Warning: This review contains full spoilers for the first three episodes of Gen V Season 2. You can also check out IGN’s spoiler-free review of the entire season.
As has become tradition for The Boys and its spinoff, Gen V Season 2 returns to Prime Video with a three-episode block. It’s just as well the streamer opted for that approach with Season 2. As entertaining as the series still is, there’s a certain loss of momentum early on as the new season walks back some of the consequences of the Season 1 finale and reverts to the traditional superhero college formula. Fortunately, there’s still plenty to love here regardless.
The Season 1 finale certainly teased a very different tone, ending with Marie (Jaz Sinclair), Andre (Chance Perdomo), Jordan (London Thor and Derek Luh), and Emma (Lizze Broadway) imprisoned inside a Vought facility while Sam (Asa Germann) and Cate (Maddie Phillips) emerged as the undeserving heroes of the Godolkin U. campus massacre. Season 2’s first order of business is to put the toys back in the basket, as it were. No sooner are Jordan and Emma released than they find themselves returning to God U. to rematriculate. Even Marie, whom we learned already escaped beforehand, undergoes a short detour in these episodes before also finding herself back at school.
Was this shift back to the status quo inevitable? Probably. Did it need to happen? Hard to say, but either way, there is a bit of an adjustment here. The return to the college format robs the series of its early narrative momentum, and it takes a while to rebuild in these early episodes. Season 1 promised one thing by making Marie and her friends prisoners of Vought, and Season 2 - at this stage, anyway - doesn’t seem fully intent on delivering. There are certainly worse ways to justify Marie’s return to school than a brief team-up with Erin Moriarty’s Starlight, but even so, I would have liked to see the series focus more on her fugitive phase.
There is a huge ray of light in all of this, however. Returning to God U allows the series to focus a great deal on the school’s new dean, Hamish Linklater’s Cipher. With his predecessor exposed and brutally slain in Season 1, Cipher arrives to inaugurate a new era for the school, one in which humans are treated as second-class citizens. The Boys and Gen V both have never been shy about satirizing the current political climate, but here Gen V actually seems slightly ahead of the curve. With real-world American universities currently capitulating to the Trump administration and tamping down on free speech, it’s a little eerie watching a series where a college dean puts his school on lockdown and declares #MakeAmericaSuperAgain.
Cipher himself is simply a blast to watch. As I said in my full Season 2 review, he’s easily the best villain the franchise has produced this side of Homelander. That much is readily apparent even in this early batch of episodes. Linklater brings a unique combination of charm and outright menace to the role. It’s clear from the outset that Cipher is not all right in the head (is anyone in this world?), and that becomes even more apparent in the tense, thrilling scene where he nearly liquifies Cate’s sole remaining hand. It doesn’t hurt that Cipher, true to his name, is a real enigma. We know so little about his background, powers, and true goals, leaving plenty of room for Season 2 to drop some big reveals as it moves along.
The narrative momentum may be sluggish in these early episodes, but you can’t fault the main cast. Broadway’s Emma is easily the standout here, as she brings both a vivacious charm and a sense of pathos to the screen, but most of the main crew get their chance to shine. Phillips also deserves plenty of credit as Cate. Given where the character ended Season 1, it would be easy to loathe her, but Phillips helps ensure we still sympathize with Cate and what is clearly a very delicate situation for her. If this is Cate winning, I’d hate to see what losing looks like. Only Germann’s Sam feels a bit short-changed here, as he doesn’t enjoy as much screen time as the rest of the gang.
Finally, it’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge how Season 2 handles the Chance Perdomo situation. Perdomo died in 2024 while travelling to shoot Season 2, forcing the Gen V crew to halt production and write Andre out of the series. Their solution is to reveal that Andre died heroically during an earlier escape attempt at the Vought facility. That’s about as elegant a solution as could be hoped for, given the circumstances. I’d rather see Andre respectfully written out rather than a recasting, and this at least gels with the ongoing subplot involving Andre and his father Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas) struggling with the lethal nature of their powers.
Speaking of which, Andre’s death allows Polarity to step forward and play a bigger role in Season 2. Polarity is now a grieving father who wants revenge against God U and its ruthless new dean. Thomas delivers a compelling portrait of a father mourning his son, but there’s also room for some levity as he finds himself reluctantly paired with a drugged-out Emma for a high-stakes heist mission. Who knew that pairing would work so well?
