Related Articles
With overlapping stories like those we see in the MCU and shows like The Boys, plot points and character development are often times theoretically planned out way in advance, while the whole story is a march toward something inevitable. Other times, things just happen to work out. That’s what we learned from speaking with Gen V showrunner Michele Fazekas, while discussing the recently wrapped first season.
There are lots of dorks in the world of The Boys, like the infamous Love Sausage. But there are also some massively powerful characters like Homelander. When we first meet Marie Moreau, it seems like her power–the ability to control blood–is destined to be used as a weapon and little more. By the end of Season 1, though, we’re left wondering–what can’t she do with these abilities?
Then, Marie met Congressman Victoria Neuman. Without telling Marie directly, Neuman walks the younger supe into a revelation: they have the same powers. Given we first saw Neuman exploding heads in The Boys Season 2 in 2020, that certainly seems like something that’s long been in the works. It wasn’t, though.
“It came out when we were breaking episode seven,” Fazekas said. “It just sort of organically was an idea that the writers’ room figured out. [Series creator Eric Kripke] had suggested, ‘oh, it would be cool if Victoria Neuman came to campus as part of her, you know, sort of campaign stop.’ I think we always knew that Victoria Neuman was her benefactor, but we never knew why.”
“We had sort of come up with the writers, in the writers’ room, like, ‘Oh, we could connect their powers.’ It was a really nice sort of organic thing that fit into the existing story,” Fazekas continued.
While Gen V Season 1 had a great cast of charismatic characters, Marie was always at the center–our viewpoint into the Gen V world, Fazekas said. She entered God U with great excitement, as it represented an escape from her life of imprisonment in an orphanage for Supes. As the season closes out, though, she wakes up in a literal prison.
“[Marie has] gone from a sort of idealism to disillusionment here, which is I think a very adolescent thing to experience, like when you start to see the world for what it is. But now she’s gone to, ‘Oh my god, everything in the world is terrible,’ So now her challenge is, ‘Okay, the world is not what I thought. What I wanted is not what I actually want. So now what?'” Fazekas said.
“I don’t have people telling me what to do. I don’t have the orphanage telling me what to do. I don’t have Vought telling me what to do,” Fazekas continued, describing Marie’s point of view. “So I kind of have to figure out what I want and how I want to be.”
Indeed, not even Marie knows her true power. In the finale, she took a blast straight on from Homelander and instead of being lreduced to a pool or blood or a burning husk like most of his targets, she wakes up in a high-security hospital bed.
“[Marie] does not know how powerful she is. There may be something special about her,” Fazekas said, though she acknowledged that there may be more to it than that. “Also, Homelander may have a need for…I think there’s a lot of different interpretations of that.” Homeland, of course, came to end a riot that had erupted when the young supes being experimented on by God U escaped. Meanwhile, Vought executive Ashley Barrett was there trying to quell the events from a public relations perspective.
Homelander may have been under orders from Ashley not to kill a girl who is the first young black woman to achieve top ranking at the school. Increasingly, though, Homelander has also been scheming on his own, and may even have his own agenda for her.
While Fazekas didn’t have anything concrete to say about the future of Marie and the other kids, we also discussed whether or not they had a chance to succeed in the first place.
“I think what I really love about telling the story from this time in their lives is…they go into the system and it almost is like they don’t have a chance. But so you could see these kids going in and see how this place corrupts them. It’s going to be very interesting because we’ll have all of Season 4 of The Boys between our Season 1 and 2. So a lot of that has a lot of impact on what our season 2 looks like and the world is gonna be very different,” Fazekas said.
As to whether the kids had a chance to come out of God U unscathed, “I actually think it’s really hard. Eric Kripke, he says there’s no way you would want superpowers, it would be terrible to have superpowers. But I think anybody who is actually a hero and actually a good person is going to have a very hard time in the current way Vought exists.”
As to whether there’s such a thing as a ‘good’ Supe, “I bet you Eric [Kripke] probably thinks you couldn’t be a good superhero. However, I might have a slightly more optimistic viewpoint.”
