Ethan Slater Just Explained Gen V Season 2's Game-Changing Villain Twist

Gen V finally showed its hand on who is actually pulling the strings this season, and Ethan Slater is at the center of it. If you clocked something off about Dean Cipher, you were not wrong.

Quick heads up: spoilers ahead for Gen V Season 2, Episode 7, 'Hell Week'.

The reveal

• Episode 7 confirms that Thomas Godolkin is alive and secretly operating the whole season from inside Dean Cipher’s body. Hamish Linklater’s Cipher is basically the face; Godolkin is the driver.
• Godolkin’s own body is a scorched ruin, so he moves around the world by steering Cipher. He’s been the mastermind in the shadows, nudging events along while hiding in plain sight.
• Slater first popped up in the season premiere in a flashback tied to the early days of Compound V, before the accident that left Godolkin physically destroyed.

How Slater found out he was the Big Bad

"I had been given vague clues... 'You’re really prominent towards the last two episodes'... and 'You’re kind of the big bad.' But they didn’t quite tell me about the twist with Hamish."

According to Slater, the full plan got laid out on a call from showrunner Michele Fazekas. After that, scripts for Episodes 7 and 8 hit his inbox, and all the pieces of the twist clicked.

Building a shared performance

Because Godolkin is living through Cipher, Slater studied Hamish Linklater’s work to fold Cipher’s phrasing and rhythms into his own take on Godolkin. The goal was to make it feel like one mind wearing a different face, which is trickier than it sounds and very much part of the fun here.

Slater’s read on the character: Godolkin is the smartest guy in any room, and you only realize what he’s doing half a beat after he’s already said it. That tracks with the reveal; the show has been telegraphing the con without letting you see the card.

The oddly fitting behind-the-scenes wrinkle

In a very on-brand twist, Slater and Linklater never actually met while filming these episodes. They compared notes after the fact, which is a neat little production tidbit considering they’re essentially playing the same person from two angles.

Halloween chaos

Slater wrapped the Gen V finale at 3 a.m. on October 31, 2024. A few hours later, he was on a flight to Seattle to start the Wicked press tour. He called it one of the craziest transitions of his life, which feels about right for jumping from a secret supervillain reveal to a blockbuster musical in a single day.