Krypton S01E09 Review: Everyone Fights Everyone Else

Krypton, Season 1, Episode 9: Hope

Well, this episode... certainly raises the stakes, yeah? And this is where I really wished Krypton had treated its characters more like, well, characters as opposed to moving pieces on a chess-board in service of plot. Because a lot of the motivations of the characters ends with me shrugging it off because, well, why not? Add that to some very nebulous characters like the Cythonnite cult or Jax-Ur or the Black Zero or whoever's leading the Sagittaris that we barely spend any time with, and it really ends up getting hard to be invested in the well-doing of these characters beyond the general sense of "oh, these characters are doing something". The really generic 'hope' speeches from Val-El to Seg-El doesn't really work as motivation either.

And basically, the whole point of this episode is a huge internal conflict for the Kryptonians. Adam Strange and Ona remain dead (although I wouldn't rule out Zeta Beam hijinks) and this motivates Seg to... do... something? It's never really clear what Seg's big plan is, but he certainly get in the way of General Zod and Lyta Zod as they try to unleash Doomsday to take down Brainiac. Seg and Jayna will not allow General Zod to rule Kandor with fear... and honestly? I don't really buy any of Seg or Jayna's motivations, since the show doesn't actually sell the whole "General Zod is evil and wants to rule the world" beyond the audience perceptions knowing that, hey, General Zod is traditionally a villain. Honestly, judging Krypton by its own merits... Seg ends up feeling like Adam Strange earlier in the season where he rants about ideals but never really offers any sort of concrete solution. Jayna is likewise hypocritical,  but at least Lyta calls her out on it. The Zod family drama is highly all over the place in this episode, and despite the relatively consistent performances by the actors it's not a storyline that honestly really engages.

It doesn't matter at all, though, because Zod and Jayna end up fighting to the death, a fight interrupted by Lyta and allowing Jayna to escape. Meanwhile, the Cythonnites apparently broke Doomsday's pod upon moving it, ensuring that Doomsday will be unleashed, and so the Cythonnites threaten to kill Seg and Nyssa, while they move Doomsday to Kandor to unleash it upon Brainiac when he comes to collect and bottle up the city.

Somewhere in-between this, Seg and Nyssa manages to broker an alliance between Black Zero and the Sagittari, although it ends to be for naught because Brainiac easily manipulates the two groups into killing each other shortly before the climax. The Voice of Rao threatens to drop Seg down the building, but Nyssa charges in, stabs the Voice with the convenient Chekov's Alien-Crystal-USB-of-Hope that Seg gave her... but Brainiac reassembles himself in all his green-skinned glory. Oh, and somewhere along this, Nyssa and Seg are now an item and I genuinely didn't realize when this happened. Somewhere after Seg's ranting to Lyta that she has disappointed him or something? I dunno. Krypton's romantic storylines are never really told well.

Oh, there's also a sub-plot with Jax-Ur and Daron-Vex, with Jax-Ur finding access to the council's secret stash of high-class people clones, while Daron-Vex escapes but gets shocked remotely by Jax-Ur. It's... it's an interesting storyline, of course, but it also feels like half-baked world-building because I genuinely don't give a shit if Jax-Ur and Daron-Vex become Brainiac casualties next episode due to how little they are actually treated as characters.

Overall, the episode builds up to the climactic season finale with Brainiac finally arriving on Krypton, but there are so many moving parts and so few characters that I genuinely care about that I'm honestly not very optimistic for Krypton's finale. There is a lot of thought put into Krypton, but so much of it feels more like people acting out a rough plot draft instead of a character-centric story, and so much of it also relies on pre-existing knowledge about DC characters that doesn't quite gel with how the characters are portrayed on-screen. I dunno. I've tried to cautiously give Krypton the benefit of the doubt, but ironically it's the episode titled 'Hope' that makes me lose the very same thing in it.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Among Dev-Em's password is the phrase "Flamebird", which is the secret identity that Jimmy Olsen uses when he and Superman entered the Bottle City of Kandor. Inspired by Batman and Robin, Superman and Jimmy adopted the identities of "Nightwing" and "Flamebird" and acted as superheroes there. Various other superheroes connected to Krypton would later adopt the identity Flamebird as well.