Gen V bosses explain those surprise finale cameos

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Gen V season 1, episode 8 finale, "Guardians of Godolkin."

The powers that be behind Gen V signaled that the season 1 finale would include "a handoff" to the upcoming fourth season of The Boys. But in fact, there are two!

Antony Starr reprised his role of Homelander, the maniacally deranged leader of the Seven from The Boys, with a cameo appearance at the end of Gen V's first finale episode, "Guardians of Godolkin." Then, Karl Urban's Billy Butcher made a grand return in a mid-credits scene that sets up the events of The Boys season 4.

One of these cameos had already been leaked when paparazzi photos captured Starr on the set towards the beginning of production. "I find it totally infuriating," Gen V executive producer and The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke tells EW, though he's able to laugh about it now. "No matter how hard you try to implement security protocols, that kind of s--- just gets out into the world and it's a bummer."

Gen V showrunner Michele Fazekas was more zen about the whole thing. "I also try to stay off social media for that reason," she says. "I don't want to know what people know. We're in the day and age where it happens, it's social media. We can control only what we can control."

The pair go on to explain just how both of these cameos are setting the stage for the mothership drama's return to Prime Video. (A season 4 premiere date has not been announced yet.)

After Cate (Maddie Phillips) and Sam (Asa Germann) ransack the school by allowing the now-freed prisoners of the Woods to lay waste to all non-supes, Marie (Jaz Sinclair), Andre (Chance Perdomo), Jordan (London Thor/Derek Luh), and Emma (Lizze Broadway) fight to stop them. When it seems like they've got things handled — even though Marie blows off Cate's hand in bloody fashion — Homelander arrives on the scene.... Except he's not happy. He attacks Marie for harming her own kind, and when she wakes up, Marie and her friends are now locked away in a secret facility with no windows or doors. On the outside, they've been framed as the attackers, while Cate and Sam have been crowned the new Guardians of Godolkin.

Fazekas says they always wanted Homelander to come into Gen V for the finale. "We didn't want to squander that," she says. The character's arrival also comes directly after his fanbase of MAGA-esque supe extremists turned Neuman's campaign pitstop into a full-blown riot. Kripke says "it's wildly intentional" that they are using Homelander and supe supremacy as an allegory for the alt-right movement in America.

"We don't have to pretend that the world isn't burning," Kripke explains. "We can write about what's really happening and what scares us and what upsets us. The Boys has always done that from the very beginning. It's important that Gen V continues to do that. The Homelander part also ties into the much bigger storyline. If you analyze the seasons of The Boys as the slow disintegration of Homelander's psyche, he's been heading towards this spot for a long time with this Nietzsche-an/Nazi belief that there's a better species that needs control over the lesser species, but are framing it in terms of patriotism and 'Make America Safe Again.' You get to see what it looks like boots on the ground rather than with the characters that are up at the center of the hurricane [on The Boys]."

As for Starr's costar on The Boys, Urban's Butcher scene shows the supe slayer discovering the Woods... well, what's left of it. The camera Zooms in on his face as he surveys the now-empty prisons and exclaims, "What a bunch of c---s."

Kripke confirms this means a major storyline from Gen V is coming into The Boys season 4. "Butcher's aware that this virus is out there," he says, referring to the virus Dean Shetty (Shelley Conn) had engineered to kill all supes and that Neuman has now stolen. "We knew that we wanted that to be part of the season 4 story. My writers' room pitched: 'Can we see [Butcher] at Godolkin and find out about the virus?' And then, 'Well, why don't we make that the moment at the end of Gen V so he's hot on its trail?'"

The Boys boss praised both Urban and Starr for filming these cameos on their days off from shooting the main show. "They're shooting the first two or three episodes of The Boys and it's grueling," Kripke recalls. "Then we're asking them to go to that [Gen V] set, put on the suits again, and work more with the fact that we have no money to pay you. Michelle said their support of the wider world is really, really impressive."

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