The Latest 'Gen V' NFSW Moment Isn't as Clever As It Thinks It Is
In the opening minutes of Gen V's fourth episode, an investigator jokes about a massive wound in a security guard's head. If you've been following along with The Boys spinoff so far, you may have a guess as to where he's going with this. "Maybe Sam penetrated the ear canal with his... member?" he guesses. His partner responds, "That's the sum total of your searing insight? That Sam skullf*cked him?"
When I watch Gen V, I'm often asking myself the same question: "That's the sum total of your searing insight?" Here's the perfect example. In Episode Four, a new character, Rufus, attempts to use his psychic powers to sexually assault the main character, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair). Breaking out of Rufus's psychic trance, Marie uses her blood powers to engorge and explode his... "member," as the show calls it. "Cocksplosion!" Marie's friend says. Please.
There's a world in which this is a powerful scene about an assaulter who immediately gets their just deserts. Instead, Rufus—and the event in question—bare no overarching importance to the episode. Leave it on the cutting room floor, and the crux of the show is the same as it was before. Hell, we didn't even meet Rufus until just now, and his whole penis-exploding plot lasts about three minutes before he (and his third limb) is presumably gone for good.
Gross-out humor is hard to pull off. How do you toe the line between so-disgusting-that-it's-funny and so-disgusting-that-you-want-to-puke? Not everyone has the deft hand of a director like Paul Feig, who had us cracking up when the Bridesmaids cast shit their wedding dresses. Or a transgressive filmmaker like John Waters, who used a rosary as a dildo in 1970's Multiple Maniacs. “The rosary job in Multiple Maniacs wasn’t about shocking people, it was about attacking censorship," Waters told Dazed back in 2017. "We thought up something that there was no law against showing... it was political."
What's disappointing about this aspect of Gen V so far is that The Boys is capable of good satire. In a spoof of Marvel's Ant-Man back in Season Three, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke depicted a tiny hero who accidentally sneezed inside of his lover's urethra—which triggers his return to normal size. Naturally, his poor partner implodes. Disgusting? Yes. Shocking? Yes. But it was funny, too—the moment clearly riffed on the memes about how Ant-Man could destroy Thanos from the inside out in Avengers: Infinity War. Kripke didn't hide from the comparison, either. "Once you realize you're gonna do a tiny Ant-Man character, you have to have that Ant-Man run up someone's butt and then blow them up," he told EW.
Last week, Gen V loosely replicated this scene with a new character, Little Cricket (Lizzie Broadway). Cricket also wields shrinking powers, so what happens in her sex scene? You guessed it—she climbs another student's penis like a tree. He asks the one-inch-tall girl if... it's the biggest dick she's ever seen. At most, it's a cheap joke in an overlong scene that's completely outside the plot.
The same goes for a new plot in Episode Four, which involved an on-air investigative journalist who can't stop sticking his penis in any object he can find. Plus, there's a second skull-f*cking joke. But like the shrunken sex scene, the transparent shock of seeing something explicit overtakes the seeds of an actual message. We're seeing a dick explode—not thinking about the horrors of living as a woman on a college campus in 2023. There's no weight here, no meaning, and no victory worth having. Yet again, it's the sum total of Gen V's searing insight.
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