Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 16, 2025
I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of this week’s episode of Gen V while Mike is away because I don’t typically cover the series. However, I do want to briefly talk about the twist (and maintain recap continuity here). Spoilers, obviously.
I thought it was a good twist because casual viewers may not have seen it coming, and while those who are more dialed in (or who read Mike’s recap two weeks ago) probably did, it was at least well executed. The gist? Hamish Linklater’s character was not Cipher. There is no Cipher. Linklater’s character is actually just a dude named Doug.
The real “Cipher” was Godolkin, the burned-up old man, all along. Marie and the gang discover that when Marie decides to use her powers to heal Godolkin. She thinks he’ll save them from Cipher. Not so much. Godolkin has been working Doug like a puppet all season long to force Marie to realize her own powers and use them to heal him so he can cull the weak Supes, like the poor frat guy who can turn his feet into hands. It is a bad superpower, but Godolkin didn’t have to make him strangle himself with a dog leash. Not nice!
I thought it was a neat, well-executed reveal, although the downside is that in the finale, Hamish Linklater’s delightfully good supervillain will be replaced by Ethan Slater’s Godolkin. It’s not the first time Ethan Slater has broken up a happy arrangement, I suppose, but I doubt his imperiousness will match Linklater’s smarminess.
The other reveal in the episode is that Marie’s sister, Annabeth, had a premonition of Marie being crushed and possibly killed by Cipher, so she tried to stop her from confronting him. To establish the bona fides of her premonitions, Annabeth also revealed that she’d foreseen Marie killing their parents and has spent the past several years burdened by the guilt of knowing she might have prevented it. Annabeth’s insistence doesn’t, however, stop Marie from healing Godolkin and setting the stage for a finale showdown between Marie and Godolkin and, I assume, a newly empowered Cate once Marie returns Cate’s powers to her.
The real tragedy of the episode, though, is poor Doug, the owner of a red Honda Civic, whose mind has apparently been occupied for so long that the last time he was himself, he’d just been fired from Blockbuster. As Mike wrote a few weeks ago, the clues have been there all along: Marie was right that Cipher had no Compound V in him, which also explains why Cipher was so willing to stab himself in the hand. And now Doug has a stab wound on his hand, no job at Blockbuster to go back to, and who even knows what happened to his red Honda Civic or his cat, Buster?
I hope Doug finds happiness. That’s The Boys spin-off I’d be most interested in watching.
