#indira shetty

[oldbint]

Gen V, 2023- // The Boys, 2019-

[indie-navarrete]

CATE DUNLAP AND INDIRA SHETTY — GEN V | S01 E07: Sick

[teapetal44]

p2

[fern-parallels]

[initforthethrill]

EPISODE #106 "JUMANJI"

✎ NOTES

the script explicitly confirms that this is the first moment the audience is meant to realize cate isn’t just a “pusher”—she’s a full-blown telepath. that distinction changes everything. earlier in the series, we only understand her as someone who can push thoughts and commands into others. here, we finally see that she can also hear them—and that her “silence” all season was artificially maintained. cate’s immediate instinct is to reach for her pills, her coping mechanism and the tool shetty used to keep her compliant. the empty bottle is symbolic of both her loss of control and shetty’s manipulation: shetty never wanted cate to access her full telepathic ability, because that would’ve exposed everything. the pills weren’t just a sedative—they were a leash, designed to keep cate’s mind quiet and therefore useful. i think it's fair to read her pill use as an addiction—both physically and psychologically. the withdrawal here is twofold: she’s losing the numbing control of the drug and being hit full-force with her suppressed empathy and guilt. the “maddening din” of voices drives home how unbearable her power becomes when unrestrained, and it mirrors how someone in withdrawal experiences sensory and emotional overload. the stage direction calling her “well past rock bottom” is chilling. she’s beyond self-destruction—she’s in survival autopilot. that’s what makes her pulling the others into her “mind palace” so compelling later on: she’s not doing it from a place of control or strength, but from sheer emotional and psychic collapse. the decision to reveal her telepathy now also reframes everything we’ve seen before. cate’s obedience to shetty isn’t stupidity or blind loyalty—it’s the result of engineered isolation. shetty ensured cate could never hear the truth, literally silencing her intuition. the breakdown of that control marks the start of cate’s awakening and descent all at once.

✎ NOTES

this beat quietly suggests how dire cate’s headspace is. even marie wonders if cate attempted suicide, which reframes the scene from “cate collapsed” to “cate may hate herself enough to harm herself.” it’s a striking omission in the final cut, including it would’ve guided viewers to recognize just how deep cate’s guilt and self-loathing run. the moment also invites ambiguity: the empty pill bottle from earlier points to dependence/withdrawal and shetty’s control, while marie’s line opens the door to a darker interpretation. the tension between those two readings doesn’t weaken the scene—it mirrors cate’s fractured state of mind, where coping, addiction, and self-destructive despair coexist. functionally, this would have humanized cate’s collapse for the audience. instead of reading her condition as karmic fallout or “power side-effects,” we’d read it as the breaking point of a girl buckling under engineered isolation, manipulation, and relentless guilt.

✎ NOTES

andre’s first instinct is “she erased our shit again,” which tracks with his hurt and confirmation bias, he reads every unexplained gap as more manipulation. marie, by contrast, immediately clocks that something else is happening and leans sympathetic. the contrast matters: it shows the group already splitting into punitive vs. context-sensitive lenses on cate, and foreshadows who’s primed to be a bridge for her later. this tiny exchange quietly positions marie as the one willing to differentiate intent from impact, while andre is stuck in defensive vigilance—understandable, but limiting. it keeps cate’s crisis human, not just criminal.

✎ NOTES

soldier boy’s “she really loves you” knocks andre sideways. by now he’s got his memories back, so the shock reads less like “news” and more like disconfirmation: he’d been nursing the belief that cate didn’t love him (or couldn’t), which made the betrayal easier to hold onto. realizing she did love him complicates the hurt—love doesn’t erase what happened, it just makes it messier. what kind of “love” is this? i don’t read cate’s feelings as simple, sweeping romance. it plays closer to attachment + refuge: andre was the safest place left—the closest link to luke, a steady presence to project comfort onto. that doesn’t make it fake, it makes it trauma-shaped. she clung to him the way drowning people cling to driftwood. the script’s “twinge of jealousy” undercuts andre’s hard line. he’s furious, but he hasn’t flipped the switch to indifference. that tension keeps their dynamic alive (and volatile). soldier boy is cate’s construct. he might be speaking truths, but he’s filtered through her psyche. his “she really loves you” lands as something cate believes/needs to be true—even as the show leaves room for the interpretation that her love is conditional, coping-driven, and tangled up with grief. it’s fascinating that he presents as a self-serving jerk, not the polished public persona cate would mostly know. that suggests her subconscious reads through branding and sketches him as the archetype she needs in here: abrasive, goading, hard to trust, making him an unreliable narrator by design. therefore, soldier boy likely operates as psychic misdirection—a noisy spectacle that keeps everyone busy while cate’s internal trauma reel threatens to consume her. he draws focus away from the rawest parts of her mind, buying her system time.

✎ NOTES

jumanji matters beyond the title. cutting this exchange flattens the reference into a wink. in-script, it’s textual character insight: jumanji is cate’s favorite movie, and her mind unconsciously patterns the crisis on it. that tells us she’s not masterminding an elaborate trap...she’s grabbing for a familiar story-shape while her powers spiral. this is more evident with cate’s later line “what are you doing here?” she isn’t fully aware she’s pulled them in. the jumanji callout clarifies the episode’s premise as involuntary mindscape rather than deliberate manipulation, reinforcing how overwhelmed she is. without this scene, viewers can read the episode as a stylish homage. with it, the homage becomes character logic—cate’s mind reaching for the only blueprint that makes sense to her while she drowns.

✎ NOTES

this cut scene finally shows what the final edit only implies: cate pushes her friends about the party—and she does it pained. it matters that the script writes her as emotionally torn during the act. it reframes the push from cold manipulation to coerced compliance. she’s doing the harm with full awareness that it is harm, which is exactly what makes it a moral injury for her. the second (also cut) scene is devastating character text. cate voices a boundary but shetty answers with the classic abuser’s script. that one line collapses their whole dynamic—weaponized “care,” manufactured obligation, and the exploitation of cate’s savior complex. together these pages capture the loop: (1) cate harms at shetty’s direction, visibly distressed. (2) cate tries to stop (3) shetty reframes harm as help and resets cate’s guilt into obedience. rinse, repeat. without these, viewers can default to “cate enjoys control/just likes wiping.” with them, it’s unambiguous: she never enjoyed it. she was guided, gaslit, and guilted into it, and the institution profited from her power while keeping her conscience on the hook.

✎ NOTES

the script explicitly lists cate as 17 here. even without this confirmation we are aware as an audience that shetty has known and managed cate before godU, but this stretches the shetty timeline in a interesting way. it opens up the possibility that shetty either regularly visited while cate finished homeschooling or perhaps even stepped in as a legal guardian to extract her from that bedroom-prison. in maddie’s interviews, cate sees indira as her savior—the adult who “rescued” her, protects her, and “keeps her safe.” layer the drug regimen on top (which dampens telepathy and keeps the ugliest truths out of earshot), and cate’s willingness to obey shetty isn’t convenience—it’s engineered dependence. the stage direction calls out a room that’s curated but connectionless—no family/friend photos, bolts and locks. the wall art leans towards queen maeve (queer icon) and crimson countess, with a conspicuous absence of soldier boy. that omission supports him as a mind-made misdirection/self-defense construct in the earlier scenes: if you’ve accidentally dragged your friends into your trauma, you don’t also volunteer your closeted self on top of it. cate states she’s been confined nine years. taken with the earlier script cue, that back-solves to her first catastrophic push at 8, not 9 as previously stated—another timeline wobble the show never fully resolves...

✎ NOTES

as the audience, we learned earlier that cate is a full telepath, but this flashback is when the others discover it—on screen, in real time. andre didn’t know—at all. his blindsided reaction underlines that, for all their closeness, cate kept her deepest truths hidden from him. it supports the read that her “love” has been attachment + projection born from grief and survival, not open intimacy. cate doesn’t volunteer the telepathy, she admits it only when cornered, reinforcing her pattern: a perfect, manageable mask over a self she’s sure will be rejected. that fear is why she withholds history—even from those she supposedly "loves." marie tracks the manipulation as it happens. stage direction literally has her watching shetty’s seduction mechanics and checking if andre “gets it.” marie is again the only one reading cate with empathy rather than disgust. shetty offers the same bottle we’ve seen all season explicitly framing the drug as a coping necessity. that’s coercive caregiving: relief in exchange for compliance. she also weaponized comfort when asking for a hug, which floors cate because no one has asked since she was a child—and shetty knows it. the hug is not warmth, it’s leverage. this scene proves that cate’s obedience isn’t convenience, it’s the product of long-term grooming + chemical restraint. the show is telling us shetty cultivated dependence first, then positioned herself as the only safe harbor.

✎ NOTES

marie clocks the grooming pattern immediately. she connects shetty’s tactics to her own experience in real time, which reframes cate’s behavior as coerced, not malicious. that instant recognition makes marie the only one reading the room with empathy instead of resentment. andre’s “love” vs. love in practice. his first reflex is anger and punishment, not curiosity or care. marie’s comment lands because love isn’t just a claim, it’s whether you even try to understand the person in front of you. he doesn’t. marie also calls him out on his hypocrisy. it’s a mirror moment the episode otherwise softens: all of them are shaped by harmful adults, but he only has compassion for himself. this scene underlines the show’s core: none of them chose what was done to them. cutting this entire exchange hurts the arc, and further blurs why marie keeps defending cate.

✎ NOTES

in the script, andre is the one who keeps going. cate hesitates first, then follows once he surges forward to kiss her. final cut flips that dynamic so it looks like cate is the engine and andre is the conscience. that single change quietly reassigns blame...cate carries visible conflict from moment one in the script whereas andre overrides it. on screen, most of the guilt is parked on andre while cate reads as brazen. that’s character assassination by omission: it erases cate’s ambivalence towards the affair and makes her feel colder than the material intends.

✎ NOTES

the script puts andre right there with cate as an active participant (and often the one pressing forward). it reinforces that the affair wasn’t cate dragging him, it was mutual. cutting adjacent moments elsewhere primes viewers to pin it all on her, so this scene is a needed counterweight. marie's line reframes andre not as the pained conscience, but as someone who knowingly crossed a line. it also mirrors how episode edits repeatedly let andre’s culpability blur while cate’s is spotlighted. the past tense of love is narrative distancing and shows that andre is already shifting to a posture where remorse > responsibility. it supports why other scenes (like with tek knight) have him minimizing or recasting the affair timeline. jordan's reaction matters to show that the group’s moral judgment isn’t one-sided in the script—another beat that gets softened in the final cut, which is why luke’s “she didn’t force you—you wanted to” line gets memory-holed by an anti-cate-biased audience... leaving scenes like this in would have preserved the show’s messier, fairer moral geometry—cate’s guilt and andre’s, manipulation from shetty and andre’s choices—rather than funneling hate toward one character.

✎ NOTES

the action lines (“her heart starting to break,” “pained”) make explicit that cate hates doing this. the final cut trims that texture, so viewers only hear the repeated “forget,” which reads colder than the script intends... every push here targets one subject—luke’s memories of sam. nothing else. that specificity points straight back to shetty’s agenda rather than cate freelancing evil. the script even shows how it was cumulative damage—on both sides. repetition explains luke’s fragmentation and cate’s eventual collapse. it’s harm that compounds, not a one-off villain move. framing, timing, and content align with shetty’s interests, not cate’s: keep luke from looking for sam, keep campus quiet, keep the woods hidden, etc. cate acts from groomed trust and is coerced into thinking it's “for their own good,” not from malice. without luke’s spoken lines (and cate’s pained beats), the final edit primes audiences to read this as blanket, casual mind-wiping. the script shows it as a narrow, mandated intervention that’s eating her alive.

✎ NOTES

cate explicitly saying “i can’t” is the cleanest onscreen proof that she does not want to push them. removing it flattens her into compliance, keeping it shows refusal → coercion → surrender. ultimately this further proves that cate's own consent is revoked under duress. the beat progression is: objection → refusal → parental override → compliance. that’s not choosing, that’s compliance under threat of losing the only “care” she has. shetty and brink's comments are classic reward/punish conditioning: praise to override instinct, order to force action. it’s conditional love weaponized in real time. with the inclusion of “i can’t,” viewers see a kid begging to stop. without it, the scene might be viewed as cate crying over the fact she's been caught. that edit subtly shifts blame from the institution to the traumatized teenager. this also mirrors the shetty tea-scene pattern: cate reaches her limit → asks to stop → shetty wraps threat in “for their own good.” same playbook, different situation. cate’s impulse here is caretaking, her powers are just the tool. the ethic is already in place but she’s being coerced to act against her better judgment.

✎ NOTES

marie offers what cate’s never gotten: a real choice. that’s consent, agency, and trust—all the things shetty/brink systematically denied cate. it turns the scene from exposition into a moral fork in the road. one in which cate chooses good—on purpose. with that line in place, cate pulling them out and saying they can leave isn’t an accident or power-glitch, it’s a decision. no shetty whisper, no brink order—just cate finally able to exercise her autonomy. it's the first clean break in the coercion loop. marie models empathy that holds two truths at once. she knows cate harmed her, and she still recognizes their shared wound. that’s the difference between empathy for a victim and empathy for the harmed-who-harmed. marie can carry both, the others (especially andre) largely can’t. the script direction that andre and jordan finally grasp marie's deepest pain, yet still struggle to extend that empathy to cate because her harm was proximate to them, is telling. marie—who was also harmed by cate—chooses to see the whole person anyway. that asymmetry is the point. without this line, viewers can read cate’s exit as plot convenience or passive collapse. with it, we see intentionality! the redemption hinge isn’t a later speech—it’s this trust exchange in which marie becomes the moral center and the first person to relate to cate as a peer with boundaries, not a tool.

✎ NOTES

here cate isn’t just saying “i don’t want to wake up.” she’s articulating a sentence: she believes the only proportionate atonement for the harm she caused is death. essentially, she rejects forgiveness. that matters because it counters the “cate always plays the victim” take: here she refuses the comfort of being comforted. her stance is, “do not rehabilitate me. let me pay for my sins.” that’s accountability—misguided and tragic, but real. this confirms insight, not ignorance. by this point she fully grasps the scope of the hurt she's caused. cutting it ultimately left room for “she still doesn’t get it”, keeping it shows she does—and that insight is crushing her. we’ve already seen the script toy with overdose/ideation signals. this line threads those moments into a coherent through-line of escalating self-annihilation, not a one-off dramatic flourish. it also solidifies marie's role...she isn’t just coaxing a friend to wake up, she’s interrupting a self-imposed execution, giving cate a counterargument to her death-as-penance logic.

✎ NOTES

in the final cut, dusty is blown to bits in in cate’s mindscape and is ultimately functionally tallied as another victim of her powers. however in the script, cate intervenes to save him. that’s active, restorative use of her power—the polar opposite of the “cate breaks people” narrative. especially coming immediately after the “leave me to die” spiral, this is the first concrete demonstration of cate attempting reparation rather than self-annihilation or obedience. it’s a micro-choice toward good, and it plants the seed for her later, bigger choices. removing it robs her arc of one of its clearest “i can use this to help” datapoints. without this moment, casual viewers slot dusty into the evil cate montage in their heads. with it, you’re forced to hold the tension: she has hurt people and she’s capable of healing/undoing harm.

✎ NOTES

cate isn’t begging, deflecting, or hiding behind emma. she’s staring sam’s rage in the face and accepting the consequences of her actions. remove it and she reads as a passenger in the scene, not an agent who owns what she did. it’s not a death wish—it’s consent to judgment. she’s saying, “i know i hurt you. if you need to hurt me back, i won’t run.” that’s the opposite of the “unrepentant evil” reading some viewers carried into season 2. in the aired cut, emma does all the de-escalation, sam verbalizes harm, and cate’s silence gets conflated with refusal to take responsibility. the script’s version balances the triangle: cate accepts blame, emma redirects sam from retribution to restraint, and sam chooses not to become what hurt him. when later scenes play with cate’s defensiveness, the missing s1 breadcrumbs (the apology beats, the “i can’t,” the “i don't want to wake up,” and this “do it”) vanish from the ledger. the net effect is a subtle character assassination by subtraction: cate loses her textually stated remorse and choice-for-good moments, which makes her season 2 self initially read differently.

full post here + twitter thread here

[kosmochlor]

Some thoughts on the non-super villains of The Boys (and Gen V too, though I have never watched it and don't care to). Since Stan has been a hot topic of late, they are on my mind. Or at least the Vought affiliated ones are.

Stan Edgar:

I've always seen Stan Edgar as a man who clawed his way to the top. He is a black man that became the top executive of a pharmaceutical company with an entertainment and mercenary side hustle consisting of superbeings. Going by Diabolical, he likely attained this position sometime in the nineties. Well before that, during the eighties as a young man, he had enough clout within Vought to serve as the board's go-between (if Stan wasn't a board member himself at that time) with Black Noir/Payback. He was the one who delivered the order for Vought's then-premiere team to take out their then-most formidable, first ever (on paper), and famous superhero. Presumably, Stan played a major role in plotting that coup and brokering the deal with the Soviet Union too as I can't see that plan being something those in the know could afford to share around enough to pass off such a task to an assistant. If it came to light what they were up to, Vought might have had charges of treason levied against them, to say nothing of what Soldier Boy himself would do if he had any forewarning.

Monstrous and ridiculously full of shit (particularly when it comes to Homelander) as Stan is, his backstory makes him worthy of some admiration. Though the writing often doesn't support it, he must be quite intelligent and very business savvy. My headcanon for Stan is that he hails from a lower to upper middle class background. I like to think he was originally part of Vought's legal department and then saw a better path to power and profit through hero management, so switched track to that department (which is why the Legend sees both Stan and Madelyn as his betrayers). Also keep in mind that Vought was founded by Nazis, some of whom were still active in the company throughout Stan's time in Vought and beyond. Even among real life CEOs with none of those odds against them, Stan's tenure as executive is impressive. He also was most likely the one that made the already powerful Vought American into the omnipotent Vought International. Credit where credit is due. Beneath the terrible writing and wrongly attributed cool guy vibe, Stan is a force to be reckoned with.

Madelyn Stillwell:

Ah, Madelyn. She was the first shotcaller to receive screentime and she left a lasting impression on the audience, with good reason. Madelyn is a character straight out of a parable. She plays with fire and gets burned. True to type, she is also very relatable. Much like Stan, she is an underdog. The show actually displays this very well. She is a career woman that has, in order to be taken at all seriously, had to be very focused on image and singlemindedly dedicated to her job to the detriment of her social life. When we meet her she is at a turning point, on the very edge of ultimate success. She has become a mother -- a dream she has likely long had to put aside and had to take an alternate route to given no time for romance -- and is a candidate to replace Stan as CEO.

As a side note, I headcanon (though I think it basically canon anyway) that Stan is a big supporter of Madelyn because she is his protege. They toppled the Legend together only for Stan and then Madelyn to use his position as a stepping stone to loftier heights. He surely sees himself in her. Both are at a disadvantage in the corporate sphere. He has long wanted Madelyn to succeed him at Vought. Since Victoria was always intended to go into politics and work for the company from the shadows, Madelyn was handpicked by him to be his true heir. Despite dangling Starlight like bait on a hook during the co-captains debacle, I think Stan supports women. He just isn't as enthusiastic in supporting all women, mainly those who -- no matter how much he loves some of them on an individual level -- he views as company produce. This includes Becca Butcher, who Stan spoke of in a way I found insulting toward her. As if she were an animal driven by familial instinct rather than a rational human being. I think once he learned of her pregnancy, Stan downgraded Becca, a former rising star at the company, to an incubator for the next revolutionary Vought product. I think Stan has the ability to shove anyone into a box that way mind, Victoria, Zoe, and Madelyn included.

Back to Madelyn. Another point of sympathy for her is how she has to make herself seemingly available sexually to a male co-worker, Homelander. No matter how much power she attained, she had to play that game with him. It was her fault, of course, even if she was contractually obligated at any point to make Homelander "imprint" on her she could have backed out of signing on. She made poor choices and she took advantage of a mentally unstable man over a decade her junior, a man she met when he was a teenager. I am not trying to soften her. I support her in all her manipulative, cruel, flawed fullness. The situation speaks to many viewers is all I'm saying.

The Legend:

What? A man that was on the good guys' side? Yes, naturally. I view the Legend as an epitome of the worst sort of sleezy Hollywood manager. He covered up murder, or manslaughter at the least. He bore witness to all sorts of depravity, from Soldier Boy being inappropriate with his very young co-stars to the abusive nightmare that was Payback's team dynamic. And he did most of it for the sake of personal pleasure. Access to parties, access to celebrity circles, party favors of all flavors. He is lazy, unrepentant, and cowardly. He can say whatever he likes, but he still lives rich off what amounts to blood money, failed to do enough to make up for what wrongs he did do, and covered for Soldier Boy for a while even in season 3. Unfortunately, like Stan, he gets to be a "cool guy" anyway due to poor, shallow writing. He got to be so very zany and cool that it is hard for me to find anything good to say about him. Not that I really need to, he got enough love imo.

Jonah Vogelbaum:

Credit to Jonah for acknowledging that he did wrong by Homelander and trying, in his way, to do better by Ryan. He communicated it horrendously and still missed the critical failures by a mile (namely, the torture), but he did own up to it. He even stayed put in his mansion after Homelander paralyzed him rather than hiding out in a bunker with his family, like Stan did. He also demonstrated great care for his biological family by capitulating to Billy's demands at great risk to himself and that did get him killed in the end.

Jonah is a man driven by science. If he can, he will do, if only to learn the outcome. He goes wrong in that he cared not at all for the cost until it was far too late. He never stopped to ask if his capability gave him the right or ethical leniency to follow through. I read him as possessing vision a step outside the perspective of most. Call it mad genius, theorize that perhaps there is some neurodivergence at play, but Jonah just seems so cold in a way not usually conflated with the curiosity and well-intentioned paternalistic attitude he also possesses. He also really loves his family, no doubt about it. He most likely really loves dogs too. He just has a very finely tuned skill to compartmentalize and categorize, to the great misfortune of the world he lived in.

Barbara Findley:

Barbara is an intriguing one. More than Jonah, she is very convinced of her great genius. She is somewhat a cross of him and Stan. She is stubbornly proud of what she did and feels not a smidge of remorse even with Homelander before her. I suspect that her life working in the laboratory was not any less an underdog story than Madelyn or Stan's meteoric rises.

I don't believe she was ever positioned as John's mother, for there must be a reason why Jonah was immediately given the title "father" when John asked about parents but the tutor had no easy answer for "mother" besides to offer herself. Nonetheless, Barbara, like Madelyn, touched Homelander (the handhold) and guided him in directions he did not wish to go. There are two things driving the why of Barbara having that uneviable duty by my thinking. One, of course, is that she is a woman. Likely one of few among the stuck up boys' club that would have been the majority population within a high security and top secret laboratory of a very profitable corporation in the eighties. The other is all about her characterization: she is proud. That handholding was her sticking her head in an alligator's mouth. I bet she smirked at her colleagues once the oven door sealed behind their specimen. I imagine that self-assurance is why she went alone to confront Homelander in B6.

Sure, there were some secret records no one was to know down there but Homelander would be distracting enough that additional security or even supe aides would not have time to snoop. Barbara did that on her lonesome because she once was very, very good at it. Since Homelander had taken action against all his other named handlers save Barbara, by that point she might have fancied herself reigning champion.

If she returns I bet she will be written as a misunderstood matron that bakes cookies or whatever, so I will be clinging to my interpretation of her for as long as I can. I enjoy thinking about my evil basement queen. She is scary.

Indira Shetty: (under the cut so you can ignore my thoughts on her if you prefer)

I have never watched Gen V but I think she deserves a mention as she is not an insignificant part of Vought's dark underbelly. All I really have to say, to summarize, is that she sounds like she is in massive denial. If not, her motivation is poorly thought out. She is willing to kill and abuse teenagers and young adult supes with the end goal of super genocide via a virus (something not at all known for being quick to adapt and evolve /s) because... she lost family on Flight 37. Okay. She was driven mad by grief clearly because otherwise she should know that her plan can easily go wrong and that that plane was, more likely than not, done for whether or not Homelander ever laid eyes on it. It was hijacked by Islamic state terrorists who had made no ransom demands and it was flying somewhere off the East Coast of the United States of America in a post 9/11 world. Fighter jets don't get scrambled to evacuate passengers off planes, they were coming to do whatever was necessary to protect as many Americans as possible. A single commercial airliner, no matter how packed with people, would be acceptible collateral to spare a skyscraper's worth of people. That botched rescue mission was literally the only rescue mission that was ever going to be attempted. Realistically, those jets would have shot down that plane only a little later than Homelander wrecked it. The only two possibilities here given modern history really are: the supes save the passengers and crew or the plane goes down with a high likelihood of leaving no survivors.

Indira is irrational with grief as she's not looking to stop terrorism instead of bothering exterminating supes, who really had no bearing on the crux of the situation that cost her husband and child their lives. Her hunger for revenge allegedly leads her to engage in illegal and progressively crueller human experimentation. Though given she is a Vought scientist with some authority, she was most probably already engaged in that for years for scientific curiosity and profit.

I figure she is grasping to make sense of a senseless tragedy. She desperately needs to take control of a world gone wildly off course. She cannot stop terrorism. Ironically, her softest target is supers. They are something she can easily understand and manipulate. From a lonely, touch-starved young woman to the Compound V that made them separate from their fellow man, Indira can work with and on or against supes easily. Maybe she is even aware of this being a coping mechanism subconsciously. She might even be using the Flight 37 incident to crush a newly awakened sense of guilt or unease caused by her growing to care too much for Cate or Marie. It is a shallow excuse for inexcusable actions but she cannot undo what she has already done and she cannot let go of what she is doing in the present. She has to absolutely convince herself that killing some innocent children is worth it to end the only global threat she stands a chance at stopping.

But I don't think that was ever the point of Indira. From what I know, Gen V season one ended by having the vengeful victims of Indira and Vought painted as full on bad guys and season two has built on that. In addition, I am sure Indira's responsibility for her own choices was downplayed due to what Homelander did to her family. Such a thing is just so typical of the writers of both series. They are all too eager to excuse or soften the image of any villains who never were injected with V (even if they injected it into many, many other people), no matter how great their share of the blame is for the evil perpetrated in their world.

[mental69er]

my delulu ass is still waiting on victoria neuman and indira shetty to show up in season 2

[ysketball]

When they are both deans of Godolkin 😍😍😍😍