This review and recap of Gen V Season 1, Episode 6, “Jumanji,” and how it’s The Boys telling a classic X-Men story contains spoilers.
As the first season of Gen V rushes into its endgame, it remains a perfectly serviceable superhero show. It’s well made and has a charming cast, but it also increasingly feels like the kind of superhero story that The Boys would mercilessly parody.
Gen V obviously owes a sizable debt to X-Men, both the established comic book brand and the feature films that helped to launch the modern comic book movie boom. This is particularly obvious in “Jumanji,” an episode that – despite a somewhat gratuitous cameo from Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) – feels like a classic X-Men story. This is reflected in the story’s format, its key dramatic beats, and in its cliffhanger revelations.
The plot of “Jumanji” finds the lead characters trapped inside Cate’s (Maddie Phillips) head. While inside, the characters get to experience a host of strange imagery that provides both necessary backstory on Cate and which helps expand their understanding of the deeper conspiracy at Godolkin University. It’s not the most nuanced or subtle storytelling tool, but it works. It covers a lot of narrative real estate with an admirable efficiency.
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The journey into another’s psyche is a common narrative device. It is the central conceit of The Cell, for example. Still, the use of this sort of telepathy to advance a longform serialized plot has been employed a number of times in X-Men comics. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely used it to great effect in New X-Men #121 in early 2002. Nearly two decades later, Jonathan Hickman and Russell Dauterman would pay homage to that concept in Giant-Size X-Men: Jean Grey and Emma Frost #1.
Of course, Cate herself is a character who feels indebted to Emma Frost. She is a beautiful (and somewhat caustic) young blonde woman with telepathic gifts, who ultimately turns out to be somewhat more sympathetic than her initially cold demeanor would suggest. There are undoubtedly shades of Rogue in there as well, in her tendency to wear gloves so that she doesn’t accidentally touch anyone and affect them with her powers. As such, the comparison feels somewhat earned.
With the first season of Gen V heading into its final two episodes, “Jumanji” allows the show to rush through some character development and exposition. Trapped inside Cate’s head, Marie (Jaz Sinclair), Andre (Chance Perdomo), and Jordan (London Thor and Derek Luh) each have their darkest secrets exposed to one another. It forces the characters to confront themselves and each other. As a narrative device, it’s solid and sturdy.
Of course, Gen V runs into one of its central recurring issues here. None of the characters face any real consequences for their actions, with the show reluctant to hold any of its leads to account for what they have done. It frequently seems like it’s enough that these characters feel bad about the harm that they have caused, rather than seeking to meaningfully atone or grapple with it in any substantive way.
This is most obvious with Cate. “Welcome to the Monster Club” revealed that Cate had been violating her friends’ trust for an extended period. She had been using her powers to wipe their minds. It was a horrific abuse of power, one that the series compared to Rufus’ (Alexander Calvert) history of sexual assault. How does a person forgive a supposed friend for such an intimate and corrosive violation of their autonomy? Gen V seems to suggest that the answer is “easily.”
“Jumanji” opens with Cate handily reversing her abuse of Emma (Lizze Broadway). “Remember everything I made you forget,” Cate instructs her friend. That is all that it takes. Emma immediately leaves to tend to Sam (Asa Germann), with only a brief cursing out directed at Cate. That seems like a modest penalty to pay. When Andre voices his anger at Cate, Marie defends her. “She was fucked over, just like the rest of us,” Marie insists.
By the end of the episode, even Sam has managed to work past his anger towards Cate, despite her involvement in the death of his brother, Luke (Patrick Schwarzenegger). “I know you guys don’t trust me,” Cate concedes. Marie responds, “Yeah, and you’re going to have to work really hard to get it back.” This seems a little trite, given what Cate has done to these characters over the previous two episodes. It cements the sense in which this is just a standard superhero narrative.
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It feels at odds with the narrative logic of The Boys, where the transgressions of nominal heroes like A-Train (Jesse T. Usher) or The Deep (Chace Crawford) take years to resolve. It doesn’t feel organic for these characters to forgive Cate so easily, even with the narrative contrivance of Cate’s near-death experience to force the issue. It is unearned, and it only really makes sense because Gen V needs its protagonists to press ahead as a united front, a conventional superhero team.
“Jumanji” doesn’t just borrow directly from X-Men comics. It also riffs on the feature films. The flashback sequence of Shetty (Shelley Conn) meeting Cate evokes the scenes of Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart, James McAvoy) meeting Jean Grey (Famke Janssen, Sophie Turner) in both X-Men: The Last Stand and Dark Phoenix. These are scenes of a headmaster of a school for superheroes meeting a young telepathic girl whose abilities have begun to scare her family.
Still, these are just the basic narrative elements of “Jumanji” that draw from the larger X-Men franchise. The episode’s final scene reveals Shetty’s villainous plot. The series has been hinting quite ominously at what Shetty has planned through the experiments that Cardosa (Marco Pigossi) is conducting in the Woods. It initially seems that Shetty and Cardossa have been trying to figure out a way to control superheroes. However, “Jumanji” reveals more sinister ambitions.
Under Shetty’s instruction, Cardosa increases the viral dosage to the test subject (Briana-Lynn Brieiro). It kills her. This horrifies Cardosa, but it excites Shetty. “So the virus worked?” Shetty observes of the corpse. She only has one question. “Now, you can you make it contagious?” The implication seems to be that Shetty doesn’t want to control superheroes so much as kill them using a weaponized virus.
Again, this recalls a number of different X-Men plot threads. During the 1990s, the “Legacy” virus, designed by the villain Stryfe, was treated as a none-too-subtle metaphor for AIDS, ravaging the mutant population. During Morrison’s New X-Men run, mutants found themselves under siege both by a flu caused by nano-sentinels and a sentient bacteria that had named itself “Sublime.” It’s not a typical superhero story, but it is a specific X-Men story.
Gen V has already hinted that Shetty has motivations for wanting superheroes dead. Even ignoring the condescension from characters like Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) in “The Whole Truth,” Shetty made a past-tense reference to her family in “#ThinkBrink.” Picking up on a reference during one of their conversations, Marie asked, “You have a daughter?” Shetty replies, “I did.” Given the rules by which the universe of The Boys operates, this sets up a fairly clear character motivation.
Of course, if Shetty is planning to unleash a viral contagion that can kill superheroes, she is effectively committing genocide. “Jumanji” seems to understand this. Pointedly, Cardosa’s panicked response to the death of his subject is “I was just following orders.” Again, this is a familiar X-Men plot beat, one less common in other superhero media. Mutants have faced genocide multiple times, even adopting variations on the real-world mantra “never again” like “no more.”
There is something slightly incongruous in this. It marks a sharp pivot from the narrative logic that underpins The Boys. While the X-Men franchise is built around mutants who happen to be born different from human beings, and so exist as a separate racial group, the superheroes of The Boys and Gen V are created through science. They are children who were dosed with “Compound V.” They are much closer to heroes like the Hulk or Captain America than to mutants.
Related: Gen V: Godolkin University’s Students Meet a Hard Knight in ‘The Whole Truth’
Of course, in “#ThinkBrink,” Cate makes the point that none of these children asked to be injected. “It is not your fault,” Cate assured Marie. “Your parents shot you up with a dangerous drug when you were a baby to make a buck off you.” She’s right. These teenagers were too young to consent to the procedure, and were effectively guinea pigs. At the same time, allowing for the already clumsy and imperfect subtext of mutants as an oppressed racial group, it’s a bigger leap in the world of The Boys.
Watching “Jumanji,” it’s clear that Gen V wants to tell a much more simple and straightforward superhero story than The Boys. However, the episode also demonstrates that this is incredibly difficult within the world established by The Boys. These classic superhero tropes cannot be easily retrofitted into this world, and only serve to clutter and confuse what makes this particular premise so interesting and compelling.
With “Jumanji,” Gen V feels a little too stuck in its own head. It needs to take a look around and contemplate the wider context in which it sits.
