Gen V Season 1 Episode 7 Review: Sick
Gen V offers its most chaos yet in the penultimate episode of its first season. Gen V Season 1 Episode 7, “Sick” (written by Chelsea Grate and directed by Shana Stein) hooks you from its horror movie-like opening.
Captives in The Woods are dying gruesome, blistering deaths from the virus while the Godolkin gang tries to figure out how to stop Shetty. A convenient reveal from Cardosa while Jordan and Marie are hiding in her office leads to a less convenient plan: they’ll use the visit from Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) for a debate to expose The Woods.
With the gang split up, there is a flurry of subplots that set up this group of characters for hard choices and surprising turns. While some get less to work with than others (Emma is mostly off-screen on a snack run, Andre has to deal with his daddy issues), there is a lot of meat to this episode.
The strongest part is that it circles back to Marie’s story, something Gen V sidelined in the middle of the season in favor of an ensemble show. While I’ve grown to love the whole cast, it feels important that Gen V sees Marie’s storyline through.
Her meeting with Neuman, and the reveal that Neuman is the one who got her into Godolkin because they share the same powers, is a satisfying twist you don’t see coming. Viewers of The Boys knew she had powers, but not how they matched Marie’s.
Knowing how hard Neuman had to fight and scrap to get where she is, it makes sense she’s so eager to mold Marie into her image and it makes Neuman almost sympathetic. It also reminds you a little bit of how Shetty tried to use Cate by connecting with her.
Just like that Marie is brought back to a fork in the road, though this time she’s the one with the power to choose her future. Neuman offers to handle the virus and let Marie go back to being a student who wants to join the Seven.
Jaz Sinclair’s performance captures the conflict this presents for Marie, whose idea of what it means to be a hero has shifted so dramatically. All she wanted was to get her sister back, but now she questions whether she has a greater responsibility to the world.
Cate, on the other hand, doesn’t feel like she has any choice which explains why she decides to go against Shetty and use her powers to end her. After an initial fake-out that makes it seem like Cate accepts Shetty because she loves her, she twists the knife (or rather Shetty twists it herself, committing suicide).
Fans hoping for a Cate redemption arc should be careful what they wish for. Sure Cate technically ends up on the side of the other students, but the ordeal pushes her to the edge of wanting a complete revolution against normal humans.
Her radicalization, in tandem with Sam’s after getting exposed to “superhero rights activists” at a student rally, shows the dark side of what it means for these heroes to make their own choices. Are they heroes for rebelling against their oppressors or on the path to becoming just as corrupt and vile as other superheroes?
Gen V leaves you with a lot of questions left for it to answer about the future of these characters we’ve grown to invest in. We are seeing their origin stories as heroes, but it’s important to remember that villains have origin stories too.
As exciting as this episode is, it may also be the first one of the season that chafes too much against the need to be connected to a larger universe. There’s so much going on that there’s not much time to fully explain to the audience why Neuman or CIA operative Grace Mallory (Laila Robins), whom Shetty visits, are so important.
Mallory’s veiled reference to Butcher as Shetty’s fellow countryman who also hates supes made me cringe at how clunky it is. It’s a shame to have viewers get this far in the season just to leave some of them hanging by throwing in two new characters from The Boys without much explanation.
If the episode was less stuffed it might have more room for that necessary explanation. Plot points like the fact that Godolkin University was created by a social scientist as an experiment or Shetty’s family’s murder by Homelander being her motivation could have been sprinkled in earlier.
Shetty and the virus go from threatening all of superhero-kind to being neutralized fairly quickly. There’s always a chance the virus will show up again in the future of The Boys universe (I don’t trust Neuman), but looking at just this it’s a bit anticlimactic.
Resolving the main conflict on a penultimate episode is always a risk, but fans will just have to have faith that the fallout of all this chaos makes for an equally satisfying ending.
Additional Thoughts:
- “That is a normal amount of sex toys”
- Polarity having seizures but it not being virus related is mildly confusing.
- Of course, Rufus is a superhero rights activist.
- Jordan and Marie may not be number one in the student rankings but they did earn the spot for number one couple. They are so cute together.
- Meanwhile, Sam and Emma seem pretty doomed, but maybe they were from the start and the use of romantic indie rock songs distracted me.
- Are the infected ones trapped in The Woods forever? Maybe Neuman should have had Cardosa create a cure instead of killing him.
What did you think of this episode of Gen V? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Gen V streams Fridays on Prime Video.
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Breeze Riley
Breeze Riley is a pop culture fanatic who decided to turn her love of watching too much TV into a hobby writing and podcasting about it. Although she's a convention-going sci-fi and fantasy nerd, she's just as likely to be watching an off-beat comedy or period drama.