Gen V 2×1-3 Review: “New Year, New You,” “Justice Never Forgets,” and “H is for Human”

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Gen V 2×1-3 Review: “New Year, New You,” “Justice Never Forgets,” and “H is for Human”

September 20, 2025

SM Reine

Lit by blue tones, Marie Moreau prepares to fight in an arena. (Image via Amazon Prime Video.)

The first three episodes of Gen V bring our favorite student-superheroes back for an explosive sophomore year. Fun, bawdy, and surprisingly moving, this show hasn’t missed a step.

The Boys universe is tasteless, tacky, and raunchy, which makes it an unusually good platform for criticizing contemporary fascism. You wouldn’t expect it, looking in from the outside: This flavor of chaotic edgelord humor is a feature of many pro-fascism factions cultivated on the internet, or it’s been used for centrist “let’s roast everyone” humor on South Park.

Yet The Boys has harnessed this power for antifascist criticism. You can see this criticism even more clearly in its sister show, Gen V. (If The Boys is a perversion of The Avengers, then Gen V can be regarded as a more sincere take on our beloved X-Men.)

Following a handful of students called the Godolkin Guardians at a corporate university for corporate superheroes, Gen V season 2 is keeping apace with current events. They continue pointing out the white supremacist origin of right-wing corporate Christofascism. They constantly lampoon Disney and other mass media. And they have an odd knack for prescience.

Our psychic, Cate, has been used by The Seven as a tool of direct oppression between seasons. She’s helped detain main characters from both shows.

Image via Amazon Prime Video

She also becomes a centerpiece of Vought propaganda after a serious injury. She was hurt by other supes, but Vought claims it was a human-led hate crime to fuel the internecine battle. Failure to go anti-human for Cate is grounds to get your ass kicked. Podcasters like Firecracker are making sure everyone knows it.

Sound familiar?

The actual plot of the show is more comic book-y. Last season, we had a few humans genuinely trying to kill superheroes. This season, there’s something ambiguous with scientific testing going on. Presumably this is building to a final showdown with Homelander on The Boys, somehow.

In order to get these gears moving, we’ve gotten all of our Gen V favorites out of detention—with one tragic exception in Andre.

Actor Chance Perdomo died in a motorcycle accident between seasons. Rather than recast the character, Andre has died attempting to escape detention.

I was worried how they would handle this. Again: This universe is tasteless.

But Gen V is a series of pleasant surprises, and memorializing Chance Perdomo has been no exception. His death is meaningful and woven into the plot with unexpected skill. His costars harness their emotions to say goodbye to character and actor in touching ways.

Andre’s the core motivation for Emma, aka Little Cricket, in getting up to the most sincere heroics of these episodes.

Image via Amazon Prime Video

She recruits Andre’s dad (an incredibly DILFy silver fox Sean Patrick Thomas). Her persistence is the reason they reunite with Marie and start unraveling the Odessa mystery. By the time episode three ends, she’s also inspiring other superheroes to resist Vought harder and better. I’ve no doubt Emma’s going to be the MVP of the season.

Marie Moreau, however, has the Chosen One arc. She’s born for something special, though we don’t know what yet. She’s falling into another weird intense relationship with a Godolkin dean (now played by Hamish Linklater). She’s in touch with Starlight. Is Marie going to be key to taking down Homelander? The dovetailing of the shows suggests something big coming for Marie. For now, we get to enjoy watching her powers in full use, stopping hearts and throwing blood whips.

Bigender superhero Jordan Li is mostly put into support positions so far. They’re either being dragged along by Emma, working through a fraught romance with Marie, or consoling Sam with their mundane superpower of compassion and bong-smoking. Their actors always make Jordan feel like the main character, even when they’re not given the most pivotal jobs. And they might be moving to a more active position with the cliffhanger at the end of the first three episodes, though only time will tell.

I especially adore the intensely bisexual nature of Marie’s relationship with Jordan, navigating the complexity of falling in love with someone who has two genders. Marie is in love with Jordan–all of Jordan. It’s refreshing to see, as someone who’s a nonbinary bisexual herself.

This is the first time I’ve seen anything resembling representation of my chaotic nature on-screen. Now if someone could just hook me up with problematic Vought juice so I can swap whenever I want…

Image via Amazon Prime Video

I’m delighted to be back into Gen V for its sophomore year. I love the spicy humor of The Boys universe centered around characters I can actually love, since The Boys tends to be a bit more…complicated. And it’s weirdly cathartic to see a tradwife influencer with butterfly wings teaching girls how to best serve men, because it finally looks exactly as weird as this feels in reality.

Gen V season 2 is streaming on Amazon Prime.

Author: SM ReineHalf-Tellarite SM Reine is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of fantasy. She’s been publishing since 2011 and a nerd since forever.

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