Gen V season 2 episode 7 recap: Whom does Marie heal?

Gen V season 2 episode 7, titled Hell Week, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on October 15, 2025. The penultimate episode of the ongoing installment answers a number of pressing questions, which are likely to have their bearings on the original show, The Boys, of which this is a spin-off.

Disclaimer: The following article contains spoilers for Gen V season 2 episode 7. Reader's discretion is advised.

With the second season nearing its finale, Marie is seen at the height of her powers. As Godolkin University’s Dean, Cipher, has mentioned on numerous occasions throughout the series, Marie is one of the most powerful beings to ever walk the planet. She has proven it by bringing her sister, Annabeth, back from the dead at the end of episode 5.

In episode 7, Marie uses her newfound healing power on two individuals. First, she heals Polarity after encountering him at Cipher’s home. Later in the episode, she heals the severely disfigured body of Thomas Godolkin, one of the pioneering figures in the creation of supes, at the university.

The truth about Cipher and Thomas Godolkin

By episode 6, Marie and her friends, alongside Vought’s former CEO Stan Edgar, work out that the person with severe burns that Cipher keeps at home in a hyperbaric chamber is none other than Thomas Godolkin, the person after whom God U is named and who has been the right-hand man of Frederick Vought, the founder of Vought International.

Believing that Godolkin does not want to control supes, unlike Cipher, Marie sets out on a mission to rescue him from the latter’s captivity. Kate follows her, while the others catch up with them later after finding that she has left Stan Edgar’s bunker. With Annabeth having a precog vision of Marie lying in a pool of blood, the group becomes desperate to stop her.

However, a determined Marie overpowers them all and manages to reach Godolkin. Polarity, who can resist Cipher's mind control, leads the attack against the Dean to keep him away from Marie and let her do her thing. In the end, that turns out to have been unnecessary and all part of Godolkin’s plan. As Marie heals Godolkin and Polarity overpowers Cipher simultaneously, the truth comes to light.

The Dean starts to weep and begs Polarity not to kill him, as he reveals his real name to be Doug Brightbill, a human with no superpowers. It is Godolkin who has been wearing him like a human puppet and engineering everything behind the scenes, with some help from Sister Sage. His goal has been to unlock Marie’s potential so that she heals him, and he can continue his work.

There has been no individual named Cipher; it is simply the identity Godolkin made Doug assume while controlling him. As Cipher, he has recreated his life's work, which was destroyed in a lab accident, and over time, shifted his goal from creating Supes to creating a society where only the strongest Supes survive.

How does Polarity resist Cipher/Godolkin’s telepathic powers?

In episode 6, Cipher attacks Polarity at his home to find out the location of Marie. After he gets him to trick the youngsters into sharing where they are hiding, he toys with Polarity for his amusement, only for the latter to blast him out of the room. The incident leaves both parties stunned, and in the following episode, Cipher is seen theorizing how Polarity may have been able to resist him.

Cipher, or Godolkin in reality, believes that Polarity’s control over magnetism somehow interferes with the electrical synapses in the nervous system, making him resistant to mind control. Later, while fighting Polarity in the training room, Cipher names the ability Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS).

During the fight, Cipher is able to control the students who arrive to help Polarity, and they end up attacking him instead. It is at that critical moment that Polarity hypercharges his TMS ability and blasts Cipher/Godolkin out of everyone’s head, including Doug’s. With Godolkin back at his full strength, the battle ahead of the young heroes is expected to get significantly more difficult. Still, Polarity’s new ability may give them a fighting chance.

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