts of blood).

Marie’s first period was an even more traumatic experience than Carrie White’s. She wasn’t publicly humiliated by her classmates, but she did accidentally kill her parents, which ultimately led to her estrangement from her sister. In Gen V’s second season, Marie’s sister came back as a major character, only to be killed shortly thereafter.

Marie, wracked with guilt over her parents’ deaths, refused to let another relative die on her watch, and ended up unlocking perhaps the greatest superpower in the entire Boys universe. She put her sister’s blood back in her body, got it circulating around her system, and eventually brought her back from the dead. Not even Homelander has the power of resurrection. This could come in very handy for the Boys.

Godolkin Was Working (& In A Relationship) With Sister Sage

In Gen V season 2, we initially saw Cipher looking after a man in a hyperbaric chamber and having sex with Sister Sage in front of him. It seemed pretty bizarre then, but we later found out that the man in the hyperbaric chamber was Thomas Godolkin, and that he was controlling Cipher’s body to have sex with Sage, and it got a whole lot more bizarre.

This could play into the plot of The Boys’ final season. Thomas was killed by Marie in Gen V’s season 2 finale, so he’s unlikely to come back, but whatever plan he was cooking up with Sage might still come to pass. We’ve seen that Sage is a master manipulator and a cunning strategist, so she probably won’t give up on a good scheme just because her co-conspirator was killed.

Homelander Already Has A Grudge Against The Gen V Kids

The final season of The Boys will be anchored by the titular vigilante group’s last-ditch effort to kill Homelander. That was the hook of the series from the very beginning: Billy Butcher is determined to wipe out all supes, but he wants to kill Homelander in particular to avenge his wife (not to mention all the other people Homelander has killed since he started this quest).

So, the big question in season 5 is, will the Boys actually be able to eliminate Homelander? With the combined forces of the Boys, the deserters of the Seven, and now the Gen V kids, they might have a fighting chance. But before they go to battle, it’s important to note that the fight is personal for everyone, not just the Boys.

Starlight and A-Train have both suffered under Homelander’s leadership, and the Gen V kids had a run-in with Homelander on campus back in season 1. Gen V’s first-season finale culminated in Homelander descending on the campus, disgusted at Marie for going after “her own kind” (even though Homelander himself has killed more than his fair share of supes).

After that confrontation, Homelander made short work of the Gen V kids, and they were imprisoned for their crimes against supe-manity. So, going into The Boys season 5, you need to know that the Gen V kids already have a personal vendetta against Homelander, and Homelander already hates those meddling kids.

I’m sure The Boys’ writers don’t expect every single viewer to have seen Gen V, and I’m sure they’ll include some strategic expository dialogue to get everyone up to speed. The Boys season 5 premieres on April 8 on Amazon Prime Video.