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It's official: Gen V is the The Boys season 3.5

Don't call it a spin-off, there's more to the new Prime Video series than meets the eye

Published on Mon Sep 25 2023

Fans of Prime Video’s The Boys impatient for the next season might want to make sure they’re paying attention to Gen V when it debuts this Friday — officially billed as a spin-off of Prime’s dark superhero comedy, it’s actually far closer to a secret Season 3.5 of the main show.

Showrunner Eric Kripke has previously said that Gen V “takes place between The Boys Seasons 3 & 4. With some storylines that carry over to S4.” But it goes further than that, because there are a lot of characters from The Boys who’ll be showing up in Gen V, and some of them are kind of important to The Boys and the world of The Boys as a whole.

A glimpse at Jensen Ackles’ return as Soldier Boy has already been released, with the actor having described his cameo as being primarily improvised alongside Kripke. “We were spitballing ideas and workshopping literally in between takes,” he told a convention crowd back in April. Soldier Boy is just one of a number of Boys characters who’ll be visiting Gen V’s Godolkin University in the show’s first season, however: also set to appear are A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) and The Deep (Chace Crawford), as well as Vought International acting CEO Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie), and Congresswoman Victoria Neuman, as played by Claudia Doumit.

The appearances of Neuman and The Deep might be of particular interest might be viewers, given that the last time they were seen, The Deep was murdering Lamar Bishop, setting up Neuman to be selected as the VP pick for Robert Singer — placing her deeper into debt to Homelander and the Seven, and arguably making her Butcher’s primary target in upcoming episodes of The Boys.

How much of this background intrigue will play out onscreen in Gen V remains to be seen — the series’ focus are the superhuman students of Godolkin U, which is essentially the Xavier School as seen through the lens of The Boys-verse — but their appearance is sure to set up some drama for the (already filmed) fourth season of the original series, whenever it’s set to arrive.

Gen V debuts on Prime Video September 29.

Want to catch up on The Boys in the best way possible? We’ve got a watch order to help with that.

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Graeme McMillan: Popverse Editor Graeme McMillan (he/him) has been writing about comics, culture, and comics culture on the internet for close to two decades at this point, which is terrifying to admit. He completely understands if you have problems understanding his accent.