[COLUMN] In Gen V, Baby Boomers Are Back With a Vengeance | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the second season of Gen V, which is now streaming in its entirety on Prime Video. It’s… fine. The show still lacks a distinct identity outside of The Boys, and the season descends heavily into lore as it runs, but the cast is charming and the series delivers on most of what it promises. So, if you’re watching along and haven’t watched the finale yet, feel free to bookmark and come back. Add it to your course reading list.

The second season of Gen V begins with a flashback to 1967, introducing the character of Thomas Godolkin (Ethan Slater). Godolkin is the Vought International scientist who would give his name to Godolkin University, or “God-U”, the campus on which Gen V is set. The season opens with what appears to be Godolkin’s final moments. His body is claimed by fire in a lab experiment gone awry. It appears, by all accounts, to be Thomas Godolkin’s death.

Of course, it is not so simple. Jumping forward to the present, Godolkin University has fallen under the stewardship of a mysterious new figure named Cipher (Hamish Linklater). Cipher is a radical, preaching “supe supremacy”, the superiority of the generation of superhumans created by Vought International. The situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that, while Cipher demonstrates superhuman mental powers, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) detects no Compound V in his blood.

Over the course of the season, it is revealed that Thomas Godolkin survived his lab accent. Injecting himself with Compound V, he developed the power to control others. He has operated Cipher – in reality a poor VHS repair man named Doug – as “a meat puppet with no strings.” Godolkin tricks Marie into healing his burnt and decaying body. Godolkin plans to restore things to how they should be, horrified by the college’s decision “to embrace mediocrity, to celebrate novelty acts.”

As with the first season of Gen V, there is a strong sense that the series is restricted by its relationship to The Boys. Godolkin cannot actually have any quantifiable impact on the larger shared universe, because The Boys is getting ready to head into its final season. “This is not part of our plan,” opines Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) in the season finale, in what feels like a particularly on-the-nose acknowledgement of the fact Godolkin will have to be dealt with decisively within Gen V.

The second season of Gen V began with some incisive commentary about the cultural retrenchment that is taking place on contemporary college campuses, capturing the sense in which the authoritarian tendencies of Vought International had entrenched themselves so deeply in higher education. Cipher promised his students “freedom from human constraints and the woke agenda.” Modesty Monarch (Kira Guloien) lectured on “the trad supes movement.”

Cipher transformed “Big Chief Apache’s Diversity and Equity Centre” into a combat arena. Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway) attempted to organize on-campus activists Harper (Jessic Clement) and Ally (Georgie Murphy) to help make their activism more effective rather than both performative and counterproductive. In that opening stretch of the season, there was an understanding of why a college campus was such a fascinating place to set a spin-off from a show as political as The Boys.

However, as the season progressed, Gen V became a lot more plot-driven and exposition-focused, including a big mythology thread built around the possibility that Marie Moreau had been developed as a “chosen one”, potentially rivalling Homelander (Antony Starr). This eventually turns out to be a red herring, a manipulation by Godolkin, but the second season of Gen V largely drifts away from its broader social commentary to get lost in its own lore.

Still, there is something pointed and interesting in the show’s use of Thomas Godolkin as a character and a nemesis. It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the show firmly situates Godolkin’s origin story in 1967. That was the year of the first violent antiwar protest on a college campus, as students at the University of Wisconsin protested the Dow Chemical Company, and a huge turning point in the antiwar movement as a whole. It was a year that student activism made a difference.

Even outside of his origin story, Godolkin evokes the spirit of the 1960s. A headmaster who has the ability to control people’s minds, Godolkin cannot help but evoke the superhero Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart, James McAvoy), the head of the X-Men, who are an obvious influence on the idea of “a school for superheroes.” Tellingly, the only adult who can stand up to Godolkin is Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas), a master of magnetism, immune to Godolkin’s powers – even without a helmet.

This contest between Godolkin and Polarity over the students of the university evokes the earliest X-Men comics, eschewing the complicated shading of the relationship between Charles Xavier and Magneto (Ian McKellen, Michael Fassbender) that would begin under writer Chris Claremont. Gen V positions Godolkin as an artifact of the 1960s, his mental powers allowing him to use others as proxies in waging some larger ongoing culture war on the university campus.

The Boys has crafted an alternate history of the United States, but has largely focused on the 1940s and the 1980s. The universe’s first public superhero was Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), who served during the Second World War, although the show largely skips ahead to his involvement in Reagan era conflicts in places like Nicaragua. Homelander is explicitly a product of the 1980s. It makes sense to focus on these periods of American history, as they loom large in the collective consciousness.

However, the 1960s feel somewhat under-represented within the alternate history framework of The Boys, particularly given the shadow that the decade casts over American culture. The decade realigned American politics, establishing their current configuration. There is a popular argument, advanced by figures like Fred Siegel, that the 1960s never ended. Andy Martin contends “that there is no es­cap­ing the Six­ties, no mat­ter who you are and where you are, even if only by op­po­si­tion.”

There is a strong sense that the 1960s failed to reach a satisfying conclusion for one side of the political divide or the other. 1968, the year after Godolkin’s accident, was defined by assassinations, protests and riots. Culturally, the decade ended with the spectacle of the failed Altamont Concert. This lack of closure was evident during the 1990s, where it felt like a large amount of the prematurely declared “end of history” was given over to relitigating the 1960s in pop culture like Forrest Gump.

Without a clear ending, the 1960s continued to inform and shape contemporary politics and culture. “Sure, it was probably dumb and awful to be there—yet we’re still living in it,” Sam Jennings mused of the decade in July 2024. “We are not its mirror, or its sequel. We are its wake. Very few works of art understand this because most stop at nostalgia. But not Mad Men. And not Jessica Pratt, either. The Sixties are never-ending, until we end them, but apparently that time is not now.”

In some ways, the current political moment is defined by the 1960s. Historian Andrew Hartman contends the nostalgia of “Make America Great Again” is rooted in “the argument that things went downhill in the 1960s.” In 2016, 72% of Trump voters agreed America had changed for the worse since the 1950s. Gen V understands much of the social change that scares these voters began on college campuses during the 1960s – and so much reactionary thought is defined in opposition to it.

“The ’60s revolution and the political, cultural and sexual protests at the time essentially became institutionalized, and it challenged fundamental notions of what was right, decent, good, fair and so on,” contends James Davison Hunter. “The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment culture got carried by universities [and] other important cultural institutions, and these cultural institutions are dominated by supermajorities of progressives. Conservatives see this as an existential threat.”

That conflict is still raging. Indeed, it feels like it has reached boiling point again. In this context, it is worth acknowledging that the past few years have seen an explosion in contemporary college campus protests around issues like the War in Gaza or encroaching totalitarianism. Students protesting an unpopular foreign war and for greater civil rights? The 1960s are still being litigated in real time, in what can feel like a proxy battle as part of a larger culture war.

Gen V doesn’t delve too deeply into any of this. As the season progresses, it becomes less pointedly and less overtly political, which is a shame given how (unintentionally) charged the fourth season finale of The Boys ended up being. As Godolkin arrives in the university established in his honor, looking just like he did more than half-a-century earlier, ready to pick up exactly where he left off and to whip what he perceives to be a decadent student body into shape, these ideas bubble through.

The very title of Gen V suggests a series about a younger generation of heroes, specifically evoking Gen Z. If this is to be a show about a generation coming into its own, forging their own path, it makes perfect sense that the “final boss” of the sophomoric season should be the living manifestation of an older generation. The climax of the second season of Gen V is a literal expression of that tension between Gen Z and Baby Boomers.

Godolkin is explicitly parasitic. He is a dying old man who lives on by asserting control over those younger than him – feeding off their lives to sustain himself. In some ways, the second season of Gen V makes an interesting companion piece to Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a movie that is built around a similar conceit. Gen V is a horror story about the fear that the Baby Boomers will never surrender the power that they hold – whether economic, political or cultural.

While Gen V struggles to find its own identity and purpose, to articulate a clear and coherent perspective separate from that of The Boys, the show understands that the scars of the 1960s linger on in the American consciousness – particularly on college campuses.