Marie may be intent on finding her long-lost sister Annabeth, but even she can’t escape the way the world has changed since Neuman’s death. Protesters aligned with Starlight clash with folks who insist they’re in “Homelander country” (can you guess the racial makeup of each group?), and Marie unwittingly intervenes, saving a nice young Black boy (with an earnest “Fight like a girl” shirt) who’d helped her at a minimart earlier.
She’s the kind of person who can’t see injustice being doled out. Yet that’s what eventually gets her roped back into God U. (Social media videos of blood-soaked attacks have a way of going viral in this world.) And soon she’s tracked by a supe quite literally tracking her scent. Is Dogknott (Zach McGowan) the wackiest Wolverine rip-off character we’ve seen yet? Probably. He makes quite an entrance, on all fours eventually breaking into her motel room and giving us a thrilling fight scene that would make that famed mutant proud. Marie stands up for herself but eventually needs some help, courtesy of Starlight (Erin Moriarty) herself, who beats up Dogknott and gets the young Marie out of harm’s way.
Oh, and she has a mission for the former God U student, only it requires something she may not want to do (but something the show’s plot all but requires): The safest place for Marie, Starlight insists, is on campus. Plus, she could do some research there about something called “Project Odessa,” which she believes God U is starting up again. Starlight has a great pep talk prepared that serves as a bit of a thesis for the series. “You’re a hero,” she tells Marie. “But you can’t stay out of this fight forever.”
And she really can’t, for a video of her helping the Starlighters has gone viral and that’s enough to get Emma (drunk at a frat party) to figure out where she is. With Jordan in tow, she locates her (in Weehawken of all places), as does Cate, who really wants Marie to return to God U. It’s the safest place for her, she insists, unwittingly echoing Starlighter. As a fugitive, she’s in constant danger; but if she agrees to return to God U, she’ll at least be a visible figure on campus less likely to be targeted or worse.
It’s all wrapped in good intentions (and in keeping with what Starlighter hoped Marie would do) but it soon goes sideways. Their conversation gets heated and between Marie itching to stand her ground and Jordan wanting to protect her, their dialogue soon turns deadly—as in, this all ends with Cate bleeding to death when Jordan blasts her.
To which I say: Yikes. I mean, it really can’t get worse than accidentally killing your former friend who was maybe trying to help you though maybe not in the best way—and oh yeah, she’s quite a public figure whose death will not go unnoticed. How do you get ahead of such an event? Use social media to your advantage, of course.
The most intriguing aspect of The Boys’ first season—and of its entire premise, really—was the idea that superpowered beings weren’t (just) good for heroic roles among the rest of us. In fact, as Vought had figured out, they made for better spokespeople than for actual soldiers. Or, rather, they made better soldiers because of their marketability.
Gen V is clearly also born out of that very same framework: If so many young kids have powers, they can’t all be supes. But they can all be, especially if Dean Cipher is to be taken at his word, soldiers in the rising fight against anti-superpowered sentiment. There’s a race war coming, you can almost hear him saying, and the better prepared God U students are, the easier it’ll be to stomp on those pesky humans coming for them. It’s incendiary rhetoric, but it’s nothing compared to what Emma hears as she slowly adjusts to life back as a Godolkin student required to take classes from a tradwife-esque supe influencer (with wings!) who is all too happy to train her students into using their online platforms to stoke fear regarding the recent attack on Cate. (The latter is recovering and not dead as you may have feared after that first-episode cliffhanger.
The supe-ss-influencer framework is precisely what Emma and Jordan exploit as they bring Marie back into God U: Episode two opens with Marie recording a video for social media where she talks about how she’s coming back from a mental-health break and ready to rejoin her peers at God U. And while Dean Cipher allows her back, it’s clear he cares little for her bullshit performative atonement. But it’s better to keep her close than fight or search for her.
It’s Cipher who breaks the news about Cate to Marie. Does he know she and Jordan were the ones who attacked her? Is he baiting her? Playing mind games with her? All of the above? Why else would he share that Andre had died from complications from the rare disease that also afflicted his dad? Is it to gain her trust or to whitewash Andre’s selfless death?
Either way, Cipher is clearly not to be messed with. He’s as cold and calculating as they come. And as the media around Cate’s attack is heard around campus, it’s obvious what the line is: This was a hate crime, an excuse to stoke fear and rage against Starlight and those who align themselves with her.
Which is a bit eerie to watch and try to process as a fictional take on a hellish reality. Vought and God U benefit from blaming “Starlighters” for Cate’s attack (she’s in a coma), and all the students are intent on furthering that narrative, even as we know that’s far from the truth. Then again, that word may not have quite the currency it once might have had—in both that fictional college campus and in the very real ones on the other side of the screen.
And yet, the search for the truth—of what happened to Cate, of what Project Odessa is—is what drives the latter half of this episode. Sam, who’s grown used to needing Cate to quell his anxiety and to quite literally dull his feelings, is struggling without her. He’s intent on figuring out what actually happened. And when he visits her at the hospital, she takes control of one of the nurses nearby and says one word: “Emma,” before leading said nurse into a bloody rampage against another attendant—all collateral damage as the young student struggles with her recovery. Alas, that’s all Sam needs to confront Emma—especially once he learns she’d gone to Weehawken the night Cate was attacked.
Not that Emma cops up to anything. She calls him out for siding with Cate, who she knows has been lying to Sam and keeping him on a short leash. Meanwhile, Emma and Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas), newly appointed Dean of Marketing, are set on finding more about Project Odessa. It’s an unlikely pair, but they’re both eager to find out more about the rot at the heart of Godolkin, and Polarity’s grief is fodder enough to have him infiltrating God U and teaming up with his son’s kids to avenge his death. His plan is stupidly simple (and also, as Emma fears, perhaps just too stupid in general): “I’m gonna kill Cipher. Then I’m going to burn this school to the ground. Then we’re going to Seven Tower and we’re gonna strip down to the motherfucking studs.”
Why don’t they start with something small, like Project Odessa? And so they go to the best place to get information: the library, where The Rememberer (the hilarious Stephen Guarino) oversees the university’s archives. Which are, we’re told, off-limits to the likes of Polarity but a very high Emma ingratiates herself with the once-famous supe (whose tagline was “Justice Never Forgets Shhh”) and manages to get them in the special wing of the library archives where all of Thomas Godolkin’s papers are kept. And not just that: They find a secret hidden room where his Nazi paraphernalia is on full display that has the info on Project Odessa she was searching for all along.
It’s all enough to get Emma so excited that she gets big all by herself. It’s a rare feat but also quite inconvenient considering she makes lots of noise and raises suspicion from her new BFF The Rememberer, who finds her naked and gigantic in the room he’d left her at. Phew. But if they thought the threat of being found out in Godolkin’s secret Nazi archive lair was bad, they clearly were not in Cipher’s super-exclusive (pun intended) new seminar.
“You are not students,” he tells those select few there gathered, which include Jordan and Marie. “You are soldiers.” It’s as blunt an assertion as this cravenly cruel Dean has made about how he hopes to reshape the Godolkin U population. That’s what his “optimization” seminar is all about; does Marie know how her power works? Does Jordan? How else are they going to level up and rise up in God U’s rankings to become better supes, better students, better soldiers?
And if you were fearing they’d sit around and work those kinds of questions out intellectually, know that, instead, Cipher just locks them up with Vikor (Tait Fletcher). The goal of the class? Just hit the button that will open the door—something Vikor and his imposing physique and hammer will make very very hard. Some Hunger Games-style fighting ensues, with the kids (save for Marie and Jordan, really) flubbing the test.
You can see Marie and Jordan, in real time, test new aspects of their powers. (Could Marie really stop Vikor’s heart? Are Jordan’s booms becoming stronger?) And that’s eventually enough to get them to hit the button, get some notes from Cipher, and be told to come back next week (except for that one redhead who’ll be moved to the Performing Arts School).
That said, nothing brings two doe-eyed youths together like that kind of near-death experience. And so, by the time Jordan and Marie make it back to their dorm room, the hormones are clearly doing their work and, scored at first by Olivia Castriota and then by Billie Eillish, the two get physical and give us a welcome take on desire, gender, and sexuality without really making a big deal out of it.
And that’s when they hear the ruckus outside: Is it a protest? A celebration? It’s a bit of both, as it turns out. “Vought caught the folks who attacked Cate,” they hear. Surprise! Dogknott apparently tracked the Starlighter who did it (the young Black boy Marie had helped, of course) and killed him. Justice was, it seems, served. But only because Emma, Jordan, and Marie did nothing. That’s something they can’t afford to do anymore—not when innocents will continue to pay the price.
Amid the crowd of rollicking students thrilled at this turn of events, Gen V gives us quite an early season twist: Emma makes her way through the gleeful students on campus and inches up to Marie and Jordan, pushing a folder their way. She knows what Project Odessa is. It’s Marie. Yes, it seems we’re getting a tried and true “you’re the one” trope here. Though immediately (as in, the third episode) we have Marie herself questioning how that feels ill-fitting to her. She’s no Neo. No Luke. Those chosen ones so rarely look like her.
But like many chosen ones before her, she still has to face some family trauma, which leads her to contact Pam, an old friend of her mother’s who’d been like an aunt to her and who’s oddly cagey about meeting and talking about Marie’s birth. That took place at a fertility clinic at Godolkin U, of all places, that’s led by “Dr. Gold” who, in photos, looks exactly like Cipher himself.
It’s all a lot to process. But it’s not as heavy as learning her sister Annabeth had lived with Pam following her parents’ death. Marie breaks down (in a clunkily written monologue that has the line, “I was a girl who got her period!”) and insists she wants contact with her sister again. She needs to learn everything that happened to her and that her parents were to blame. She’s no monster.
And as she dwells on that, she also has to come face to face with Cate, who finally wakes up from her coma (with one less arm, a scar on her skull, and an inability to use her powers) and returns to campus an erstwhile hero to the school even as she walks around in a kind of daze, unsure what her life will look like moving forward.
She finds the campus is on edge, especially as “RESIST” posters adorned with Starlight’s yellow star keep popping up by an invisible force. As Emma eventually finds out (following the speedster into a locker room full of naked men), it’s Harper (Jessica Clement), the rat-tailed girl whose powers are actually chameleon-like. But if Emma was hoping to find a Starlighter resistance at school, all she’s found are vandals who want to do little else but paper the campus, which she insists is not enough. They need to sabotage and start breaking stuff.
You know who’s really happy to break stuff? Sam. Once he learns Cate can no longer drug him out of his feelings, he’s left adrift and aggressive, punching everything in his room in utter despair—until Jordan arrives, fights him, and eventually calms him down. (An episode or two of Avenue V helps.) He’ll need to sort out his demons in earnest. He can’t hide anymore from his guilt or his grief.
That’s also enough of a wake-up call for Jordan, who was waffling as to how to respond to Marie’s “I love you” following their first intimate night together (Marie’s actual first, it turns out). And they finally realize they have to say it back, which they do on Thomas Godolkin Day right before they’re set to give a speech celebrating their newfound position as the No. 1 on campus.
At the propagandist-leaning event, Jordan may start openly following the cringe-inducing, PR-approved script, but they soon go for a more candid approach: They tell the gathered students how Andre died and insist that Cate wasn’t attacked by Starlighters. As Cipher looks disappointed onstage, the crowd quickly turns on Jordan. It’s clear they won’t be holding to that No. 1 spot much longer. What will this do to the campus, Cipher’s master plan to continue turning students into soldiers, and the budding resistance Emma is now coaching?
Stray observations
- • Marie quoting Brené Brown during her social-media mea-culpa mental-health-journey video is such a read on such pop psych and the way such therapyspeak is so often (ab)used in those kinds of posts.
- • “I don’t want to influence erections” is just a great line (and sentiment).
- • Anyone else getting Buffy season four vibes, with the untrustworthy authority figures on campus and the mysterious experiment?
- • We’re really going for “Make America Super Again”? Hmm.
- • Both gender versions of Jordan more obviously resemble one another now. (The hair is almost exactly the same whether they’re a boy or a girl, as are their outfits. Is this an attempt to stress their ability to exist beyond gender?)
- • It’s always so interesting what is still real in this fictional world. Even supes want to have a podcast as successful as Call Her Daddy (or at least Justine does).
- • “Right now you’re Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted; I need you to be Angelina Jolie in Salt.”— Cipher, proving his pop-culture references may be a tad stale.
- • This series is truly obsessed with ass play (as evidenced by how many jokes and gags are being made at the expense of the guy whose power is shoving things up his ass… yes, including another guy!).
- • I’m enjoying this world of films Vought is allegedly green-lighting and releasing. It does look like Flipped (starring Cate and Sam) deserved to be smoked by the Garfield movie. But, honestly, is that any worse than what actual Hollywood studios are often churning out?
