Summary
Gen V Season 2 continues to leverage more explicit connections to The Boys in Episode 6, and also drops a potentially huge suggestion about the identity of Mr. Crispy.
Gen V Season 2 continues to lean on more explicit cameos and connections to The Boys. In the previous episode, it was Sister Sage, who seems to be working with Cipher to groom Marie’s powers so she becomes powerful enough to take on Homelander. Here in Episode 6, it’s Stan Edgar and Zoe Neuman, in slightly less showy but potentially more impactful appearances that bring us a little bit closer to the truth about who Cipher is keeping alive in his house.
Of course, I’m pretty sure we’ve already figured that out. “Cooking Lessons” drops a major clue in this regard, all but confirming that Mr. Crispy is indeed a surviving Thomas Godolkin, but it doesn’t commit to the idea that he might be the one controlling Cipher for his own ends. The clues are there if you’re looking for them, though. But let’s get on with breaking down this episode.
Following Marie’s sudden, unexplainable resurrection of Annabeth, the rest of the gang are a bit confused and fearful, especially Annabeth herself, who isn’t wildly keen on the idea of having been killed and resurrected just as a prop to entice Marie’s latest skillset. But there’s no time to dwell on that, since an escape from Elmira is necessary. Thanks to Annabeth’s powers of precognition, which allow her to snatch glimpses of the future but in a vague way that makes it difficult to understand or act on what she’s seeing, and the sudden arrival of Sam, who bursts through one of the walls like the Kool-Aid Man, they all manage to escape in one of the security vans.
This doesn’t exactly assuage the tensions, though. Annabeth doesn’t want to make the radical move of driving all the way to Canada, but Marie thinks it’d be stupid to go to Aunt Pam’s or anywhere else predictable, so they’re kind of stuck winging it. And their escape hasn’t gone unnoticed, least of all by Cipher, who takes the news so badly that he immediately starts slapping Mr. Crispy/Godolkin all over the place. This somewhat goes against my theory that Godolkin’s truly in control, but I think you can sort of rationalise it as the “real” Cipher managing to lash out as Godolkin’s influence lapses during a moment of emotional stress, especially since he immediately goes back to his dead-eyed physiotherapy as though nothing happened in the interim.
While Marie and the gang hide out in a library – whenever 1984 has been burned, you know there’s some fascism at play – Cipher goes nuts and sets out to retrieve his golden goose. His first stop is Polarity’s house, where he tries to talk Polarity into helping him by positing Marie as a medical miracle, but when he won’t play ball, Cipher forcibly takes control of him to extract information about Marie’s whereabouts from Harper, who had been instructed to summon help through an Instagram SOS.
I’ve already said elsewhere that Hamish Linklater is carrying this season on his back, and this new, slightly more desperate, more unstable mode is especially fun. Seems to work, too, since he’s able to get enough out of Harper to send Vikor after Marie. As before, it’s pretty much a mismatch, but this is as good a time as any for Gen V Season 2, Episode 6 to introduce Stan Edgar and Zoe Neuman. The latter pulps Vikor’s head using her nested mouths, and the former takes the gang to the relative safety of a bunker located 90 feet underground. In the meantime, we get some vague information about how Zoe was taken to Red River, and Stan somehow got her back after being freed from prison.
Stan is a wealth of plot-relevant information. He explains that Project Odessa was originally created by Thomas Godolkin to produce God-like Supes, but it was largely a baby-killing disaster aside from two notable successes – Homelander and Marie. Both are the only living results of the program, which was kept alive by Cipher as part of a lifelong ambition to continue Godolkin’s work (hmm). There does seem to be one notable difference between the approaches of the two, though – Godolkin was obsessed with controlling Supes, while Cipher is more interested in total, fascistic Supe supremacy. This, at least, I find a bit difficult to reconcile with my Godolkin-is-in-control theory, but I’m not writing it off just yet.
To this point, Cate and Jordan also reveal that Cipher keeps an extra-crispy old dude in his crib, who Stan immediately intuits to be a surviving Thomas Godolkin. This is a game-changer for Stan, who instead theorises that Cipher had been continuing Goldolkin’s work by torturing the information out of him. He’s almost right, I think, since our working theory is that it’s the other way around, and Godolkin has been using Cipher as a puppet to continue his experiments. But this shifts Stan’s objective, since if he can get to Godolkin personally, he can use his theories and technologies pertaining to Supe control to put a lid on Homelander.
Marie isn’t too keen on being a pawn in this scheme, though, so she decides to leave the bunker under the cover of night, and Cate, who believes that Marie can potentially repair her powers, goes with her. Needless to say, the group splitting up at this stage seems pretty ill-advised, but kids will be kids, even superpowered ones.
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