'Krypton' Episode 1 Review

So Krypton the television series is a thing that has happened now. For better or for worse, it’s out there, so how did its debut episode turn out?

Being a life-long Superman fan, I’ve taken a crack at every show and movie that has featured the Man of Steel, so naturally I wanted to check this out. When I first heard about it I was initially worried that this was going to be a re-hash of Smallville—much how Gotham is just “Smallville with Bruce Wayne” or the opening sequence to Man of Steel only much…much longer.

With Smallville I have a love/hate because I felt they dragged it out too long. Some of it was very well done, and some of it…you know what, this isn’t about Smallville, this is about Krypton.

Naturally the question is posed about “Which Krypton is this?” Well I have a theory on that so give me a minute and let’s cut to the chase and talk about the pilot episode itself.

The episode starts, as so many DC shows do, with an opening narration from an adult Seg-El talking to Kal-El (which in case you didn’t know, is Superman), explaining how the events of this show occur “200 years before” Kal-El is born. We open on Val-El, grandfather to our main character Seg-El, as he is being tried for treason because some dude with a golden mask with a lot of faces on it has become the new religion on Krypton and Val isn’t down with that. The main debate is, “Are they alone in the universe…” and Val-El supports the idea that they are not and that something big is coming their way. The council doesn’t believe him and Daron-Vex carries out Val’s death sentence in front of his whole family.

Now, the Wikipedia page for this show says that Val-El is sentenced to the Phantom Zone, but the whole thing about the Phantom Zone in literally every other iteration of the Superman mythos is that you survive in a state of suspended animation inside the Zone. It’s one of the chief McGuffin's for a lot of Superman stories, how we constantly get Kryptonian characters popping up despite Superman being the “last son of Krypton.” Val, in the pilot episode, does not get sentenced to the Phantom Zone. They open up a shield protecting the city of Kandor and make him walk a plank like he’s on a space pirate ship. He’s dumped into an icy canyon, presumably to a very Wiley Coyote-style grisly death. Also, at no point does the show call this “The Phantom Zone,” so the point here is don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia.

We fast forward 14 years and Seg is a young man running scams in the slums of Krypton, which okay, so that’s the direction we took. Sure, fine, Superman’s granddad was a con man. Cool, whatever. We establish here that there is significant class divide as you have those who are “ranked” and those that are not. Val-El lost his rank, the family name of “El,” when he was convicted of treason and so Seg and his parents were banished to Dicken’s era London…in space.

That’s the chief thing that stuck out to me about Krypton it’s a lot of very familiar tropes “in space,” as though throwing in a blaster and a hover car doesn’t make it feel like recycled plot points.

Seg’s dad now works as a butler to Vex because Vex is an asshat with the not so subtle name that means literally “to make someone feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried,” making this a very comic book concept of naming a character after their chief defining trait. I mean the character lives up to it in every way.

Seg goes to the council chamber where they are putting on trial people associated with a terrorist organization called “Black Zero,” which of course there are terrorists here. Why wouldn’t there be? Anyway, Seg sees a guy with a bomb in his arm trying to blow up the council chamber and stops the bomber with the guards, literally blasting the guy’s arm off to stop the explosive device in a pretty visceral scene for a show based around a guy who flies around in a cape. Like holy cow.

Sadly that would be one of only two “oh wow” moments in the episode.

For his heroics, Vex reinstates Seg into ranks of the…ranked, and decides to pair him off with his daughter, Nyssa. Unfortunately this doesn’t reinstate the name “El,” but rather makes Seg another Vex. They are to mate and make a baby. It’s…not what you think.

After all this we see Seg go back home and run afoul of the Voice of Rao’s guards when the multi-faced god-king is walking the streets. He is pulled aside by another character, which was showcased earlier as being a less than stellar cadet and the daughter of head of the Kryptonian military. This young lady, named Lyta-Zod is romantically entangled with our hero and lets him go after a brief make-out session. On his way home he is stopped by a guy introducing himself as “Adam Strange of Earth” who gives him a cryptic message about how his (Seg’s) grandson is important and hands him a crystal (called a sun stone) with the House of El inscribed on it.

He takes the sun stone home and shows it to his mom and dad, who claim to have no idea what it is despite recognizing it immediately and even calling it “a sun stone.” They suck at lying. His dad opts to stuff it in his messenger bag (space messenger bag) and says he’ll take care of it and that Seg needs to go to the Genesis Chamber, with much the same enthusiasm one might say, “Go by the DMV.” Seg doesn’t push the matter, but does palm the stone from his dad’s bag before he takes off. After he leaves, his parents discuss whether or not to tell Seg about “it” like the audience doesn’t know what’s going on.

At the Genesis Chamber, Seg meets Nyssa (no nothing sinister about THAT name cough-Arrow-cough). They are there to make a baby, which means putting in a sample of blood from each parent and goes to make a new Kryptonian in a pod. You want to talk about some anticlimactic scenes…

Sorry, that was bad even by my standards.

Alright now we are at the “obviously bad choices” part of our show. Seg runs afoul of some guards because he doesn’t own a watch and breaks curfew…for the second time in the show. He fights with the guards and is rescued by his mom who stole a skimmer (i.e. car) to save him. She takes him to “the Fortress of Solitude” which is of course one of those major set pieces that has only one friggin' room. There she explains that grandpa was validating his theories and has an full exposition dump. The bad guys track the skimmer and they beat feet out of there before the fortress is found.

Somehow, the police track the stolen skimmer back to their house and take his mom into custody after she hides him. They put her on trial and demand to know if Seg was with her. His dad comes forward and says he was with her and mama Zod, the head of the military and suspiciously the guard for the trial, kills them both in a courtroom shootout. I mean I guess it makes sense that mama Zod is there because the last trial nearly got blown up.

Daddy Vex rips mama Zod a new one, saying that they need to find the fortress, but she points out that Vex is the one who put them in this position by first killing granddaddy El and then reinstating Seg under his, Vex’s name, and that maybe, just maybe, putting the people you constantly piss off by killing their family members in positions of influence isn’t such a hot idea.

Lyta tries to comfort Seg and Seg takes off to the Fortress where he meets Strange again and gets the set up for the season, that the big bad they are facing is Brainiac and he’s trying to wipe out Superman before he’s ever born a la Terminator, only with more gusto.

So how did this shape up?

Honestly this wasn’t a bad show. It was predictable and we followed the “dead parents” story trope that I talked about a few articles back, but it handles the material well enough. The characters feel about as rounded as they need to be. Early in the episode, Seg is hanging out with his best friend and decides to head home, saying he’s going to “bounce.” I don’t know why the writers went with that, but it’s there. Another point of contention I have with the show is when Seg meets Adam Strange for the first time and asks “What are you wearing?” indicating that Strange’s clothes are highly unusual, which from the rest of the extras, they really aren’t. He’s wearing a hoodie, jacket, and pants with a ball cap. Outside of the ball cap, the attire isn’t that out of place. I guess in the grand scheme of the world they are trying to build, these two items are just two items, but still jarring enough to take me out of the episode.

The thing to remember is that this is just the very beginning, and I like how Strange resonates this statement at the end of the episode. Seg, by this point, has lost everything. His grandpa is dead, his parents are dead, he’s emotionally cut off from his girlfriend, and promised to the daughter of the man who facilitated the annihilation of his family. He doesn’t even have his last name anymore. Strange says to him, “You think you’re at the end, but you are at the beginning.” This is a moment of hope, and I like that the writers expressed this in a very unique way, without saying the word “hope,” because if you’ve been following Superman for the last two decades, you know that the symbol on his chest isn’t an “S” it’s the crest of the House of El, the Kryptonian symbol for “hope.”

Some Fan Theories

So I started off by saying “Which Krypton is this?” I looked at the cape that Strange shows Seg in the Fortress of Solitude, and it bears a significant yellow crest on the back. This is important because not a lot of Superman capes have that anymore. The DCEU cape doesn’t have it, the Supergirl version of Superman doesn’t have it, and going back to the Brandon Routh version, he doesn’t have it. The last time we definitely saw a yellow crest on Superman’s cape was during the Dean Cain era, prior to that was the Christopher Reeve era. I couldn’t find confirmation on whether or not the Smallville version of the suit had it so I don’t count that one.

But I don’t think this Krypton ties into either of those eras. No, I think this Krypton is nebulous enough on purpose so that it could apply to any Superman era, or even be a separate timeline altogether, which I wouldn’t mind either. The problem with tying it to a specific timeline is you will have fans who just don’t like that era. By keeping it nebulous you can attach this history to any Superman.

My other fan theory is this: General Zod is going to be Superman’s half uncle. Whaaat? Well hear me out. Seg is going to father Jor-El. That’s a given, but he’s shown romantically tied to Lyta-Zod. If Lyta gets down and busy with Seg she will probably get pregnant the old fashioned way. This would be a huge scandal for Krypton since we know that by the time Jor-El is running around the council will still be a problem. Having her cover up her pregnancy and fake the future General Zod coming from the Genesis Chamber sets up 1) why he didn’t come out pre-programmed and led a rebellion against the council, and 2) sets up an even more emotional confrontation between General Zod and Jor-El, and by extension Kal-El down the road.

So would I recommend this show? Yes, I think it has a lot of potential and hopefully won’t screw it up five episodes in. If you missed it when it aired on the SyFy channel, check it out here at the link here.

Thanks for reading

Superman and all related characters are the property of DC Comics and the show Krypton is specifically the property of the SyFy channel.