‘If you look back, you’ll see it’

This article contains spoilers from Gen V season 2, episode 7, “Hell Week.”

Gen V finally revealed the truth about Thomas Godolkin, and the clues have been right in front of us all season long, if you knew where to look.

In season 2’s latest episode, Team Bloodbender faced down Cipher (Hamish Linklater) and his mind control abilities while Marie (Jaz Sinclair) snuck away to repair the burned, debilitated body of the God U founder (Ethan Slater). When she finished, some hard truths were revealed.

Cipher isn’t really Cipher. His real name is Doug, and he’s just some guy that Godolkin psychically puppeteered while stuck in his incapacitated state. Now that Marie restored his real body, however, he no longer has to keep up the charade. He releases Doug from his mental prison and sets out to fulfill his new mission of culling the herd at the university — in other words, killing off all those supes who can’t level up.

“We’re laying out little hints that, if you look back, you’ll be able to see it,” showrunner Michele Fazekas tells Entertainment Weekly of the twist. “Even the fact that — why does this guy just drink gross shakes with chicken and stuff in it? It’s because he doesn’t taste anything. He doesn’t care about this body. He’s just trying to keep it going to get to the end goal.”

At the start of developing the season 2 arc (“we’re going back years now,” Fazekas notes), the writers knew they wanted their new dean of God U to be a supe who was firmly the villain, even if the audience didn’t know his motivations. Simultaneously, they wanted to explore the history of the school and connect it somehow to Marie, which set them down a path that led to this twist.

“We were worried that everyone’s going to guess that,” Fazekas says of Godolkin being the charred body in Cipher’s chamber. “I think some people will guess that. I don’t know if it’s guessable that they are actually the same person, that this guy is just some guy. He is basically just a body that [Godolkin’s] tried on.”

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When Slater came along for the role, the showrunner noted how the Wicked star felt “of that time,” meaning of the 1960s, where the Godolkin flashbacks take place. “We didn’t want it to be some superhero-type person,” she says. “There’s a sweetness to him that belies what this character has wrought.”

She further explains how, after shooting the first episode, she had Linklater watch footage of Slater’s performance and vice versa, though she admits Slater had more material to view. “What I told Ethan was, ‘We’re not looking for a mimicry. We’re not looking for you to do a Hamish Linklater impersonation,'” she says, “but he really did study it, even little subtle things he did to lean into.”

The Gen V season 2 finale drops on Amazon’s Prime Video next week on Oct. 22.