‘Gen V’ Episode 3 Recap: “#ThinkBrink”

Gen V just keeps getting better, and it’s only the third episode. “#ThinkBrink” is built around a big fancy gala event at Godolkin University. It’s a memorial tribute to Clancy Brown’s Golden Boy-combusted professor, and a silent auction where moneyed donors can bid on stuff like “a private evening with The Deep” – we know how wacko that might get, given the proclivities of Chace Crawford’s aquatic hero character on The Boys – and the parents of student supes can mingle with trustees and Vought executives. More importantly for the young people, the gala is the ground where each individual stands for themselves, owns their powers as an expression of their identity, and begins to see through the mess of ulterior motives, superficial expectations, and parental ambitions that are clogging up the works. In short, the gala is the place where they become who they are.

But let’s start with a flashback.

It’s three years before the events of Gen V, and we join Luke and Cate as they’re taken to Sam’s metal holding cell at Sage Grove, a Vought-controlled psychiatric research facility that previously surfaced in season two of The Boys. “Did you know about this Compound V stuff?” Sam asks his brother, and Luke defends their parents, saying they thought it would be a gift to give their sons powers. (A gift for whom is the question.) A gift? “I got a broken fuckin’ BRAIN!” Sam shouts, and promptly puts his fist through a security guard’s gullet. In the present, Cate awakens in the dorm after her seizure. With the evidence that Sam is actually alive and being held in The Woods, Andre wants to mount a rescue operation. But Cate cautions that they can’t just rush in, and instead they have sex. Maybe as a distraction, or a tribute to their feelings for the fallen Golden Boy? Then again, maybe it’s just college. 

In her own dorm, Marie discovers Emma at her tiniest. Like, a speck. It’s not an eating disorder, Emma says of her purge-induced power, and Marie gently suggests her friend might seek help –  she was so tiny she could barely move. Which prompts Emma to toss it right back. “You cut yourself,” she says of her roommate’s method for accessing her bloodborne powers. “Are you gonna get help for that?” Gen V is great in these moments, as it illustrates how diagnoses of disordered physical and mental health can be exacerbated by Compound V warping but also defining how these characters view themselves. One day becoming a hero or a supe celeb is just one thing. Each of them understanding their powers on an intrinsic level is quite another, and way more significant.

Indira Shetty is continuing to butter up Marie with an icky mix of bestie and motherly. She wants to “show her off” at the gala, help make stick the “Guardian of Godolkin” tag conceived of by Vought and the trustees. And Emma’s mom also barges onto campus, looking very Real Housewives-y in her blonde blowout, rope gold, and expensive heels. “How’s your eating?” she asks, not really waiting for an answer. “When I was fired from the Vought Shopping Network, did I curl up and die?” It’s her plan to use the benefit to reinvent Emma’s public-facing brand – i.e., make lots of cash – while not respecting her daughter’s thoughts on the matter. Jordan’s parents show up at the dorm, too, interrupting a sex session they’re having as their female self; Jordan switches to their male identity to greet them. No matter how much dad would wish his child’s gender to be exclusive, no matter how much he exclusively uses he/him pronouns, Jordan stands as their own person. “I’m not a boy, dad. Not all the time.”

At the gala, administrators, trustees, alumni, and parents all roll up in their tuxes and gowns, and Marie, Andre, Cate, Emma, and Jordan are soon enduring hell. Lots of empty schmoozing (Shetty: “These people don’t want to hear the truth, and you don’t want to say it”) and people like Vought marketing exec Courtenay Fortney (a cutting, hilarious Jackie Tohn), who gets with Emma’s mom to whiteboard “Eatin’ Alive” or “Feelin’ Small” as Little Cricket rebrands. Her daughter calls it for what it is. At base, this is exploitation that ignores her personal agency. Emma tells her mom to go fuck herself and walks outside to smoke a J.

Which is where she encounters Andre, similarly frustrated by his father’s blatant attempts to ingratiate him into the donor class feeding frenzy. Polarity ignored his son’s pertinent questions about The Woods – “Don’t say another fucking word about this,” he whispered harshly, fear in his eyes – so Andre, with the understanding that his dad not only knows about the secret facility, but isn’t willing to go hero on saving anyone held there, is gonna enact his own plan. He shows Emma the video of Sam’s detention. She can get small, right? Would she be interes–that’s all he’s gotta say, and soon a tiny Emma is slipping underneath the secret entrance into The Woods, dwarfed by the GPS tag that will track her recon mission. She locates Sam, and they immediately like each other, especially since they actually recognize and respect their mutual personhood. And so, when a sadistic security guard barges in and starts beating the crap out of Sam, Emma takes some action of her own. In keeping with The Boys/Gen V universe’s adoration for “Yeah, we went there” gore, she burrows right into the guard’s ear canal and forces her way through his brain to exit on the other side.

The young supes at the center of Gen V have come to understand that what they see in the open at Godolkin is not supportive, not designed for acceptance, and is in fact a facade that masks Vought’s true intentions. (Related: what did their parents know, and when did they know it?) What they must do now is sort out who will listen. 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.