Gen V Season 2's Ultimate Villain Is A Sinister Take On Marvel's Professor X

This article contains spoilers for "Gen V" through season 2, episode 7, "Hell Week."

I called it! "Gen V" season 2 episode 4, "Bags," revealed two important details about the villainous Godolkin University Dean Cipher (Hamish Linklater). One: His superpower is telepathy, even though the blood-controlling Marie (Jaz Sinclair) sensed no Compound V inside of him. Two: Cipher was caring for a burned man in a hyperbaric chamber. That man was implied to be Thomas Godolkin (Ethan Slater), the assumed dead founder of God U and the Odessa project that birthed Homelander (Antony Starr) and Marie.

After "Bags," I predicted that Cipher (whose name refers to a system of hiding numbers/letters/symbols underneath different ones) would be revealed as Godolkin's puppet. There is no "Cipher," just Godolkin psychically speaking and acting through him. This season's penultimate episode, "Hell Week," revealed I was exactly right.

Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas), a supe whose magnetic powers can disrupt Cipher's telepathy, knocks him unconscious. At the same time, Marie uses her blood powers to heal Godolkin's burned body, thinking he'll know how to stop Cipher. Except, as she and her friends realize, Godolkin is Cipher. Who is Linklater's character, then? Just an average guy named Doug, who Godolkin abducted and has been using like a parasite controlling a host body.

There's no V in Doug's blood because he doesn't have psychic powers, Godolkin does. The latter was burned to near death in a lab accident started by Compound V, but he took some himself to survive.

Everything Cipher has done or said this season, like tutoring Marie in her blood control or starting a "seminar" death match to weed out the strongest God U students? It was really Godolkin. That's why Cipher had sex with Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) while Godolkin watched and vicariously experienced it, Godolkin's self-loathing for being "useless" is why he had Cipher yell in his face, etc.

Godolkin's contempt for the weak is also the root of his master plan. He wants to retake control of his school and cull God U's student population. The first student he meets can only turn his big toes into opposable thumbs, so Godolkin kills him. ("We want gods to walk this Earth, not circus freaks.")

Stop me if you've heard this one before: There's a psychic teacher with a disability who runs a school for supes. If that sounds familiar, that's because Godolkin is a parody of Marvel Comics' Professor Charles Xavier, leader of the X-Men. Professor X is paralyzed and used a wheelchair, so he can't physically fight with his students. His psychic powers leave him far from helpless, though. One of Xavier's signature moves is telepathically summoning his students to him: "To me, my X-Men."

If you've read the original "The Boys" comic series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, Godolkin's twisted resemblance to Professor X is even more obvious. One of the sickest storylines in "The Boys" is "We Gotta Go Now," which focuses on the G-Men, a blatant parody of the X-Men. Garth Ennis thinks that American superhero comics are quite stupid, and "The Boys" is him taking the piss out of all the genre's biggest characters, one by one. 

The G-Men's line-up resembles the most famous X-Men. There's Groundhawk, a Wolverine stand-in who has hammers for hands, Five-Oh is Cyclops but with a motorcycle cop outfit, Coldsnap is Iceman, etc. The comic also shows the G-Men have many sub-divisions (G-Force, G-Style, G-Wiz, etc.), echoing the endless X-Men spin-offs during their comics' height of popularity in the late '80s to mid-'90s.

In "We Gotta Go Now," the Boys send Hughie undercover into G-Wiz following the suicide of the G-Man Silver Kincaid (a Jean Grey parody). It turns out the G-Men's leader, John Godolkin, is not, like Professor X, a kindly teacher who takes in orphans and misfits, but a pedophile who abducts children and grooms them into his G-Men. That's why the G-Men are always recruiting; Godolkin wants new victims, and it's a self-perpetuating cycle where he turns those victims into new superhero cash cows to fund more of his crimes. He's brainwashed his students into utter loyalty, not with psychic powers like Professor X could, but through years of abusing and indoctrinating each and every one of them. 

"The Boys" TV show didn't adapt this arc. Instead, it was used as the loose basis for "Gen V." That said, all the main "Gen V" characters are original to the show. And "we gotta go now" is what Cate (Maddie Phillips) says in "Hell Week" when she realizes Godolkin is really Cipher, but that's a generic enough phrase that it may not be a reference to the comic's title.

"Gen V" isn't as blatant an X-Men parody as "We Gotta Go Now," but the influence is still there. Cate's habit of wearing gloves to hold back her touch-based powers recalls the X-Men member Rogue. The season 1 finale of "Gen V" echoed the X-Men comic "Riot at Xavier's" when a student protest broke out at the superhero school. Now, "Gen V" finally has its own Professor X with Cipher/Godolkin. Xavier has his students train themselves in a Danger Room filled with holograms and death traps that put the X-Men's abilities to the test in a controlled environment. Cipher's seminars have a similar purpose, but the danger the students face is totally real; he's the type of teacher who lets the less-promising pupils fall behind to focus on a few favorites, while Xavier writes off no student as a lost cause.

Human evolution is a major theme of "X-Men," because the X-Men are mutants who were born with an X-Gene that bestows superpowers. Mutants will one day overtake the entire human population, sparking fear and bigotry from "normal" humans. Godolkin wants to force the evolution of a new world, but his philosophy couldn't be more different from Xavier's dream of peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants. Godolkin wants to exterminate all supes he deems too weak and let the most powerful ones reign over humanity. Due to his desire to create "perfect" supes, his background as a geneticist, and his ties to the Nazis (like Vought International founder Frederick Vought), he resembles the X-Men villain Nathaniel Essex/Mister Sinister.

One last similarity to Xavier is how Polarity can disrupt Godolkin's psychic powers. I don't think it's a coincidence that Godolkin's weakness is a supe with magnetic powers, since Xavier's nemesis is Magneto. We'll see how/if that weakness is enough to bring Godolkin down in the "Gen V" season 2 finale.

"Gen V" is streaming on Prime Video. The season 2 finale, "Trojan," premieres on Wednesday, October 22, 2025.