Ah, Gen V, the best years of your life — oh wait, no, that’s college, where Gen V is set. [Ed. note: The best years have no definitive age. Dream big, kids.] And Godolkin University is hardly all golden times. This is collegiate living in the universe of The Boys, after all, where an evil Superman lasered a guy’s head off at the end of season 3. And that’s just the most recent thing we know he did.
We don’t know exactly what Homelander has been up to since the events of season 3, but Gen V is our best look yet at what’s been happening elsewhere in the world of Vought nonsense (Voughnsense?). Here’s what we know about how Gen V is handling its side-by-side timeline, and what it tells us about season 4 of The Boys.
When does Gen V take place compared to The Boys?
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Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video
Gen V is actually very clear about when it happens: The present day events start on June 22, 2022, when Marie hears back from Godolkin University about her application. While there’s no year on the calendar Marie has in her room, she has circled that day as a Wednesday, as it was in 2022. (But props on Godolkin dean Indira Shetty being voted VNN’s most trusted educational professional of 2023 already!)
By the time the school year starts (Sept. 29, according to that linked recruitment video), it’s clearly after the events of season 3 of The Boys: The Deep’s book, Deeper (“A memoir from the Deep”), is out and being auctioned off at the university’s fundraiser. We hear whispers about Queen Maeve truthers out in the world. When flicking through the TV, we see commercials for Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) and her campaign to be vice president, alongside a brief flicker of a news segment about whether Homelander will stand trial for killing a protester — the latter of which clearly places Marie’s college years at the end of The Boys season 3. Plus there’s the fact that The Boys social media account just straight-up told us:
If we’re clearin up the timeline, @genv takes place between S3 and S4. So the kiddos at God U all saw Homelander laser a guy’s head off to the sound of thunderous applause pic.twitter.com/SYwH0raJgD
— THE BOYS (@TheBoysTV) September 6, 2023
That puts Marie’s admission date a few weeks after the premiere of Dawn of the Seven, which was released on June 3 — presumably of 2022.
So what does Gen V tell us about The Boys season 4?
Well, that’s a little more complicated. In the first three episodes, not a lot. In fact, while the news segment casts some doubt on the fate of Homelander facing a legal struggle, a PSA “from” Vought International on its YouTube page asks that people stand by Homelander in his upcoming trial.
In-universe, 2022 also appears to be a presidential election year, a slight shift from our world. (Who knows; maybe the introduction of real-life supes altered the election years at some point!)
Beyond that, it’s somewhat hard to know what’s going on in the surrounding world. Everyone at God U is drinking the Kool-Aid, or at least swimming in it. What flashes we see of the outside world — at least, so far — are being filtered through the Vought industrial complex. But trailers have shown some other folks we can expect from both worlds: Congresswoman Neuman, presumably hot on the campaign trail, and supe Tek Knight, who has been mentioned multiple times in The Boys but has not shown up in the series yet. It looks like he’ll play a minor role in Gen V, and he’s expected to show up in The Boys season 4 as well. That’s just one connection — there are sure to be many more that we won’t know until the next season of The Boys premieres.