The Big Picture

The season finale of Gen V leads to chaos and bloodshed on the university campus, setting up events for Season 2 and crossover with Season 4 of The Boys. Showrunner Michele Fazekas and executive producer Eric Kripke discuss the importance of that cameo in the final scene and how it sets up future storylines. The characters of Cate Dunlap and Sam Riordan experience significant character development, with Cate’s journey toward embracing her power and Sam’s struggle with morality and redemption.

[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for the season finale of Gen V.]The season finale of Gen V saw a terrifying supe team-up lead to blood splattered terror on the Godolkin University campus, turning lives upside down and leaving everyone in a place they never could have imagined. It’s anyone’s guess what will come next for Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), Andre Anderson (Chance Perdomo), Jordan Li (Derek Luh and London Thor), Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway), Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and Sam Riordan (Asa Germann), so it’s good to know that not only will there be a Season 2, but some of these events will bleed into Season 4 of The Boys, which could lead to some answers even sooner.

During this interview with Collider, showrunner Michele Fazekas and executive producer Eric Kripke talked about that standout final scene, setting up important moments in Gen V that can carry forward into The Boys, that being broken doesn’t mean Cate is a full villain, how the Emma and Sam relationship shows that you can’t solve your problems through romance, and why that cameo in the penultimate scene was the perfect time and place.

Collider: A lot happens in this finale. I want to start at the end and the fact that this group of supes we’ve been watching all season are fractured, there’s a lot of blood and murder, Homelander is clearly not messing around, and then Billy Butcher shows up. After all the craziness, it put a smile on my face to see Billy Butcher. Did you want to leave the season with a bit of comic relief, at the end?

ERIC KRIPKE: I’m glad that you found it funny, and that has a lot to do with Karl [Urban]’s delivery of the word, “Cunt.” But the intent was to start setting the table for Season 4 of The Boys. It’s not a spoiler to say that the virus that was created in Gen V plays a big part of the storyline in Season 4 and that we knew we wanted Butcher to be aware of it. That’s really one of the fun things of having these two series, you can go back and set up an important step in Michele [Fazekas]’ show, and then carry it forward into ours.

Image via Prime Video

I also love that he’s a character that is so well-defined that just a moment with a few words and a smirk says so much. Was that a situation where you knew you could do so little and yet it still would be such a big moment?

MICHELE FAZEKAS: I think that’s a credit to Karl.

KRIPKE: Yeah. I remember when we were writing that moment, we were playing around with, “Does he say more? Does he interact with anybody?” And we were like, “Why?”

FAZEKAS: Keep it simple.

KRIPKE: Yeah. At that point, we’ve worked with Karl for three seasons now and, as you said, he can always do so much, in between the lines. You don’t have to give him a lot, you just know that he’ll nail it.

How do you think he feels about what’s happened and what’s going on? Is he just as annoyed as everything else he’s always annoyed about?

KRIPKE: I think he loves how many dead supes there are. Anyone who can kill a supe and do his job for him, he’s happy about.

FAZEKAS: I bet he loves that he’s just come upon a place where they were torturing supes. He’d be like, “Fantastic!”

KRIPKE: Yeah, that’s Disneyland for him.

FAZEKAS: He’s thankful to have a way to kill them.

KRIPKE: One of the things we love most about both shows is that who you look at as the good guys in The Boys flips and are the villains in Gen V, and vice versa. Shetty would be a hero in The Boys. It just all depends on your perspective.

Image via Prime Video

When you were setting up the finale for this season, were you thinking about Season 2 and what you could dig deeper into and continue to explore, and were you also thinking about leading into Season 4 of The Boys? Were you trying to do both of those things at once?

FAZEKAS: Yeah, you have to. Eric and I never wanna make it where the worlds are so interconnected that you really have to watch them both or you’re gonna be totally lost. I think we’ve been successful at that. We knew that between our Season 1 and 2 was gonna be Season 4 of The Boys, so we had to speak to both of those things.

We went on a very interesting journey with Cate this season, from girlfriend to the reveal that she was secretly working with Shetty to killing Shetty, and then killing a whole lot of people. What is her true goal? Does she even know what that is, at this point? Is still a chance of redemption for her?

FAZEKAS: I feel like a lot of her journey this season was accepting how powerful she is. She, for a really long time, had been told, and it is somewhat of a gender thing too, “You need to stand behind the man that is Golden Boy, and you need to stay in the background, and you’re not gonna be too flashy.” And then, as she’s put under so much pressure from all sides and it breaks her, in the breaking, she realizes how powerful she is. And I don’t think she’s a full villain. Yeah, she’s broken and she’s now killing people and stuff, but you at least understand why it’s happened and that it is not entirely her fault. She was pushed, in some ways, to this place. Did she have to kill Shetty? No, she wanted to kill Shetty. But you understand why. Shetty was psychologically torturing her for years, even though I think Shetty loved her and I think Kate loved Shetty. It’s messy, which I really like.

Image via Prime Video

There was something so pure and sweet about the relationship between Emma and Sam that it felt like it was going to be this guiding light for him, only that didn’t last very long. Is he just too damaged to be able to draw a moral line anymore?

FAZEKAS: He doesn’t know how yet. He hasn’t been taught that. No one is irredeemable. Being irredeemable is boring. Everyone can be redeemed, I feel like. I even think Butcher can be redeemed. I don’t know if Eric thinks that.

KRIPKE: Yeah, I do.

FAZEKAS: Yes, there’s a point of no return, but I feel like for Sam, humans have tortured him and incarcerated him and are responsible for his brother’s death. He also doesn’t have a lot of life experience and he’s still somewhat arrested, emotionally, so he’s very susceptible to manipulation. Even when he was trying to fight back, Cate pushed him like, “Oh, you’re fine, don’t feel anything.” So, there’s good in him still. I think it’s always going to be fighting its way up.

KRIPKE: What I love about that particular story and what Michele and her [writers’] room did with that is that it takes a very traditional young adult trope, which is that the love of a good woman can help this damaged person heal themselves, and really deconstructs that. That doesn’t fix mental illness. You can’t solve your problem through romance. That scene that the two of them share, I think it’s brutal and heart wrenching for a lot of reasons, but I love the honesty of it, which is, “You’re only happy when you’re telling me not to murder people, or not to do things that are in my nature or that are things that I want to do.” That’s just not how a relationship actually works. You can’t just fix people like that. I think it’s just a really honest depiction of a relationship.

Homelander shows up and after everything he’s done, he has the nerve to call Marie an animal. Did you always hope or plan to have Homelander in the season finale? Was that always part of the plan?

FAZEKAS: We always did hope that Homelander would show up and we also knew that we weren’t gonna get a ton of chances to ring that bell, so we wanted to make sure it was special. We also don’t wanna overly rely on cameos. We wanna be our own show. As Eric put it, you call Superman in to save the day and Superman’s on the bad guy side, which is such a funny way of interpreting it, but it’s exactly right. Homelander had come up in different episodes, where we were like, “Is this where we see him? Is this where we see him?” And then, it just made sense that the penultimate scene of the season seemed like the right place.

Image via Prime Video

And that leads to leaving a good chunk of your cast in a doorless, windowless room. What can you say to tease how they’re going to get out of that?

FAZEKAS: We’ve got a whole season of The Boys between our first and second seasons, so there’s gonna be a lot happening between now and then.

KRIPKE: There’s a hatch on the ceiling, just saying.

They just haven’t found the right button to get themselves out yet.

FAZEKAS: That’s right.

KRIPKE: Yeah.

Gen V is available to stream at Prime Video.