When viewers tune into the first three episodes of Gen V’s second season on Wednesday, showrunner Michele Fazekas tells The Hollywood Reporter they should expect all of the main characters to be in a very different place.
That’s because season two picks up over a year after the first season, with the entirety of The Boys’ season four having taken place in between the Gen V seasons. For Gen V characters like Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and Sam Riordan (Asa Germann), that means they not only helped cover up the murder of Godolkin University’s former dean, Indira Shetty (Shelley Conn), at the end of Gen V season one, but they have since joined Homelander’s army, aiding the villain (played by Antony Starr) in his war against humans and into a takeover of the U.S. That meant using their powers to carry out arguably unforgivable acts — with a little time on the side for starring in a body swap rom-com.
Meanwhile, their former friends and classmates — Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), Jordan Li (Derek Luh and London Thor) and Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway) — have been locked inside a high security, underground supe prison for young adults known publicly as the Elmira Adult Rehabilitation Center. The trio, along with Andre Anderson (Chance Perdomo), were all thrown inside during Gen V’s season one finale, where they’ve spent the last almost year contained, undergoing traumatic experiences.
Following actor Perdomo’s death ahead of season two, the show made the choice not to recast his character, Andre, and instead write his death into the show’s season two storyline inside Elmira. With a trailer that has already teased Marie, Jordan and Emma’s release, what does the return to Godolkin mean for each of the young supes and their relationships?
“The entire season of The Boys has happened, so everybody’s going to be in a very different place, and it’s going to cause a lot of problems between everybody,” Fazekas teases.
Part of those problems will be about how these supes individually navigate the loss of Andre and their release, or escape, from Elmira, as well as their relationships with one another. Not only were Marie, Jordan, Emma, Sam, Cate and Andre somewhat friends, several were in romantic entanglements, and the decisions they made around Shetty, Andre and Homelander will undoubtedly affect their chemistry on all fronts.
“Jordan and Marie were in that sort of early stage,” Fazekas says of where they ended their relationship in season one. “It’s a bad time to have a massive thing happen, but it also forces them to confront it.”
Part of that journey for the duo will continue to emerge through Jordan’s grappling with their own view of their gender identity. While Fazekas says Marie’s storyline around her sexuality was sorted during a season one dorm room conversation with Emma, “the Jordan story this season is that Jordan kind of still cares. Jordan has a lot of ideas about what is okay and what is not okay. Or, Jordan has ideas about assuming what the other person is thinking about them in whatever gender presentation. So Jordan has some stuff to learn about themselves.”
Fazekas adds that Jordan’s storyline has been shaped by a writer in the trans community who helped steer the conversations and representation around the character’s arcs for the Gen V room. “He was great at being like, ‘Hey, this thing that you maybe think is no big deal is actually a little bit offensive,’” Fazekas recalls. “Or he would be really good at pointing out, ‘Oh, this is an issue that you can talk about,’ and so that was so important for us and to us. I’m fine to make fun of anybody, but I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
For Emma and Sam, who start the series in even more different places than Jordan, Fazekas notes that in terms of their feelings for one another, “it’s still there, but has now festered.”
Much of the lift in terms of their relationship — whether it rests at platonic or returns to romantic — will have to come from Sam’s side, the Gen V showrunner adds. “Sam is going to have to accept responsibility for things not only that he’s done the first season, but that he’s done since,” Fazekas tells THR. “So Sam has a choice to make. Are we continuing to work with this, or are we going to come back to who we are — ourselves? Sam has to answer who I am without my brother to define me, without a mental institution to define me, without Cate and boss to define me.”
For Cate, who has been adjacent to — and part of the cause of — two of her partners’ deaths, this season won’t be about finding her way out of what she’s done or what’s coming necessarily through another person, but reckoning with a history of behavior that has put those around her in jeopardy.
“Cate’s story is not at all about finding a partner, but you’re going to figure out very much why,” says Fazekas. “Cate is going to have an incredible challenge that will happen at the end of the first episode. In a similar way to Sam, Cate has to figure out: Who are you and what side are you on?”
Gen V releases Wednesday on Prime Video, with episodes releasing weekly until the Oct. 22 finale.