'Gen V' Fans Are Furious About the Characters' Screen Time in the Finale of 'The Boys'

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for Season 5, Episode 8 of The Boys.

Creating a spin-off series of a beloved show is one of the trickier moves Hollywood producers have to navigate. On the one hand, you don't want the spin-off to be a completely standalone series, making it seem disconnected from the larger universe. On the other hand, you don't want it to be so intertwined with the original series that fans are required to watch both.

It's a fine line that, unfortunately, The Boys spin-off Gen V couldn't find. After two seasons of the latter show, Gen V characters finally made their way into The Boys for the highly anticipated series finale. However, the amount of screen time they got — and the consequences of their presence — has left fans furious.

Rather than establishing itself as a series in its own right, Gen V spent its entire two-season run setting up the protagonist, Marie Moreau, to fight Homelander. They constantly spoke about how she was the only Supe powerful enough to go head-to-head with the villain, and spent much of the series teaching her how to hone her skills to do just that.

Gen V even featured cameos from The Boys characters, such as Starlight and A-Train, further teasing a convergence of the two shows. In fact, Starlight explicitly invited the Gen V characters to join The Boys!

Fans eagerly awaited an epic battle between Marie and Homelander, and a joining of forces between the Gen V crew and The Boys group.

However, neither of those things ever came to fruition. In fact, the Gen V characters were completely inconsequential to The Boys at all!

In the end, Starlight and the rest of The Boys crew sent the Gen V kids away, saying they could help by driving some people to the safety of Canada. After all that, often painful, sitting through two seasons of Gen V, fans were rewarded with a quick clip of the oh-so-powerful Marie turning into an Uber driver. Needless to say, viewers are furious.

Of course, fans are expressing their anger, with one even going as far as to calculate all of Gen V's screen time in The Boys. The X post laments, "Marie Moreau, Jordan Li, and Emma Meyer had a total of 2 minutes and 30 seconds of screen time in The Boys series finale. Totaling out to nearly 5 minutes of screen time in all of Season 5."

The revelation was met with unanimous agreement from other angry viewers.

One person wrote, "What a waste of potential, sadly." Another shared, "They really pump faked us into thinking they would play a main role in the finale." While a third pointed out, "Marie can bring people back from the dead, and they were like, nah, we good."

In fairness to the producers, Gen V was unexpectedly cancelled, which probably impacted the original story setup for those characters. Furthermore, show runners have teased potentially bringing some Gen V characters into other The Boys spin-offs in order to complete their stories as planned. However, given how all their previous hyping up led to a whole lot of nothing, we're taking that with a grain of salt.