Krypton is finally premiering tonight on Syfy. 
This has been years in the making.
Well, I’m hooked. I liked the opening, I liked Seg’s adult introduction and over all the story and where it seems to be going.
The only thing that had me go “come on, that’s dumb” was when ding-dong head was accusing Segs mom, in the round room with too-many-faces lording over, and he basically said, “So you’re sticking up for your daddy-in-law who was a traitor and a crazy loonytunes and made up craziness against the crown. Now tell me where his secret hide out is that has all the evidence that proves he was right!!!”
I haven’t watched yet, but aren’t Kryptons just regular people on Krypton?
I thought it was Earth’s yellow sun that gave him his powers.
The earliest versions of Krypton in the comics (at least until 1948, a decade after Superman’s debut) showed all Kryptonians with powers, the result of a much longer evolution plus science and stuff.
Thing is, Superman’s powers continued to increase year by year, to the point where he was casually flying through space and time. It raised the question of why the Kryptonians simply didn’t abandon their planet as soon as they realized it was dying. Hence the need for an explanation where he had powers on Earth but would not on Krypton. Initially, it was because Earth had much lower gravity.
I haven’t seen this new show yet, but it would be easy enough to explain that the Kryptonians seem to have super powers that are actually based on their hyper-advanced technology.
Does the pilot explain why grandpaSuper has a British accent?
Every Kryptonian (who don’t have powers, luckily for the plot, which would have needed awkward rewriting at multiple points if they did*) is played by a British actor, as far as I can tell, all using their natural accents. From all over the UK (Kandor’s clearly a big place), but all British. (The only non-Brit is Canadian actor Shaun Sipos as Adam Strange.)
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- Black Zero and the Els’ rebellion against the state would be…difficult if the Voice of Rao and his minions had super senses. Especially Seg’s escapes after pissing off the Sagitari.
- If Charys and Seg had been flying under their own power, instead of in a skimmer, pretending it wasn’t Seg would have been unworkable.
- Seg laying into Adam Strange, with no motive to hold back, or way of knowing he would need to, would have lost the exposition that led to Seg not just saying ‘fuck it’, when Strange got reduced to a thin meat flavoured paste.
In the show, yes.
At first I thought they were all British too but then some started throwing “mate” around and I thought maybe they might be Australian and I was like, "Wait? Are they, “Fancy another tea and crumpets guv’na?” Or, “Mate, let’s go grab some shielas and gobbies.”
Basically yes. They live over twice as long as humans, but that seems like it’s a result of their advanced medical technology and millennia of genetic engineering. The show is set in the DC Extended Universe (or at least branches off from it). It’s not exactly clear what biological quirks, other than gaining superpowers from a yellow sun, Kryptonians have. The worldbuilding here really intrigues me. We know upfront Krypton is doomed in the end. This is twilight hours of a civilization with a hundred thousand years of recorded history that’s gone from interstellar exploration and colonies to a living in handful of domed cities on their already clearly dying homeworld. Lyta-Zod’s comments seem to imply at least some of the city-states are independent so the Voice of Rao way not rule all of Krypton. Or he could be like a medieval pope; the nominally above the entire planet’s secular leaders, but Kandor is like Rome.
Nah, there’s multiple Zod related elements that point away from this.
Race - Zod of the movie is white, the members of the House of Zod shown in Krypton are all black. (Also, I don’t think he’s named in the pilot, but Dev-Em is a character in the show, according to imdb, and played by a black guy - he was also a white character in the movie.)
House glyph - the one Movie Zod wears, and the one the Krypton Zods wear are significantly different.
Black Zero - a terrorist organization in the show, Zod’s ship in the movie.
There’s also other more minor aesthetic things (the design of the Genesis Chambers, the sleek armour worn by the Sagitari, compared to the bulky suits worn by Zod’s faction in the movie, etc).
Brainiac was cool. Is this his first appearance in movies/TV?
Nah. Even sticking to live action, he was the villain of season 5 of Smallville (based on the DCAU version, where he was a Kryptonian construct, rather than his Coluan origin from the comics). They didn’t give James Marsters (who played him) green makeup, though. (Around the same time, he was playing Piccolo in Dragonball, where he was also not painted green. It’s weird.)
There’ve been a lot of animated uses, though - the DCAU, as mentioned, and the old Superman and Superfriends cartoons, Batman the Brave and the Bold, the LSH and Superhero Girls cartoons, and the Gods and Monsters shorts, as well as at least 2 DTV movies (Brainiac Attacks and Superman: Unbound).
Brainiac (not sure if they gave him a #, but he is a good guy) is on Supergirl. He came back from the future with Mon-el and Mrs Mon-El
Brian
I watched the first episode (probably aren’t likely to watch any more) but isn’t the DC universe as chock-full of alien species as the Marvel universe? So these Kryptonians are supposed to be an advanced tech species of interstellar explorers who have no idea life on other planets exists?
Not very promising. It seems like your bog-standard dystopia with the Superman mythos grafted in.
I enjoyed the show, but this part didn’t mesh with me. For a society that is so entrenched in the sciences, you’d think they’d have a more realistic view about the universe they live in.
I never was a DC comic reader, but I saw Superman (1978) again just a week or two ago, and specificly remember the mention of other civilizations while Kal-El is being taught on the way to Earth. Googling, the exact quote is “Embedded in the crystals before you is the total accumulation of all literature and scientific fact from dozens of other worlds spanning the twenty-eight known galaxies.” Embedded in the crystals before you… … is the total accumulation of all literature and scientific fact… … from dozens of other worlds… … spanning the 28 known galaxies.
Lol. “The 28 known galaxies…” Yep, that sounds like it was from 1978 alright.
Huh, didn’t notice how that double-quoted until now. That was attempting to copy/paste from the script site which seems to block you from doing that and just left a blank space, so I hand-typed it. Looks like it was pasted after all and just invisible until I submitted. For the record, of course, Jor-El did not stutter.
Brainiac 5 of the Legion. There was also a female Brainiac (with another name) in season 1 of Supergirl played by the actress who played Supergirl on Smallville.
Brainiac was also part of the Legion Of Doom in Challenge of the Superfriends in his green form, then the brought him back in his much more robotic form later on when they changed Superfriends into Super Powers to tie it in with the Super Powers toyline/out of cannon comic series
So this is taking a very unexpected turn. House Vex is actually working to overthrow the Voice of Rao. Also I didn’t realize that Cor-Vex had actually been conceived; I thought the visit to the Genesis Chamber was just to provide genetic samples & get an extrapolation of the child would look like. Poor Seg-El; he didn’t even get the please of jerking off into a cup. Or hooked up to some weird Kryptonian semen collection device.