SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 6 of “Gen V,” now streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video.
This week’s episode of “Gen V” Season 2 dropped a lot of news, most of which was learned during the God U students’ time in former Vought boss Stan Edgar’s (Giancarlo Esposito) “weird billionaire bunker,” as “Gen V” showrunner Michele Fazekas put it to Variety, following their escape from Elmira.
Among the top revelations during “The Boys” crossover cameo were: Thomas Godolkin (played by Ethan Slater) is actually the elderly burn victim in the hyperbaric chamber that God U dean Cipher (Hamish Linklater) has been caring for/abusing; Godolkin came up with The Odessa project; Marie (Jaz Sinclair) and Homelander (Antony Starr) are the only two Odessa subjects to survive the experiment; Zoe (Olivia Morandin) is safely in her adoptive grandpa Stan Edgar’s hands following the death of her mother Victoria Neuman in “The Boys” Season 4; and Marie’s long-lost sister Annabeth (Keeya King) is a supe with the power to see the future.
As Cipher’s master plan — building off what Godolkin started with Odessa to then eliminate 75% of the student population at God U by targeting the weakest supes, then doing the same to the global supe community — becomes clear, Marie and Cate (Maddie Phillips) decide to head back to campus on their own in hopes that if they save Thomas Godolkin from Cipher, he will help them end Cipher’s plot and that they’ll even find a way to take out Homelander once and for all.
Here, “Gen V” showrunner Fazekas breaks down the big reveal in Episode 6 and how the two remaining installments in “Gen V” Season 2 are meant to set up the upcoming fifth and final season of “The Boys,” which will premiere next year.
Marie has proven her ability to heal to the point she was able to bring her sister back from the dead. Is this the power Cipher was trying to tap into? The end goal that he’s been trying to get her to, with her power over blood?
It is one of them. It is healing — but I would say that is a step along the way to his ultimate goal. That is not the ultimate goal. And I would differentiate between healing and resurrecting. Because I think we were careful to be like, it’s not like she’s reanimating the dead. But it is not the end of the agenda.
Was the form of death — Annabeth’s throat being slit and her bleeding out — what specifically made Marie able to heal her? Was it the bloody nature of this that allowed her to bring back her sister?
Not necessarily.
We find out in this episode that Annabeth is herself a supe, a precog, and received Compound V. Was Annabeth part of Odessa like Marie?
No, I can safely say no.
The reveal that Godolkin is the old burned man being kept alive by Cipher is a big lore drop. I know you and “The Boys” creator Eric Kripke said back in Season 1 that it would be possible to watch “Gen V” separate from “The Boys,” but now it really feels like we’re deep in the Vought backstory, and so it’s gonna be hard to watch the final season of “The Boys” if you haven’t seen “Gen V” Season 2.
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.
What was Godolkin’s main focus and original plan here with Odessa? And why are Marie and Homelander the only ones so far to survive? What made them special?
I think that’s what Cipher is trying to figure out. And part of it is just science; you do a bunch of different experiments, you try things a bunch of different ways, and some things work. The whole thing about science is, can you replicate it? I think that’s where it gets tricky, because why did it work with Homelander and Marie, but not with other things they’re experimenting on? You can go down a rabbit hole of genetics or whatever. But right now, these are the two that worked.
There’s a similarity — I don’t think this is spoiling — in how Marie was like a test tube baby. So was Homelander. So that is part of why it works differently with them.
And it was already said Annabeth specifically was not.
Correct.
Talking about Dean Shetty’s plan in Season 1 versus what Cipher is trying to do here. Shetty was trying to eliminate all supes, while Cipher is trying to eliminate the weak supes. What is his goal here?
He wants to eliminate the weak, because it’s almost like resource control. Like, let’s get rid of the what he thinks are the stupid ones, and just focus all of our efforts on the perfect ones, on the ones that will elevate us. He is basically trying to be the supe version of Darwin. We are only going to let the fittest survive. We’re not going to waste our time and our efforts on the ones that are, what he estimates to be, dumb. And that is the theme that I really loved that came out of the season is, just because he thinks a power is dumb doesn’t necessarily mean anything, because they can still be heroes. Even the stupid powers end up making a difference, and he sort of writes them off. And that is a flaw, that’s a mistake.
Is there clarification yet at this point in the season on why Marie couldn’t feel the Compound V in Cipher?
No, there’s not.
But there will be?
Oh for sure. That wasn’t a mistake on our part. That was on purpose, and it’s going to make sense.
There are two more episodes left in the season. No spoilers, but can you tease if there is going to be set up for a third season? How much longer do you see the show going when “The Boys” proper comes to an end, and then “Vought Rising” is a prequel to the series?
I think there is any number of ways you could do a third season. Our task here was launching into “The Boys,” which doesn’t really mean that there wouldn’t be another season of “Gen V.” That’s what’s great about a college show —everyone’s always going to college! But our task was launch us into the new season of “The Boys.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.