By the time our favorite students return to Godolkin University in Gen V Season 2, America has reached a tipping point. But few supes are as willing to rise to the occasion upon their return as Lizze Broadway‘s size-shifting character, Emma.
Emma returns from the Elmira Adult Rehabilitation Center a new person: Radicalized, angry, and in mourning. Not only did she and her friends endure relentless torture when they were imprisoned at Elmira, but her friend and classmate, superhero Andre Anderson (Chance Perdomo), died trying to break them out. Emma is fired up when she, Jordan (Derek Luh and London Thor) and Marie (Jaz Sinclair) reluctantly return for their sophomore year at Godolkin University.
Broadway told DECIDER that Emma is “not the same girl” fans met in Season 1.
“It’s very interesting because we left Season 1 and Emma [in] Season 1 was this, like, wide-eyed golden retriever, full of innocence and heart,” Broadway said. “And you know she’s heartbroken by Sam. And then during prison, her good friend died.”
While Elmira understandably left her friends feeling disillusioned and powerless, Emma is dead-set on dismantling Elmira and the rest of Vought’s shadow network.
Unfortunately, the only thing that hasn’t changed is Emma’s ability to control her powers. She can shrink to the size of a chapstick or become super-sized and fill a room, but she still believes her abilities are tied to her literal self-worth, manifesting in an eating disorder she’s had since girlhood. By Season 2, Emma is fully aware that she can’t depend on her negative coping mechanisms. But there’s a growing sense that she almost believes there’s a truth in why she needs to feel poorly about herself in order to change size.
![gen v 202 [Emma, big, w/ boobs as guns] “I got big! By myself! Pew! Pew! Pew!”]](https://decider.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/gen-v-202-02.gif?w=640)
Despite this, Emma proves to be a mobilizing force this season. She gains three much-needed allies in Harper, Ally and Greg, who she challenges to think bigger than just plastering Starlighter posters around campus. And she’s the one who ultimately empowers Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas) to pull himself out of his grief and help them investigate Odessa.
“Emma is quite a bit more protective,” Broadway said. “She has a lot more anger and so, over the course of the season, she’s integrating what it means to be a hero.”
But that kindness rarely extends back to herself, magnifying a tragic lack of self-esteem in a character that has remained an audience-favorite since the pilot episode.
“It’s like the idea of being more mature but also not losing your soft, innocent side. […] I think she’s just trying to be what she deems a hero,” Broadway said of Emma’s Season 2 arc. “And it’s kind of messy. And integration is.”
In many regards, Emma is still the zany college student viewers met in Season 1, making her alliance with Polarity all the more enjoyable to see. Thomas had nothing but praise to share about his time filming with Broadway and bringing their unexpected partnership to life.
“It was a lot of fun filming that stuff with Lizze Broadway,” Thomas said. “She’s so just, like, bonkers, her character and her. She was like a breath of fresh air to me as an actor and, I think, to Polarity as well.”
He added, “Polarity’s kind of stuck in this funk that I don’t think he can find his way out of at all. And I don’t know if he ever would have found his way out of it if not for meeting her. And so it’s a very gratifying thing to to have a performer like Lizze kind of, you know, drag things out of you and kind of make it a rollercoaster ride.”
Broadway delivers a must-watch performance in Season 2 as Emma, who is as empathetic as she is messy. Emma is an easily underestimated character who truly steps up to the plate after Elmira revealed the lengths Vought and Dean Cipher are willing to go to. But this scene-stealer is not one to be ignored.
New episodes of Gen V drop Wednesdays on Prime Video.