Gen V's Shocking First Episode Harkens Back To A Horror Classic
The first episode of "Gen V" introduces us to Luke (Patrick Schwarzenegger), AKA Golden Boy, the highest-ranked Supe at his all-supe college. He's tough, strong, and he can control fire to an extent that makes Lamplighter's pyrokinetic abilities seem like child's play. Ability-wise, he's the Homelander of the series, a guy so untouchable that not even the rest of the cast combined could likely stand a chance against him. But personality-wise, he's nothing like Homelander at all. He's kind and thoughtful to our protagonist Marie, and although there's clearly some dark backstory going on with him, it doesn't seem like Luke himself has a dark side.
With Patrick Schwarzenegger being perhaps the most famous main cast member, and with his character featured prominently on most of the promotional images for the show, it's easy to have assumed that Golden Boy's gonna be around for awhile. An optimistic take on a Homelander-esque character? A guy who seems happy except for a few strange recurring dreams about "the woods," which will almost certainly be important later on? Sounds like the show's going to give him a fun character arc, right?
Wrong. "God U" ends with Schwarzenegger murdering the school dean, Professor Brinkerhoff, for unexplained reasons that seem vaguely connected to "the woods," and then going on a homicidal rampage that ends with him blowing himself up. One of the only people capable of killing Luke is Luke himself, and he does it in the very first episode. It's a shocking development, one that radically reshapes our understanding of what sort of show this is going to be and how it'll move forward. But for fans of a certain horror franchise, it's also a narrative choice that feels awfully familiar.
Remember Scream?
Back in December 1996, an unassuming slasher movie starring Drew Barrymore (and a bunch of other, less famous actors) released in theaters. The movie opens with Barrymore's character Casey Becker home alone. She gets an ominous phone call from a guy who claims to have called the wrong number by mistake, and it's downhill from there. It's a suspenseful and brutal sequence, made even more so by the fact that Casey was marketed as the main character. It's her face on the poster, after all; how could the movie even continue if she's dead within the first ten minutes?
If you watch the movie for the first time years later, this meta context is likely lost on you. Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox are now big stars in their own right, and their characters Sidney and Gale are so iconic that even non-fans are at least vaguely familiar. A modern viewer watches the opening scene and immediately assumes Casey's going to die. She's the opening kill, after all, a staple of the horror genre. But if you're fully expecting a Barrymore-centric movie, it's far more likely you'll miss the signs. As Barrymore explained in a 2020 Hot Ones interview, that's exactly what she herself had in mind:
"In the horror film genre, my biggest pet peeve was that I always knew the main character was going to be slugging through at the end but was going to creak by and make it. What I wanted to do is to take that comfort zone away. So I asked if I could be Casey Becker so we would establish this rule does not apply in this film."
A strong, fresh start
Admittedly, comparing "Gen V" to "Scream" is a bit of an overstatement; Patrick Schwarzenegger is not as famous as Drew Barrymore was in 1996, and it's clear from the first scene of the first episode that Marie (Jaz Sinclair) is the main character, not Luke. The ending of this episode is surprising, sure, but it's not quite as well-designed to break the audience's brains as Casey's death was 27 years earlier. Still, Luke's death helps to serve the same basic purpose of raising the stakes, making it clear that this is not a show that's afraid to go to some incredibly dark places. It's not just willing to kill off Marie's parents in the opening scene; it's willing to kill off the characters we've already gotten to know.
Maybe what's truly the most surprising part of Luke's final sequence on the show is how much it subverts our expectations of Marie as well. She wants to be a hero, and most shows would've had Luke's breakdown be Marie's time to have her shining moment to prove herself. "God U," meanwhile, chooses to have Marie run away; she's only saved because the other two supes, Jordan and Andre, step in to help. It's a surprisingly redemptive moment for the two characters, who had callously left a woman to bleed out in a bar not much earlier. The first episode of "Gen V" might not be quite as bold and disorientating as the opening sequence of "Scream," but when it comes to establishing itself as a unique, subversive story, "God U" still hits it out of the park.