Gen V’s puppet massacre was ‘a puppeteer’s dream’
It was always going to be safe to guess Gen V would end in a massacre. Much like The Boys, the Prime Video college-set spinoff has never shied away from violence, but it has been exceptionally creative in how it presents that violence. Case in point: the puppet massacre in episode 5, a season highlight that’s both one of the funniest moments on the series and the most horrifying.
Much of Gen V’s plot revolves around the disappearance of Sam Riordan (Asa Germann), an incredibly powerful young superhuman and kid brother to prize student Luke Riordan/Golden Boy (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Early on in the season, protagonist Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) and her friends discover Sam has been kept in “The Woods,” a secret facility beneath Godolkin University where supe students are abducted and experimented on. When Sam escapes, it becomes terrifyingly clear that he’s not well, and Marie and her friends struggle to both help him and keep him from doing anything destructive.
Unfortunately, in “Welcome to the Monster Club,” Gen V’s fifth episode, the people running The Woods catch up with him — not that it does them any good. Sam slaughters them all, but instead of a regular fight scene, we see things from Sam’s perspective, rendering the moment in brutal puppet combat.
“This kind of job is a puppeteer’s dream,” says makeup and prosthetics head Colin Penman in a Zoom interview. Penman is usually responsible for Gen V’s non-puppet prop needs, like giant dicks or ears, but he also has a history of working with puppets. And while his career has taken him more toward makeup and prosthetics, Penman relished the chance to build people out of felt and do horrible, horrible things to them.
“Usually, puppets are for television aimed at a
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