Generation V Season 2’s Ultimate Villain Is a Sinister Version of Marvel’s Professor X
This article contains spoilers for “Gen V” through Season 2, Episode 7, “Hell Week.”
I called he! “Gen V” Season 2 Episode 4, “Bags,” revealed two important details about Godolkin University villain Dean Cipher (Hamish Linklater). One: His superpower is telepathy, even though blood-controlling Marie (Jaz Sinclair) hasn’t detected any Compound V inside him. Two: Cipher was treating a burned man in a hyperbaric chamber. This man was implied to be Thomas Godolkin (Ethan Slater), the presumed deceased founder of God U and the Odessa Project that gave birth to Homelander (Antony Starr) and Marie.
After “Bags”, I predicted that Cipher (whose name refers to a system of hiding numbers/letters/symbols under different ones) would turn out to be Godolkin’s puppet. There is no “number”, just Godolkin speaking psychically and acting through it. This season’s penultimate episode, “Hell Week,” revealed that I was exactly right.
Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas), a supe whose magnetic powers can disrupt Cipher’s telepathy, knocks him out. At the same time, Marie uses her blood powers to heal Godolkin’s burned body, thinking he will know how to stop Cipher. Except, as she and her friends realize, Godolkin East Encrypt. So who is Linklater’s character? Just an average guy named Doug, who Godolkin kidnapped and uses as a parasite controlling a host body.
There is no V in Doug’s blood because he does not have psychic powers, unlike Godolkin. The latter was burned alive in a laboratory accident triggered by Compound V, but he took it himself to survive.
Anything Cipher has done or said this season, like tutoring Marie in her blood control or starting a “seminar” deathmatch to take out the strongest God U students? It really was Godolkin. This is why Cipher had sex with Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) while Godolkin watched and experienced it vicariously, Godolkin’s disgust at being “useless” is why Cipher screamed in his face, etc.
Godolkin’s contempt for the weak is also behind his master plan. He wants to regain control of his school and eliminate the student population of God U. The first student he meets can only turn his big toes into opposable thumbs, so Godolkin kills him. (“We want gods to walk this Earth, not circus freaks.”)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s a disabled psychic teacher who runs a school for supes. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Godolkin is a parody of Marvel Comics’ Professor Charles Xavier, leader of the X-Men. Professor X is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, so he cannot physically fight with his students. His psychic powers, however, leave him far from helpless. One of Xavier’s characteristic gestures is to call telepathically to his students: “To me, my X-Men”.
