It's fight night in an entertaining Gen V

They soon hatch a plan: Cate and Jordan will head to Cipher’s house, suspecting it’s highly guarded for a reason, while Marie trains with Cipher and keeps him occupied. That training scene, where Cipher is equal parts Yoda and Professor X (though closer to Magneto, really) to the bumbling Marie is Gen V at its best: Watching Hamish Linklater and Jaz Sinclair trade barbs as we learn more about why Cipher is so invested in Marie and how he really is perfectly aware of everything that’s going on around campus is very entertaining. If these students really want to face him, they’ll have to up their game—and their powers. Which is, ironically, what Cipher wants to do with Marie. After letting her know he’s aware she’s seeking answers about Odessa (nothing gets by him, and he seems hilariously bemused by their attempts at stealth), he insists she was all but designed to be the most powerful supe…ever. Yes, even more powerful than Homelander.

That makes sense when you realize her ability to control blood gives her an enviable advantage over every other “walking, talking blood bag” around her. Soon enough, as she’s egged on to feel her powers rather than think about them, she’s able to move an actual plastic bag with blood from one table to another. Sure, she eventually explodes it but it’s progress; by the end of the session, she’s handily controlling a real-life goat and having it levitate from the ground (though she does eventually blow it up as well). 

On the other end of campus, Emma is doing her own kind of training. Harper is coaching her on controlling her own powers without needing to resort to binge-eating and/or crushing and intrusive self-esteem thoughts. Like Cipher, Harper stresses that Emma should feel her powers rather than to overthink how to use them. Soon enough, they’ll all be leveling up their powers even if it’s obvious there’s one among them who is in desperate need of such a glow-up: Cate.

Since her injuries her powers have been extra wonky. When she approaches the security guard outside of Cipher’s house to get him to “fuck right off” and forget he ever saw them, he immediately walks away, unzips his pants, and begins fucking a nearby garden gnome. It’s all quite worrisome but it gains them enough time to enter the house and see a hyperbaric chamber in one room with what looks like an old burn victim who wakes up upon being gawked at.

As it turns out, that’s not really the smoking gun they all need. But Marie’s intel is. While in close proximity to Cipher, she realized he has no V in his blood. Maybe there’s a reason why no one’s seen his powers. He may not have any. That’s enough to convince Cate to try and entrap him at the Vought VIP box during Jordan and Marie’s fight (all with the help of small Emma, who carries a tiny camera into the room through the pipes leading into the VIP bathroom which, as you’d imagine, does not go without a hitch and gives us a big WTF-are-we-watching moment staged in a toilet). 

But back to their incredibly naive plan. You’d think they’d all have learned their lesson by now: Cipher is way ahead of them all. Always. And he’s deliciously vicious about their utter incompetence. (Truly, is this Hamish Linklater’s greatest role since Midnight Mass? It might be!) Cipher easily catches on that he’s being recorded, and when Cate accuses him of being a “human,” he does the only thing that makes sense: He shows her exactly what his powers are.

Down below in the fighting cage he sees Jordan and Marie refusing to fight. They’re kissing instead after sharing a lovely heart to heart in the locker rooms right before. Cipher will have none of that: He possesses Jordan (like a meat puppet, really, as he puts it) and begins attacking Marie. The ensuing fight is as legendary as the Vought ads had promised it would be and ends with Marie (who’d been told the fight would be rigged in her favor) triumphing over her boy/girlfriend by keeping Jordan levitating above her. And just when you feared she’d explode it like the goat and the plastic bag before, Jordan collapses on top of her, ensuring she’s crowned the winner of the match and all but terrified about what Cipher can truly accomplish when push comes to shove. 

So he does have a superpower. But has no V in his blood. Oh, and that guy in the hyperbaric chamber is his father. So what does it all add up to?

Stray observations

• • Gen V’s anal fixation continues unabated. But even I was surprised we got a full close-up of Cipher sitting on the toilet, showing us, as Emma put it, balls the size of the sun. (We also got a security guard fucking a garden gnome so I guess it’s just another day at God U.)
• • What is there to make of the joke about how Cipher only names the goats he’s ready to sacrifice for “assholes” with the first one being named Elon Musk? Is this really a world where Vought and God U would be aligned against that X CEO? 
• • Honestly, “Half man, half woman, all deceiver” is just a killer tagline for Jordan.
• • I do feel for some of these young God U kids because, while hilarious, I would also be rather embarrassed if I got saddled with “prehensile pubes is your superpower” as Bushmaster (Harper’s fellow Starlighter/resister) is. 
• • Uh, where’s Sam? 
• • And are we really getting a new Emma love interest in the shape of Bushmaster’s hunky brother?
• • So Cipher has to be Godolkin’s son, yes?
• • And speaking of family, are we just going to ignore the way Marie’s sister subplot sort of disappeared?