Gen V: The Dirty Thing You Only Notice About Tek Knight After A Rewatch
This article contains spoilers for Episode 4 of "Gen V"
"Gen V," Amazon Prime's spin-off of the hit superhero satire "The Boys," commits to the same level of explicitness as the original, but Episode 4, "The Whole Truth," has even more gross-out humor to offer with a rewatch. The character of Tek Knight, played by Derek Wilson, has a bizarre secret that gets referenced before audiences are made aware of it.
Tek Knight is a corrupt journalist who pretends to do hard-hitting investigations that really serve to shunt the blame for Vought's wrongdoings. But when he's not drilling into interview subjects, he's drilling into pretty much anything without a pulse. As we learn by the end of Episode 4, Knight has a habit that's weird even by "The Boys" standards: he compulsively gets intimate with inanimate objects. Since that information is revealed toward the end of the episode, there's a lot of innuendo in the script that will go over viewer's heads on a first watch. But revisiting the episode, it's clear that those close to Knight are aware of his fetish.
The first hint of Knight's unnerving habit is the title of the TV show he hosts. In a homophonic pun, it's called "The Whole Truth." We first see him reading a script for the episode he's shooting, where it becomes evident his crew is aware of his secret. On first watch, you'd think Knight is uncomfortable with the line, "This whole case is a rabbit hole ... and I won't stop plunging its depths," because of the obvious double entendre. But on repeat viewing, it seems he knows his show's writers are mocking him by adding puns into his script. From there, things only get more hilariously dirty.
Tek Knight's prurient predilection for inanimate objects is even funnier with context
The references to Tek Knight's libidinous appetite for inanimate objects are all over "Gen V" Episode 4 once you understand what his deal is. In the opening shot of his show, "The Whole Truth," he stands in front of a yonic tunnel bored into a hillside, and the camera pushes through it to the title credits. From there, things don't get any more subtle.
In his first conversation with Dean Shetty (Shelley Conn), Knight fingers the rim of a whiskey glass with his finger, framed in an uncomfortable close-up. During his interviews with students, he says the word "whole" a whole lot. When he speaks to a crime-fighting class, he picks a roll of Scotch tape off a desk and again runs his finger along the hole at its center. In a scene where he threatens to frame Shetty for a crime, he does the same with a bagel, and the look on his face implies more than one kind of hunger.
While it's far from the most disturbing thing in "The Boys" universe, Knight's tawdry temptation toward anything with a hole in it is certainly one of the funniest, as well as a reminder that even this youth-centric series isn't for kids (or really anyone who doesn't want to see exploding genitals). The repeated hints at his habit before it's explicated to audiences prove that the writers on "Gen V" can be just as inventive as on the main series.