‘Gen V’ Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: “H Is For Human”

Alright, so Marie is Odessa. What does that even mean? The files Emma found in the Godolkin University archives are tantalizing, but they don’t provide full facts, and if Starlight was right in Episode 1 of Gen V Season 2 – that Odessa is a weapon – then that makes Marie hero-coded. It’s the last thing she wants to be. Not when the crew’s being surveilled on campus and forced to participate in Vought and Dean Cipher’s bizarro world Make America Super Again propaganda. Besides, Marie tells Jordan, chosen ones and heroes – those are “babyfaced white dudes.” Harry Potter. Frodo. “Not someone who looks like me.” Their God U experience is already like supervised prison work release. And now Marie’s supposed to rise up and embody Odessa? They need answers, something tangible.

In Season 1 of Gen V, Marie’s manifestation of her powers as an adolescent resulted in her accidentally killing her parents. That kind of experience will fuck with you in a lot of ways. It can make you doubt yourself, and not wish to be a hero. It will also get you sent to Vought’s Red River Orphanage, which will disrupt your emotional and sexual health. Marie said “I love you” during intimacy with Jordan, which has now caused some awkwardness. But Marie has another confession. She was a virgin until they slept together. It’s all very confusing!

Seeking clarity, Marie visits Pam (Judith Scott), her mother’s best friend from back in the day. Pam refused to see her after the tragedy, even now is standoffish, and has never heard of Project Odessa. But she does have photos of Marie’s birth, which we learn took place via fertility treatments at a clinic on the Godolkin campus. “IVF was too expensive, Vought came along,” and oh look, here’s a photo of the doctor who delivered her. What do you know, it’s Cipher.  

No wonder the dean is so interested in Marie – she’s the only baby who survived Project Odessa. He also takes her aside during the one-on-one battles of the Hero Optimization Seminar and encourages Marie to enact her blood powers with her mind instead of cutting herself (“Self-harm is so…human”), something Cate witnesses with alarm. She’s out of the hospital now, with criss-cross metal stitches holding her skull together, and is having trouble generating her own powers of mindreading and control. Cipher doesn’t go so far as to say he wants Marie instead of Cate as the university’s most powerful supe. But he doesn’t mince words, either. “Your value in this world comes and goes with your powers,” he tells Cate. “Without them, you are nothing.” Just another nobody on campus, wearing an “H” lanyard to mark her as human.     

Sam is still looking for a little of that Cate touch power. Anything to calm his raging mind, which is regurgitating all the heinous Season 1 murdering he committed when it isn’t once again transforming the world into puppets. Sam has an episode. Destroys some dorm furniture. Finally, it’s Jordan who steps in to help. And in her female form, she calms him down. They rip bongs. Watch kids’ shows like Sam used to with his late brother Luke. They both agree there’s been enough death surrounding all of them, and it sucks. Sam wishes he had just five more minutes with Luke, and Jordan says if Andre were still here, “I’d tell him I loved him. Should have said it more.” It’s a really effective scene between London Thor and Asa Germann, and combines a lot of what Gen V does well. The value of real relationships, grief and loss in the context of superpowers and nearly constant violence, and of course, casual drug use.   

While Marie was learning about her past and Cipher’s “fucking creepy” interest in her, Emma was on campus pursuing a secret Starlighter. (She even pursues into the guys’ locker room. More dicks in there than a Peacemaker episode!) As Emma learns, the “Resist” slogan that keeps appearing around God U, whether as bright yellow graffiti or a proud star, is the work of Harper (Jessica Clement), a mimic supe with a curling tail we met last season. Harper and her friend Ally (Georgie Murphy) are pretty proud of their vandalism. They’ve got a plan to douse God U’s Homelander statue in Starlighter paint. Which Emma declares to be stupid and useless, because it is. She knows the whole truth about Homelander, Vought, knows they’re all in a deadly battle against complete evil supe takeover. “What we should be doing,” Emma tells her new secret Starlighter friends, “is sabotage. Disrupt. Break shit. Fuck shit up!”

You know who it was who inspired this confidence in Emma. Who told her in no uncertain terms she had a right to stand for herself, and to fight Vought’s rank fascism. Andre Anderson. And it’s her friend’s legacy she draws on to inspire fucking-shit-upness in Harper and Ally. Emma’s eyes grew distant as she remembered him, but there was certainty there, too, just as it was with Jordan’s moment with Sam. And Andre’s legacy – the real reason he died at Elmira, and not the shit Vought cover story – is on Jordan’s mind again as they walk on stage for a big flashy campus event, “Thomas Godolkin Day.” The speech they were given they had no hand in writing. It’s more Vought-aganda, propping them up as the #1 supe on campus while twisting Jordan’s bi-genderism into a broad troll of “trans-tastic” identity, and for awhile, they can fake it. They have to: Cipher lurks just offstage. 

Well, heroes don’t fake it. Before she got onstage, Jordan called Marie over. “I love you,” he told her in his male form, and the awkwardness gone, they kissed passionately. Why not? Andre’s death, on top of Gen V’s already heavy bill of carnage, only proves how unpredictable and fleeting their lives really are. Jordan and Marie should act on their feelings, because under the thumb of Cipher and Vought, they could be dead tomorrow. Shit-canning the speech they were forced to recite, Jordan exposes the trickery. She tells the Godolkin Day crowd how Andre really died. And she tells them Cate wasn’t attacked by human Starlighters. “It was me,” she says, and in the wings Marie’s jaw drops. Marie was conflicted about being a hero. Jordan just became one in public.

Class Notes for Gen V Season 2 Episode 3 (“H is for Human”):

• We get an opening credits banger in Episode 3, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal.” I wish I could disappear…God it’s brutal out here: Olivia is singing about teen angst, but in a Gen V context, “Brutal” is about human beings with campus jobs terrified of supe harassment.

• The visit with Pam yielded another fact: the woman ended up adopting Annabeth, Marie’s still-missing little sister. Angry with the discovery, Marie counteracts Pam’s protests that they were afraid of her – “You massacred your parents” – with facts. It was her parents’ choice to pump her full of Compound-V, not hers. As she tells Pam, “I was just a girl who got her period.”    

• Every tidbit we learn about Cipher leads to more questions. At the dean’s residence, between her flashbacks to murdering previous dean Indira Shetty, Cate also sees an enormous vault door. What (or who) does Cipher got in there?

• In Gen V, there are always a few random supe students at God U with even more random superpowers, and with Ep 3 we get another instance of the guy who can suck up large items into his ass. Last time it was a keg. This time it’s his boyfriend.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.