When Chance Perdomo died last year, Gen V lost its most promising young performer. But season two has avoided recasting the character or introducing a prominent new student to take his place, instead focusing on a smaller group and developing the people we already know: Marie, Emma, Jordan, Cate, and Sam. That shift is working pretty well for me overall, even if this season feels slightly less novel than the first.
It feels right that season two is kicking into gear as we reach the midpoint. “Bags” starts to really peel back the curtain on what this story is about, digging into Project Odessa and the true nature of the villainous new dean. Cipher is a huge presence here, lingering in the air even when he doesn’t appear in a scene, and Hamish Linklater is really selling the character’s creepiness.
This is an episode all about the fallout of Jordan’s decision to reveal the truth about Andre’s death and Cate’s attack. On Vought News, Cate is still parroting the story that she was assaulted by Starlighters and Jordan is lying for likes. But this situation won’t just go away, so Cipher whips up a disturbing solution: Marie and Jordan will duke it out on live TV. It’s blood bender versus gender bender, and Jordan will get their ass kicked to provide the public some catharsis. Marie doesn’t want to fight her partner, but neither of them have any leverage here; Cipher can haul them off to Elmira whenever he wants.
Much of “Bags” is about the heroes trying to find that leverage, to figure out some way of resisting. Nobody loves the idea of enlisting Cate’s help, especially since she’s still a Vought puppet, but Marie knows it might be the only way to learn more about Cipher. Unfortunately, Cate’s powers are still on the fritz. And even before the attack, she couldn’t read Cipher’s mind; he has an ironclad barrier around his mind, perhaps an effect of his own powers.
That doesn’t mean they can’t dig up some dirt on him, though. During Marie’s private lesson with Cipher, Cate and Jordan infiltrate the dean’s house, finding a withered old man in a hyperbaric chamber. They also bond a little along the way. Jordan isn’t sure they can forgive Cate, but they come a long way in this episode, especially after an apology and an argument that devolves into mutual slut-shaming and laughter. It’s a helpful reminder that these two were friends years before the events of the show. There’s a sense of history there, and it makes their alliance feel believable despite Cate’s ever-questionable morality.
She gets another chance to prove herself that evening when Cipher texts her after realizing she poked around his house. The plan to get him to call off the fight is pretty straightforward: Cate will visit Cipher in the VIP box during the big fight and get him to admit that he’s not a supe. (During her lesson, Marie didn’t sense any Compound V in his blood.) Emma, meanwhile, will shrink down and sneak in through the pipes to plant a tiny camera and capture the whole thing, gaining the leverage they need.
It’s nice to see Emma in a new mode this season: much more self-assured and actively working to overcome the deep-rooted self-loathing that still remains. Part of that is having friends like Harper and Ally who really look up to her, viewing her the same way she viewed Andre as a freshman. As a chameleon, Harper can access the same powers as Emma, but she doesn’t need to internally self-flagellate to shrink down. She plays coach in a touching scene, gassing her up in the hopes that she’ll grow to massive size. Apparently Emma is the only other person Ally has told about her power: pubic hair–bending, which I’m surprised hasn’t already appeared in The Boys.
Ally provides the camera, and Emma’s trek through the pipes goes well until the water turns back on and she’s washed away. Luckily, she makes it to Cipher’s toilet and manages to crawl out right before he takes a shit. I will not forget the toilet-POV shot of Linklater’s (presumably prosthetic) ball sack descending from above anytime soon.
It’s a happy ending for Emma, who has a wholesome reunion with her new buddies after successfully growing back to normal size by being “too tired to think.” Elsewhere, though, everything is going off the rails — or, from Cipher’s point of view, going to plan. He admits to Cate that the old man she saw is his father, but he seems completely unfazed by her claim that she can read his mind and knows he isn’t a supe. Her attempt to broker a deal is doomed from the start, and she doesn’t even know it yet. We have some idea this won’t go her way, but we don’t know how.
Jordan gets boos when they come out for the fight, of course, while Marie gets universal cheers. But to her credit, she makes an effort to reject this false choice altogether, kissing Jordan instead of hitting them. It’s not until Cipher says “Watch this” and Jordan punches Marie that we realize what’s going on: He has his own form of mind control far more powerful than Cate’s. He can watch from the VIP box and speak through Jordan, controlling them like a puppet.
When Marie realizes what’s happening, she’s forced to employ the lesson Cipher taught her earlier: lifting living beings through blood-bending. She concentrates and connects with the cells in Jordan’s blood, levitating them and dropping them only when they’re on the verge of exploding. It’s the ideal ending for the narrative Cipher and Vought are constructing: Now satiated, the angry public can cheer for Marie and take joy in Jordan’s punishment.
Viewers of The Boys know that all-powerful supe villains can be narratively frustrating; Homelander is basically unstoppable, and we know he likely won’t die until the end of the show, so it’s just a matter of watching the heroes fail to find leverage over and over. “Bags” arguably has that same issue, but at least the characters know who they’re dealing with now. And unlike Homelander, Cipher might just be a one-season villain like the dean before him. At least in this episode, Cipher getting what he wants successfully raises the stakes. Watching these shows, you don’t want to be thinking, Oh God, they’ll never beat him. You want to be wondering, How the hell will they beat him?
Extra Credit
• Cate’s attempt to push a security guard into handing over his keys results in him fucking a garden gnome. Truly classic Gen V humor. Kudos to Maddie Phillips for her urgent delivery of “He’s rearranging a gnome’s guts right now.”
• I always like a hero-villain dynamic in which the villain is the mentor helping the hero unlock new powers (season one of The Flash comes to mind), and the blood-bag training sequence is pretty effective. As soon as that goat appears, you just know it’s going to burst midair.
• Cipher tells Marie that the whole point of God U is to produce someone like her, potentially the most powerful supe ever. We sort of already know that, though. It feels as though there’s more to uncover here.
• “Ease up, Yoda.” “Fair enough. Sorry.” This is a nice, rare moment of Cipher actually backing down slightly.
• Not sure what to think about Cipher saying the goats are named after “assholes” and then using Elon Musk and Julia Fox as the two names.
• Ally’s Starlighter brother is Greg, the cute guy Emma knows from Modesty Monarch’s class. More to come, presumably.
• Emma suggests Bush Master as Ally’s supe name. She loves it.
• Cipher complaining about the bad camera angle might be my favorite Linklater moment of the episode.
• Cipher does seem to lose control of Jordan there at the end, allowing them to tell Marie to stop. What happened there?
