‘Gen V’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: “Hell Week”

It’s nice having a precog around when you want to do a little foreshadowing. As Gen V barrels towards its season finale, and as it rolls steadily toward The Boys Season 5, Annabeth is in Stan Edgar’s bunker, where she experiences a disturbing vision. It’s her sister Marie, covered in blood. OK, not exactly shocking – a trending topic this season has been Marie’s growing mastery of weaponized hemoglobin. But Annabeth thinks she could be hurt, and in the vision, there were definitely bars on the windows. However Marie plans to stop Cipher, the growing confidence with her powers won’t be enough. And soon, Annabeth won’t even require precognition to know how right she is.

Marie’s powers really have become formidable. Even before we knew she was one of Project Odessa’s only surviving superbabies – ‘Sup, “Cousin Homelander” – Marie was already exhibiting greater command over blood-wielding. While Cipher and the Thomas Godolkin factor are still in play, it’s intriguing to think about what might be next for her, and we definitely don’t mean junior year at God U. It’s hilarious how nonexistent class schedules and college life are for this entire crew. Season 2 of Gen V has proven its university setting can’t really hold any of them. 

Would Marie somehow join The Seven, incorporating her original dream into the evolving nightmare that her superhero experience has become? Fight back from the inside? Would she go back on the lam, maybe taking her seer sister with her, and this time, maybe even Jordan? The core group of this series has been through so much chaos, in and out of a black site superjail, and racked up all kinds of losses against Cipher. Assuming nobody dies during the upcoming final battle, thinking about what’s next for any of them usually results in a scenario where they’re in an entirely different supe show. What, is Gen V gonna add its third evil dean in as many seasons?  

Let’s not get too far ahead. We don’t even know if there will be a Gen V Season 3, and we’ve still gotta sort out Cipher. He has fled the dean’s residence with Thomas Godolkin’s ravaged body in tow, and we catch him in some basement, vacillating between beating the man’s head in with his own oxygen tank and talking through how they’ll once again control Marie. “It may be time for a very big sacrifice,” Cipher says, and Godolkin nods.

By now, the entire crew has reassembled on campus. Jordan is once again angry with Marie (“I know you didn’t leave me behind again…”), Emma has to temper Sam’s volatile romantic feelings for her with facts (“It’s zero of your business” if she decides she likes Greg), and as Cate watches Marie use her powers to heal Polarity, she seems to wish the same for herself. (Cate betrayed them, double-crossed them, helped Vought set them up. All true. Then again, they’re also the only friends she has left.) It’s just like this bunch to wanna face Cipher and Godolkin together, despite the danger. But it’s just like a newly-emboldened Marie to use her powers, and put their blood-suspended bodies on pause.

“You don’t really think you’re gonna stop me, do you?” It feels like Cipher’s been uttering versions of this line for the entirety of Gen V Season 2, but here in Episode 7, his endgame becomes clear. Because after all, what is a cipher? A blank, a vessel, someone to be utilized, to speak through. And while Marie’s powerful hands hover over Godolkin’s wasted body – his skin burbles and pops, transforms, becomes fresh and pink and new – “Cipher” in the seminar training room shouts at the rest of the crew with deranged glee. “He’s out of my head now!” 

Live, from inside his hyperbaric chamber, Dr. Thomas Godolkin has been puppeteering the man we know as Cipher for the last 30 years. When Marie tried to save Godolkin, she released him instead.

No wonder he was obsessed with Marie. His work to increase her power set was for his benefit. The sex with Sage? It also makes sense now. Hurling insults and fists at his own destroyed form? Again, makes sense. With his mind trapped in a broken body, Thomas Godolkin used his super puppet power to overtake a weak-minded subject – Cipher’s real name is “Doug,” and in 1995 he was a VCR repairman – who became the psychotic supe doctor’s head and heart, hands and feet, as he plotted his supe-led world takeover. Which would also pit him and Sage against Homelander’s own supe-led takeover, but that might be a story for The Boys Season 5.     

Cipher’s words felt prophetic, back in Episode 3, when he told Cate her value to the world was only through her powers, and he repeats them here just to fuck with her. They just had to try and save everyone, had to try to be heroes. Well, all they did was unlock Goldolkin’s evil from his decrepit physical prison. While our friends try to figure out how they walked right into this latest super-trap, Godolkin walks free for the first time in decades. With the sun on his face and the smell of fresh grass in his nostrils, he encounters a supe student with the power to turn his toes into opposable thumbs. Godolkin forces him to kill himself. Can’t have such a crap superpower in the coming new world order. “We want gods to walk this earth – not circus freaks.”

Class Notes for Gen V Season 2 Episode 7 (“Hell Week”):

• The thing about Annabeth and her precognition? It struck in the moments before Marie’s power killed their parents, and ever since, she’s felt terribly guilty about not doing anything. For years, it was just easier to blame her sister.

• Only one quick line from Zoe Neuman in Ep 7, and none from Stan Edgar. We’re gonna make an educated guess and call their last-episode appearance in Gen V pure setup for The Boys S5.

• And Quantum Ass Man appears again on the God U campus. It’s “Hell Week” after all, and Rufus has ordered him to store their shitty frat’s leashed pledges up there. Leave it to Gen V to ensure a recovered Dr. Thomas Godolkin isn’t the only one wearing a diaper. 

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.