Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Mike Redmond | TV | October 9, 2025
Picking up immediately after Marie (Jaz Sinclair) miraculously healed her dying sister inside the Elmira prison, Gen V Episode 6 hits the ground running as the show leans harder than ever into its X-Men influence. Did you not know Gen V is The Boys doing a riff on the Marvel mutants? You will now!
As the gang makes their escape, the shocks keep coming for Marie as she learns that her sister Annabeth (Keeya King) is also a Supe. She somehow senses Sam (Asa Germann) before he smashes through a wall and gets the group to safety. Turns out reconnecting with his parents did him some good. For now anyway. If there’s one thing this franchise loves doing, it’s turning things to sh*t, and that starts happening immediately with Maria’s sisterly reunion.
Finally finding Annabeth should be the happiest moment of Marie’s life, and it’s proving to be anything but. Her closest friends are freaked out by the scope of Marie’s powers, Marie herself is freaked out because, basically, Cipher (Hamish Linklater) was right, and Annabeth is understandably shellshocked that her entire life has gone to hell again because of Marie. She was living a charmed, normal life with Pam (Judith Scott), where not a single person knew she was a Supe. That’s now gone as she’s sucked into Marie’s vortex.
While the gang hides out in an abandoned library, the unflappable Cipher is showing a surprising amount of frustration. We’ve never seen him lose his cool all season, but with Marie in the wind, he’s throwing phones and slapping the crap out of the burnt, diapered man hidden in his house. Our boy is rattled, but it’s not long before he’s back to doing his one-step-ahead schtick with Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas).
Knowing Emma (Lizze Broadway) will reach out to the seemingly ailing Supe, Cipher is able to learn the kids’ location and sends Vikor (Tait Fletcher) to collect Marie. With that locked down, Cipher toys with Polarity by taking control of his body and making him slap himself. He even mocks Polarity’s crumbling health by noting the same thing happened to Andre (Chance Perdomo) before his death, which was exacerbated by Cipher’s experimenting. That will be a mistake. Just as Cipher goes to make Polarity slap himself again, the Supe is somehow able to resist, and neither one knows how it’s happening. Cipher is the most confused, but he doesn’t have time to react before Polarity blasts him out the window.
Back at the library, Vikor is cutting through the gang, but his rampage is stopped short by the sudden arrival of a very familiar-looking little girl with insanely powerful tentacles in her mouth. Welcome to Gen V, Zoe Neuman (Olivia Morandin). But she’s not alone. In a continued collision with the flagship series, the gang was tracked by Zoe’s grandfather, Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito). The former Vought CEO also has a vested interest in Marie, and here comes the franchise morass.
With the group safe in his underground bunker, Edgar makes with the exposition dump by revealing the deal with Project Odessa. In a nutshell, it was Thomas Godolkin’s attempt to engineer “god-tier” Supes by injecting infants with Compound V as early as the blastocyst stage. The result was a lot of dead babies, but exactly two subjects survived the process: Marie and Homelander.
Naturally, this revelation rocks the group even more. They’ve already seen Marie’s powers pull off a miracle, and now, they’re learning she’s literally on the same level as Homelander. Gen V has been pointing in that direction for a while, and it just became text. Clearly, the two are on a collision course, and that only becomes more inevitable as Marie ditches the group to find Cipher. Or at least she tries to go alone until Kate (Cate Dunlap) tags along with hopes of Marie healing her broken powers.
Thought Splatters
— One of my concerns, and I’ve seen others make similar remarks, is that this show will build up Marie, only to have her be a throwaway character in The Boys final season, if she even appears at all. However, having Marie as a prominent character in the flagship series would make Gen V required viewing, and according to showrunner Michele Fazekas, that is not the case. Here’s what she told Variety in the latest post-episode interview:
I’m not the person to ask about the next season of “The Boys,” because I really don’t know, but I doubt it. The way that I think of it and the way that Eric Kripke also thinks of it is, if you watch both shows, you will get the story on a different level than people who only watch one or the other. But we make sure you can still enjoy it and still understand the story having not seen one. Even if I’ve never seen “The Boys” before, the way they talk about Homelander, I get who Homelander is, whether or not I’ve seen. So will you get more out of watching this and then watching “The Boys”? Maybe, but it won’t be so entwined that it won’t be understandable.
That does not bode well for Marie.
— So, for the nerds at home: Homelander and Marie are omega mutants, and Cipher is Mr. Sinister. Got it.
— Speaking of Cipher’s plans to cull the herd, heading into this episode, I was wondering about the size of the Supes population because it has to be huge if they’ve been filling up a college campus since the freaking ’60s. You’d think at least a few of them would become supervillains, which would negate Homelander’s need to create super-powered terrorists in the first season. But I guess not every power is the most spectacular, and apparently, a lot of them turn out butt-based. Such is life.
