But while the heroes are touted as a gift from God, their abilities come from twisted experiments. Vought Rising shows an early version of the Sage Grove Center featured in season 2 of The Boys, where Stormfront and Vought were working to develop new versions of Compound V by experimenting on psychiatric patients. At Sage Grove Manor, an unnamed character played by Jorden Myrie is injected with a version of V that gives him super strength and toughness, allowing him to escape from a containment cell.
Given Vought’s Nazi roots, it’s unsurprising that their public-facing heroes are all white and that they’re conducting secret experiments on Black men. The plot echoes the story of Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Isaiah is a Korean War veteran whose all-Black unit was used as test subjects to try to replicate the Super Soldier Serum that gave Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) his powers. Isaiah was created for the 2003 limited Marvel Comics series Truth: Red, White & Black, where his origins were inspired by the actual Tuskegee Experiment the U.S. government conducted on Black men between 1932 and 1972.
The Boys has confronted white supremacy better than most superhero stories, and Vought Rising appears poised to do the same. The trailer also delivers plenty of blood and gore, part of the absurdism that The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke tells Polygon has protected his show from censorship even as it offers scathing critiques of the U.S. government.