Gen V season 2 episode 5 recap — Sister Sage’s takeover, Cipher’s hidden self, and Marie’s power pushed to the edge

Gen V takes a darker turn this week with an episode that feels both deeply unsettling and thrillingly strategic. It doesn’t wait for a late episode twist; it opens with revelations that reshape the season’s power game.

In the fifth episode of the second Season of Gen V, Cipher’s punishments become long-term manipulation, Sister Sage steps fully into the Godolkin shadows, and Marie’s abilities explode past everything we’ve seen before.

This is a chapter that bridges Gen V’s college horror with the ruthless statecraft of The Boys, pulling its young supes into the same brutal chessboard where Homelander once rose.

Back to Elmira

Cipher sends Cate back to Elmira as punishment for trying to film him, but everything suggests it’s part of a bigger plan. The cold open of this episode of Gen V flashes back to one month ago, showing Cipher caring for a burned, barely alive man, strongly implied to be Thomas Godolkin.

He feeds, cleans and bathes the frail figure until Sister Sage appears unannounced. She arrives unexpectedly and immediately takes control, turning the moment into something intimate and deeply unsettling. While having sex with the current Cipher, she covers his eyes and fixes her gaze on the burned man in the tub, a charged gesture that quietly implies the real Cipher might be the one lying there.

It’s never stated outright in this episode of Gen V how long they’ve been working together, but the scene makes their partnership feel both personal and strategic, and hints that Sage has been embedded in Godolkin’s shadowy operations long before the present timeline.

Before the flashback ends, Cipher breaks the tension with a meta hint, telling the audience that to understand Marie’s powers they’ll need to come back next week. It’s a mocking wink that fits Gen V’s self-awareness without weakening its menace.

Sister Sage takes control of Vought’s future

Later, Sage’s influence over Vought becomes explicit. She’s not the official CEO (yet) but she’s taken control while Ashley Barrett remains incapacitated after injecting herself with Compound V to survive Homelander in the finale of The Boys season 4.

Episode 5 of Gen V makes it clear Ashley survived but is sidelined, creating a power vacuum that Sage now fills. Her long-term strategy inside Vought keeps unfolding, suggesting that Homelander’s rise was only the first stage of a much larger plan.

Gen V pushes Marie’s blood powers to the limit

Cipher’s philosophy emerges when Polarity confronts him about Andre. He coldly admits to testing Andre with the deadly metal door that ultimately broke him. That ruthless approach explains why Marie’s become his new focus.

In the present timeline, Cate’s stripped, collared and humiliated inside Elmira. She tries to escape and kills two guards but is recaptured. Jordan, Marie and Emma debate rescuing her. Emma initially refuses, scarred by her own experience there and angry that Cate contributed to their previous imprisonment, but Marie and Jordan convince her they can’t abandon someone to that place. They plan to use the same route Marie once took to escape, only to discover it’s been sealed. They need force to break out again and turn to Sam for help, but Sam refuses, leaving them to act alone.

The rescue fails almost immediately. Marie, Jordan and Emma are drugged, collared and locked in cells next to Cate. That was a trap and they kind of knew that. Cipher appears, pleased with how events are pushing Marie to evolve. He tells her that one-on-one training would’ve been easier but that the environment inside Elmira will force her powers to grow faster.

Jordan tries to resist his mental control and notes how painful it was for him the last time he invaded their mind.

"You're in pain all the time'"they say.

Cipher threatens to repeat it but also shows vulnerability in that process, hinting at limits in his power.

Sage visits Elmira and discusses accelerating Marie’s development. She and Cipher talk about running out of time and needing Marie’s full potential to reach a goal bigger than Homelander. They suggest Homelander’s unaware of their plan, adding another layer of intrigue. Meanwhile, Polarity keeps investigating but suffers a severe seizure, cutting his effort short.

When the chance to break free finally comes, it feels suspiciously easy. Cate frees herself using a hidden pin, then releases Emma, Jordan and Marie. They suspect another trap, yet push forward. They find her bleeding out from a slit throat. Marie, desperate, unleashes her blood manipulation beyond any previous limit. Her power floods the room, triggering headaches and nosebleeds in Cate, Jordan and Emma, but it works. She seals Annabeth’s wound and pulls her back from the edge of death.

The moment strongly suggests that Marie’s ability doesn’t resurrect the fully dead but can reclaim life if it hasn’t completely slipped away. Cipher and Sage have clearly engineered this environment to provoke that breakthrough since the first season of Gen V.

Cipher’s identity under question

The episode strongly suggests a hidden layer to Cipher’s identity. The burned man he cares for in the cold open might not be just another victim but could be the real Cipher, while the version we’ve seen in action might be operating through a host body, possibly even Thomas Godolkin himself.

This idea is at the same time subtly and strongly confirmed when Sister Sage covers Cipher’s eyes while staring directly at the burned figure, paired with Cipher’s unnerving conversation with Polarity about Andre and control, and Jordan's comments on him being "in pain all the time.'

Nothing in Gen V confirms this outright, but the staging and dialogue leave enough space to read it as deliberate misdirection, hinting that Cipher’s body and mind may be split.

Sam’s fractured journey

Sam’s storyline runs parallel but thematically tied to the Elmira plot, deepening Gen V’s focus on control, trauma and identity. He returns home, reconnects with parents who thought he was dead, and learns that Vought lied to them for years.

His family even held a funeral for him, believing he was gone. That revelation cuts deep and feeds his paranoia. The scenes are tense to watch, with the actor delivering a performance so volatile it feels like Sam might kill his parents at any moment. When he sees his mother making a phone call, he assumes betrayal, smashes her phone and lashes out, injuring his father in a fit of rage.

Later, his mother reveals that they once gave him Compound V hoping it would cure his mental illness, a decision born of fear and misunderstanding. The truth devastates him but also brings fragile clarity: his condition isn’t caused by the serum but comes from a family history he never knew about.

The sequence reframes Sam’s instability, showing it as something deeper than Vought’s experiments and making his anger feel even more tragic. This arc keeps Sam physically separate from the Elmira rescue but thematically connected to the show’s obsession with broken families and weaponized control.

A larger, darker endgame

The episode closes on Cipher and Sage, still planning something that outpaces Homelander and promises a radical shift in power. The burned man in Cipher’s house and Marie’s near-death sister feel like pieces in a larger design we can’t yet see fully. The episode circles back to Cipher’s ominous line:

“We'll just have to tune in next week to find out, won't we?”