Diksha Sundriyal
The second season of Prime Video’s ‘Gen V’ introduces a formidable villain in the form of Cipher, the new dean of Godolkin University. While he identifies as a Supe, his powers and true origin remain a mystery. No one knows where he comes from and who he really is, which leads Marie and her friends to try to dig into his life. The need to know more about him and his secrets becomes more urgent when he decides to pit Marie and Jordan in a public fight that becomes the talk of the town. The desperation to make him stop the fight leads to some shocking discoveries, beginning with the doubts over him being a Supe. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Lack of Compound V in Cipher Raises Major Questions
Unlike every other powerful Supe whose powers are publicly known, Cipher prefers to keep his powers a secret. While it is known that he somehow has eyes and ears everywhere and seems to know all sorts of things about people, there is no way to confirm how he knows about it in the first place. Since nothing comes up on him, the only way to learn something of substance is to break into his house, especially after Cate reveals that there is a secret vault in his house. So, while Cate and Jordan sneak into his place, Marie decides to keep him occupied. He had been wanting to train her for some time, so she decides to oblige and signs up for a private lesson. It begins with him teaching her to control her powers such that she can move blood bags without destroying them.
The lesson helps her tap into her powers, and after an initial hitch, she moves all the bags without popping any of them. Then, he takes her a step further and tells her to levitate a goat without killing it. She succeeds at the levitating part and most likely wouldn’t have killed the goat if she hadn’t gotten distracted. As Cipher is awed by her power and admires the levitating goat, she uses this time to look into his bloodstream and realizes that there is no Compound V there. Since all Supes are known to have received their powers from Compound V, it convinces Marie that Cipher is not a Supe due to the lack of the blue chemical in his veins. This gives her and her friends more confidence, leading Cate and Emma to stage a sting operation where they try to get him on camera while confessing that he is a simple human and not a Supe.
At first, he plays along, but eventually, he reveals the true extent of his powers. It turns out that he really is a Supe, and his powers are mind control. This explains how he always seemed to know stuff and remained a step ahead of everyone else. It remains to be seen whether controlling others’ minds is his only power, but it is clear that he has such mastery over it that he doesn’t need to use his hands like Marie or to touch someone like Cate to exert his power over them. This is what he had been trying to teach Marie during the goat lesson. Now that it is confirmed that he is a Supe, the question of the missing Compound V from his veins becomes an even more intriguing mystery. This is where the secret vault in his house comes into the picture.
Cipher’s Parentage Explains His Powers
While Marie trains with Cipher, Cate and Jordan break into his house and enter the vault, which turns out to be a secret room. There, they find a burnt man inside a hyperbaric chamber. Later, when Cipher confronts Cate about the break-in, he reveals that the burnt man is his father. From an earlier scene of the season, we know that years ago, there was a fire at the lab where Thomas Godolkin had been working on Project Odessa. While his colleagues died from the side effects of taking Compound V, he suffered major burns from the fire caused by their actions. It seems that somehow he survived the fire, and it may have to do with the fact that he himself was on Compound V.
While the whole picture remains to be seen, it can be fairly assumed that Thomas Godolkin took some of the V himself, and perhaps it gave him some superpower that allowed him to survive the fire and to stay alive for all these years. More importantly, it explains why Cipher doesn’t have Compound V in his veins. From ‘The Boys,’ we know that the offspring of Supes have the potential to be Supes as well. Ryan is a prime example of this. Andre Anderson, too, would not have required a shot of V to have powers because he was born to Polarity, a Supe.
This means that the offspring inherit the powers, which don’t require V in their bloodstream, which means that Cipher, who also does not have V in his blood, is the offspring of a Supe. Since Thomas Godolkin is his father, it is fair to assume that Godolkin took a shot of V, which led his son to become a Supe. Since Marie and her friend don’t know any adults, or even any of their peers, who have gotten powers without Compound V, it makes sense that they would think that not having V means a person is not a Supe. The revelation about Cipher shatters that perception while also setting the stage to unravel more mysteries about Cipher, Thomas Godolkin, and their secret project, Odessa.
Read More: Gen V: What Happened to Andre? How Did Chance Perdomo Die?
You must be logged in to post a comment.