‘Gen V’ Showrunner Breaks Down Massive Godolkin Battle and Cliffhanger Fate for Marie and Team
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SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Episode 8 of “Gen V,” the Season 1 finale (“Guardians of Godolkin”), now streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video.
Marie (Jaz Sinclair) survived her first semester at supe college Godolkin University — barely — but it doesn’t look like she’s going into a second one any time soon. As the Season 1 finale of “The Boys” spinoff “Gen V” concludes, Marie and her friends stuck inside some kind of hospital room with no doors and no clue how they got there.
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For now, “Gen V” co-showrunner Michele Fazekas is mum on what comes next. “You’ll find out,” she teases, when asked by Variety about where exactly Marie, Andre (Chance Perdomo), Jordan (Derek Luh/London Thor) and Emma (Lizze Broadway) are being held and who is holding them, following that massive battle on the God U grounds.
But Fazekas and “Gen V” executive producer/”The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke did give a few hints about where the show goes in Season 2, which has already been given an early renewal by Prime Video ahead of “The Boys” Season 4 airing.
See below for more from Fazekas and Kripke on the “Gen V” finale.
Michele, no doors in this hospital-like room that they’re in. Where are they? With Vought, with The Boys or somewhere else?
Fazekas: You’ll find out.
That wasn’t any of the options! How long did it take to shoot that finale battle scene? And Eric, how did it compare to filming a large-scale battle on “The Boys”?
Fazekas: Next to the pilot, we had the the most number of shoot days on that episode. It was very big and complicated. We had a great producer up in Toronto who’s like, ‘I’m gonna just squirrel away money for this episode.’ It’s always never enough time and never enough money. But that was a very, very big episode. And obviously the first draft was even bigger and we couldn’t do that.
Kripke: If I remember correctly, just the exterior stuff outside with Marie and Jordan and all that, and Andre fighting Sam and and the chaos of it, it was five days or more just to bang all that out. Which is a lot for a 10-to-12-day show. And how does it compare to “The Boys”? In a way, it makes it really impressive. “The Boys,” now that it’s a junior or senior in high school, we get a lot more days, so we get a lot more time. When you’re new and you have to prove yourself, you have to be really scrappy, because you have much less time and money to do it — but it also has to be as good. You cannot be able to tell a difference or drop in quality, even though you have all of these restrictions in being a new show. That’s a really stressful, hard challenge that you’re asking of them. All the credit to Michele and her team, because that is not easy.
Marie surviving Homelander’s attack — Andre makes the comment about how not everyone could have done that. Was that a throwaway line, or will there be a reveal in Season 2 about what is special in Marie that allowed her to survive?
Fazekas: I will say that there is a reason and we will get into it in Season 2. It wasn’t just, ‘we need her alive, so let’s just have her survive.’ There’s a reason.
Kripke: I will also say, this is unconnected to her reasons, so it’s not a spoiler or anything, but Marie is not the first superhero in the history of these shows who survives Homelander’s blasts.
Is Vought currently constructing Cate some kind of cool, bionic hand?
Kripke: The only slippery banana on the show is the superpowers. I get pitched “Iron Man” shit all day and I’m like, but there’s no one in the world who has the technological knowhow to make all of that. It’s our world, there just happens to be this blue juice that gives you powers. There’s no high techy stuff. So maybe real prosthetics, we can give her a hook.
Were there any discussions about actually making someone a member of The Seven by the end of the season?
Fazekas: It’s always the carrot that they’re holding out. But we didn’t ever really think, ‘and then we’re going to see somebody join The Seven.’ I like having that as, ‘hey, if you stay in line, maybe you’ll get this thing.’ We knew that we weren’t going to end there.
Why wasn’t Emma able to bring Sam over from Cate’s side, given Emma was the only person he really knew all season and their romantic bond?
Fazekas: He’s damaged and he’s sort of the most vulnerable out of all of them. He’s spent so much of his time locked up and tortured, essentially. So he’s very susceptible to outside influences. I think there’s something that really resonates with him about this: humans hurt us, humans are responsible for my brother’s death, humans hurt me — and he’s not wrong, that is all true. But he’s vulnerable, and he’s vulnerable to Cate and he’s vulnerable to Rufus and so it just sort of makes sense. He doesn’t have the life experience to be able to critically think about everything.
Can Emma get small without purging now — is that what we’re supposed to assume from her shrinking down when she is sad after Sam leaves?
Fazekas: Yeah, she gets sad and has no idea! It’s the first time she’s ever experienced that.
You’ve already been renewed. Where are you on Season 2 right now?
Fazekas: We had the second season writers room running prior to the writers strike and then we had a very big pause. And so we came back after the strike and I had a few days of like, ‘what did we say? What is the show?’ But we’re in it now. We know what the general season looks like and we know some tentpoles and we’re breaking episodes.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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