The twist that comes at the end of this penultimate episode of season two sets up a thrilling future and also, sadly, takes away the very thing that had made this entire round of Gen V so watchable. I’m not here to say that Ethan Slater will not be able to hold his own as the resident big bad. But I am here to say that Hamish Linklater has singlehandedly elevated this spin-off of The Boys, making his Cipher an electric (if deliciously smarmy) villain. Slater has his work cut out for him but at the very least we can look back and rejoice that we got to enjoy Linklater for as long as we did.
Even if, at the end of the day, he was only playing Doug, Honda Civic owner and former Blockbuster employee. But I’ll get into more of that at the end. First, we start with a vision: Marie on the floor, drenched in blood, as if it had been raining on her. Annabeth is rightfully fearful. She’s clearly seeing something in the near future and wants to make sure she can stop it. Except, Marie isn’t in the bunker—and neither is Cate. As the Gen V kids soon find out, the two of them left sometime during the night. And Jordan, angry as he is about once more being left behind (just like in Elmira), at least has an idea of where they may be headed: Cipher’s home.
After all, that’s where Cipher is keeping that burnt body they are all convinced now is Thomas Godolkin, a.k.a. the key to stopping the dean and maybe even learn how to stop Homelander altogether. Against better judgment, perhaps, they all agree to leave the bunker and head to God U again (Sam and a tiny Emma in his pocket via the sky, Jordan and Annabeth in a car). There, they hope to find and help Marie who they know cannot do this alone. (Anyone getting Buffy vibes from all of this? A younger sister who’s new in the picture…blood sacrifice…a villainous dean.)
On campus, Emma finds herself in the middle of a love triangle: On the one hand, there’s Sam, saddled with a frat pledge in a diaper and a dog collar/chain seeing as it’s Hell Week and his brothers don’t really understand the gravity of what he’s up to now that he’s back at school. And on the other, there’s Greg, who swoops in to play knight in shining armor to help Emma and offers to fly her around campus (which is so much cooler than jumping, which is all Sam can do). I wish these kind of dynamics were given more space to breathe as they’re rather fun excursions in between all the end-of-the-supes shenanigans happening. This, I’d argue, is the best reason to have longer seasons. With 22 episodes, you were allowed to follow, say, Buffy’s romantic life, have hilarious hijinks, and be invested in the end-of-the-world stuff. With such a reduced episode count, everything happens in the blink of an eye.
Meanwhile, on their way to Cipher’s, Marie and Cate are stuck having a trust-issues conversation: While Cate begs Marie to fix her (she’s clearly strong enough to do that now), Marie flat out refuses. She can’t bring herself to trust Cate, not after she sent her to Elmira and continually used her powers against her own friends. It’s a back and forth they keep having even once they enter Cipher’s emptied house where they find Polarity still weak. He fills them in on Cipher’s master plans and, oddly enough, suggests Marie should heal Cate in order to be better armed to fight him. That’s all she needs to lash out.
“You betrayed us to Vought,” she says. “You’re the reason Andre is dead,” she adds, knowing it’ll trigger Polarity. And so no matter how helpful it may be to have Cate’s powers restored, she ends with the line she will not budge from: “I can’t trust someone with that kind of power again.”
What she does do is actually heal Polarity. He’s the only one who’s been able to even hurt Cipher so there’s a benefit in having him at 100 percent. And that slight hiccup has sent our villain into a spiral, hurting the burnt Godolkin body with such hatred you fear he may kill him before Marie gets to him. He knows Polarity’s electromagnetic pulse can successful scramble his powers, so maybe it’s all for nought. Maybe he should end it. And he almost does until he sees Marie in the security footage from his home. Ah, maybe there is still a chance.
And so he lures her into the seminar room again. She’s destined for greatness, he insists, and all she has to do is continue training with him. It’s all a bit Emperor/Anakin-coded (embrace your powers, come to my side, etc.), but since the show’s already coded Marie’s journey as “The One” that’s not that surprising. Of course, by the time Marie is ready to head into the room, she finds all her friends have also made their way to campus and are there to help her. They want to make sure Annabeth’s vision doesn’t come true. And therein lies the guilt Annabeth has carried all this time: She had a vision of her parents dying… she couldn’t stop that then. Maybe she can stop this now.
Marie remains steadfast: She’ll do this alone. She even uses her powers against her friends to make sure they understand she’s serious. (It’s amazing how hard it was at once for her to float a bag of blood and now she can levitate four grown college kids without batting an eye.) In the end, though, she realizes there may be something to be gained by this kind of help. Her powers now allow her to scan for heartbeats so she knows where Godolkin is. All she needs is time.
And so Polarity, flanked by Greg, Sam, and Jordan (an all-boys plan of attack), arrives at the seminar room to keep Cipher busy. And here’s where Gen V gives us its most thrilling action set piece yet. Cipher is aware that Polarity can stop his powers, but only if he knows where he is at any given point: “Have you ever played Whack-A-Mole?” he asks, with a sly grin. And then he proceeds to hopscotch his way from Jordan to Greg to Sam and start kicking Polarity’s ass—who never knows who Cipher is taking control of. It’s a great conceit for a fight—and it goes on until Polarity just outright loses it and creates a pulse strong enough to knock them all out.
And now we’re at the pivotal moment in this episode, when the girls find Godolkin wounded and possibly dying. Marie’s instinct is to heal him, hoping he’ll entrust them with the information they need to vanquish Cipher. He barely musters a nod, and Marie gets to work. She’s clearly come a long way—and soon enough, all the burn blisters are gone and we are faced with a fresh-faced man: Thomas Godolkin. Only, there’s a smirk lurking underneath his demeanor. He knew she would do this. This is what he’d trained her to do. And as Marie collapses from exhaustion, it dawns on Cate that the person in front of them is, in fact, Cipher—or, maybe, as they soon realize, there was never a Cipher to begin with.
For the person in the seminar room knocked out by Polarity is a sniveling man who sounds nothing like the person they’d been fighting. He’s Doug, he says. He’d been puppeteered, and Marie had played right into Godolkin’s hands by eventually gifting him the body he’d long lost. As the girls escape and the boys make sense of what just happened, Godolkin enjoys a nice stroll out on campus (wearing nothing more than a diaper and a blanket) and begins the culling he’d long envisioned. His first target? Frat pledger Sam, who’s also in a diaper. “We want gods to walk this Earth,” he says, “not circus freaks” before having him cut off his own head with his dog chain as Godolkin walks away. “Okay, who’s next?”
Stray observations
- • In all honesty, having the power to turn your feet into hands (well, your big toes into opposable thumbs) is 100 percent a worthless power.
- • One of the most fascinating aspects of Jordan’s power is how carefully the writers of the show attend to when he switches between London Thor and Derek Luh. It must be a nightmare to shoot, but Jordan’s gender presentation is so key to who they are that I particularly enjoy those blink-and-you’ll-miss-them switches (like in the car with Annabeth) for what they tell us about who they are and who they project to be. That scene is also quite touching in that it feels like a coming-out tale: “I can’t imagine being me without them,” they say about their powers, and you truly believe that it got better for them when they embraced who they were.
- • By the end of the episode, Marie’s line about not trusting people with that kind of power feels like a premonition (if not an outright warning): She blindly trusted in that burnt victim she hoped would help her, and once more, she was betrayed. But it speaks to the larger question Gen V has been toying with all season (and which The Boys is basically premised on): What responsibility do people with superpowers have to themselves, to one another, and to the public at large? How can they be trusted with said powers?
- • With one episode to go, I’m curious if we’ll get another deus Boys machina like we got last time, where those A-listers from the OG show crash this college-set series or whether Annabeth’s vision of Marie will spell a more dour kind of ending. Either way, let’s hope that eugenicist/“supe supremacist” of a villain gets the comeuppance he deserves.
