‘Krypton’ Revealed: Take a Behind-the-Scenes Deep Dive Into the Superman Prequel Series Before Season 2 Premieres

Episode 1: ‘Pilot’

PLOT SUMMARY:  Superman’s grandfather, Seg-El, learns Krypton is in danger of being destroyed so that his future grandson will never be born.

CAMERON WELSH: The pilot was probably the most challenging one of all, because it was originally shot in Belgrade. Then, when we got picked up to series, the production moved over to Belfast in Northern Ireland. There, we reshot quite a high percentage of the pilot and introduced new characters like Adam Strange, who wasn’t originally a part of it. So trying to blend in the pre-existing footage and story was really challenging. We had different sets as well; we rebuilt the Fortress set. The trick was to make it all feel seamless.

Given Krypton was created by David S. Goyer, there’s an obvious influence on that world in a number of ways from 2013’s Man of Steel, which Goyer also wrote. 

CAMERON WELSH: I think that was really the genesis of the show. Since he had set the first 20 minutes of the film on Krypton, I guess it made him realize that there’s something really interesting about that culture, planet and civilization that led it to give birth to the greatest hero of all time. It’s been kind of under explored relative to so many other aspect of Superman’s life. We all know about Smallville, where he grew up; that story’s been well told in lots of ways and lots of different times. Same with his life in Metropolis. And even though he didn’t really have a life on Krypton, he’s still a Kryptonian. It’s in his DNA, and to kind of explore that society or the civilization that gave birth to that superhero was a really compelling idea for David.

Episode 2: ‘House of El’

PLOT SUMMARY: After suffering a tragedy, Seg is forced to adjust to a new life, a new rank and a new threat. 

CAMERON WELSH: The second episode is always like a second pilot, so it’s tricky. We hoped we would get an audience for the first episode — it was really well publicized, it had the Superman fan base already sort of built in, so we had a sense that they’d come for the first one. But in the second episode, we really need to hook them and engage them. In the first episode, we did a show with such dense mythology; there was so much set up in the pilot. Whereas episode one introduced the world of the show, episode two really needed to establish the characters. We felt the success of the show was going to really hinge on the ability to engage with these characters that the audience really didn’t know.

I guess the centerpiece for that episode was probably the fight to the death that Lyta has with Quex-Ul to take command of the squadron. That was really a character-defining moment for her; it was an action set piece that showed that this is a brutal world. I think it said a lot about the planet Krypton, it said a lot about the show and it said a lot about her as a character. That became something that we tried to emulate throughout the rest of the series: whenever we’re doing big action sequences, we try to have them reveal as much as we can about the characters so that they’re all about characters rather than moods.

When you think of Superman’s main adversary, it’s probably Lex Luthor that comes to mind. In there as well, but not often explored in depth, is Brainiac, the android entity introduced to the comics in 1958. Krypton postulates that the populations in those cities live forever, but in a kind of stasis — a living death. Now he’s set his sights on that planet’s city of Kandor.

CAMERON WELSH: Brainiac feels he’s preserving cultures. He’s got this idea that civilization is effectively doomed by the people that make it up, because of their inherent greed. So to kind of preserve part of that culture, he would bottle a city and it would remain in his collection untouched and preserved forever. While the rest of the planet destroyed itself, as often happens, from Brainiac’s point of view he sees himself as a conservationist.

The beauty about this whole series is we’re really given a lot of freedom by DC to explore these characters in ways they’ve never been explored before. We can be using elements that pre-existed within the DC lore or it could be inventing new things that work for us in the show. Brainiac was one thing where you have the character in the comics, but for TV it felt like we really needed to kind of dig deeper and peel back a few layers to find out what motivates him. Why does he do what he does? Then we settled on the idea of, in his own weird way, he is, again, a conservationist. He certainly doesn’t see himself as a villain. No villain does. And he doesn’t see anything wrong with the truly horrifying idea of people being fully conscious, but frozen. We kind of talk about it as being awake  but in a sort of coma and just the horror of that. Spinning with the idea that if Brainiac, in our version, let people within the bottles just go about their daily lives, they would degrade that city in some way through their actions. So in order to truly preserve it, they needed to be frozen.

Episode 3: ‘The Rankless Initiative’

PLOT SUMMARY: During a military crackdown on Seg’s home district, Seg and Adam Strange race to find a deadly Sentry. 

CAMERON WELSH: At the time — certainly not now — this was probably one of the most challenging episodes from a production viewpoint. There’s a lot of action in that episode at the same time — not in an over-the-top preachy way — we try to make some social commentary as often as we can. This was kind of talking about the over-militarization of the police that we see in America these days and I think it was pretty clear what we were trying to do there. There’s a moment where we see the police, or the Sagitari, trying to suppress a protest, and one of the protesters is choked out and he says, “I can’t breathe,” to which the Sagitari responds, “If you can talk, you can breathe.” Those words were lifted directly from the case of Michael Brown in New York. We went into that quite consciously trying to make a bit of a political statement, but at the same time it was part of the show. We were talking about an oppressive, overly militarized society, and so we were telling that story, but also doing it from a character point of view. We always liked the idea of Seg being a hero of the rankless; a symbol of hope for these people.

CAMERON WELSH: You have Lyta on one side working for the Sagitari, not agreeing with their methods, but sort of trying to fight it from within, doing her best to try and change their methods within that sort of machine. And Seg trying to fight it from the outside, and all of this stuff happening with Brainiac trying to create his sentry. So, yes, again there was a lot in that episode, but I feel we achieved a lot in it. We learned a bit more about Dev there as well and his reasons, really, for being involved inn the Sagitari, and learn a bit more about Black Zero. We explore the idea that they’re painted as terrorists by the regime, but that they would view themselves as freedom fighters. I guess that was just an aspect of the show that really depends on what perspective you’re looking at. Things are never as black and white as they first seem.

Episode 4: ‘The Word of Rao’

PLOT SUMMARY: Seg is approached by a Black Zero leader as Rao finds a scapegoat for the failed Rankless Initiative.

CAMERON WELSH: Going back to the subject of Man of Steel, we were interested in exploring the kind of civilization that births a hero and in a lot of what we’ve seen, Krypton is depicted with brilliant scientists at the peak of civilization, but when you start out, that’s not the case. This is a world, as I’ve said, that’s really an oppressed society. So we were looking at various institutions: the patriarchy, the military industrial complex, and also the role of religion in these kind of oppressed societies. We felt that in order for Krypton to birth Superman, it has to go through a renaissance. A Golden Age. It has to free itself from the shackles of tyranny before it can achieve that. So in order to get to that place, we wanted to lay a lot of obstacles in front of us. One is Rao’s theocracy. In some ways it would have been a bit of low-hanging fruit to sort of model the society on a Trumpian kind of dystopia; megalomaniac, authoritarian.

So we looked at theocracy as a model for an oppressive regime. “The Word of Rao” was that. You can see the pomp and ceremony. He’s a bit like the Wizard of Oz in that when you peel back the curtain, there’s really just a man behind it all. But to the people, he wears that freak mask, he has three clerics that surround him with writing on their faces. There’s a lot of theater in his public appearances like the Wizard of Oz, but if you strip it all away, he’s just a man.

CAMERON WALSH: We start the episode with him being dressed, really, so we’re sort of looking at how you start with a simple man, and then you layer up all these extra adornments that go on top of it to create the illusion of power, and how people buy into that. And Blake Ritson, who is playing the role, is just a fantastic actor. I love watching him work and he really excelled in that episode. In a way, Blake was playing a couple of roles: He was playing Brainiac, he was playing the voice of Rao and he’s playing the Voice of Rao who has been turned by Brainiac.

Episode 5: ‘House of Zod’

PLOT SUMMARY: Jayna grapples with her torn loyalties as Seg fights for survival within the heart of Black Zero.

CAMERON WELSH: This is probably my favorite episode of both last season and the second, because I feel this is the episode where we’ve got the balance between the characters, action, plot, mythology — all of those things. Again, in order to build a new future, we have to tear down the old structure, and we see how the House of Zod will feel, and how Jayna became who she was. The way her father pitted her and her twin brother against one another in what was a quest for survival, really. It was very cool to see how the House of Zod was built. We see the cyclical nature of that in the way Jayna treats Lyta. History is being repeated, and it’s the sins of the father in a way. It was really gratifying for me to be able to explore that. Having been introduced to Jayna in the first episode, she plunges that knife into her daughter’s hand while training her and you get an immediate impression of who she is from that act. But then by mid-season we were able to peel a bit of that back and understand how she came to be that way. I think we’ve become a lot more empathetic toward her as a character by doing so. It’s also the episode where we reveal Zod to be part of the show. It’s really the big mid-season twist I’d like to think that nobody saw coming.

Zod, of course, eventually becomes the enemy of, first, Superman’s father, Jor-El, and then the Man of Steel himself. In Krypton, he’s come back to the past he believes to save the planet, but in reality his goal is to take control of it. We also discover that in the future, Seg and Lyta are actually his parents, which connects him genetically with Kal-El. The character of Zod had been played by Terence Stamp in the Christopher Reeve films, Michael Shannon in Man of Steel and, on Krypton, by Colin Salmon. 

CAMERON WELSH: In the same way that Brainiac sees himself as a conservationist, I would say that Zod does, too, because he would argue that he came back in time to save Krypton, not necessarily to conquer it. He chose that point in time, because he knew that’s when Brainiac attacked and that’s when Kandor is lost, which ultimately leads to the planet’s destruction. In his mind, he’s a hero. His problem, of course, is that he can’t accept the idea that there may be other people as well-placed to serve Krypton. He thinks he is the only one who can do it, because he has the knowledge of the future that other people don’t. Bottom line is that he doesn’t play well with others.

Episode 6: ‘Civil Wars’

PLOT SUMMARY: Seg is faced with an impossible choice that will shape the El legacy and the fate of the universe.

CAMERON WELSH: This is the attempted coup, where Jayna, in order to save Lyta from execution, has agreed to help Daron-Vex and Nyssa-Vex to overthrow the Voice of Rao, so we see the attempted coup take place and that’s the time where I guess we reveal to the characters that the Voice of Rao has been taken over by Brainiac. It was another good one, and, again, the further the season went along, we were just trying to reveal more and more about the characters to understand their motivations a little more.

In the episode, Nyssa shows that she’s just really politically savvy. She would play whatever side felt like it was going to work for her. I think we revealed a lot about those characters. What was also happening during that episode is we had Zod, Adam Strange, Lyta and Seg all down in the catacombs looking for Doomsday. We started to introduce that into the mythology. And I think this is where we saw the split between Adam and Seg.

This is a big step in the development of Seg as a character. He’d been told all along from Adam Strange he’s a hero or the ancestor of the universe’s greatest hero, and that he has this responsibility to live up to and he’d been guided so much by Adam to do that. Then Zod comes along and challenges everything that Adam says and it’s the first time that Seg learns that Krypton will be destroyed. And that Adam’s plan is to let that happen, because he doesn’t want to change the timeline. He wants Superman to be born.

CAMERON WELSH: It’s the first time you start to see Seg gain some independence as a character and real agency. Until that point he’d been guided a lot by other characters. So on the one hand you can say he was gaining some independence, but on the other that he was being manipulated by Zod. You wouldn’t be wrong either way; both are true to an extent. But by the end of that episode, our team of heroes are truly fractured.

Interestingly, we know that someday Doomsday and Superman are going to kill each other (temporarily) and in a way the set-up feels like watching Star Wars Episode IV when Darth Vader shows up after the audience has seen the prequels chronicling the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Vader. Suddenly there’s all this baggage of knowledge. The same thing can be said about Doomsday here.

CAMERON WELSH: In that episode, Adam Strange is the only one who knows about Doomsday — him and Zod both, actually — and it has them vying for Seg’s soul. They’re the only ones who know the true destructive capacity of Doomsday. And obviously Zod in knowing that wants to unleash him, but Adam knows that can only end badly for everybody. As an audience, we get it. We understand completely. It just imbues it all with a greater sense of tension, I think.

Episode 7: ‘Transformation’

PLOT SUMMARY: After a failed coup, Daron punishes the conspirators. Lyta and Dev go in search of Jayna.

CAMERON WELSH: This is an important episode in that Seg comes back to Kandor to rescue Nyssa, who’s under house arrest. We see Daron reveal himself to the voice of Rao, who’s now Brainiac’s sentry and has revealed himself to be that to Daron, who is charged with the responsibility — to prove his loyalty — to assassinate all of his co-conspirators, including his daughter, Nyssa. He attempts to do so, but she’s very savvy and is one step ahead and foils that attempt by using a hologram. So we see her craftiness and intelligence, but we also see, which is quite devastating, how low Daron would sink. At the end of the day, he’s a cockroach, a survivor, and he will do whatever it takes to survive. Loyalty doesn’t mean anything to him, it’s just about survival. There’s more to it as is eventually revealed, but on the surface it’s unbelievably cold of him.

CAMERON WELSH: We see Seg come back to save Nyssa, which says a lot about him as a character —again, him taking control of the situation. And we understand the depth of his feelings for her; he genuinely cares for her. She has worked with him and he can’t forget that. Everybody else would gladly let her burn, but not Seg. Meanwhile, this is the episode where we see that Dev-Em has been taken over by the Voice of Rao, and as they go searching for Jayna, ultimately Lyta has to blast Dev and leave him  for dead as she searches for Jayna. We start to see a lot more character development and shifting loyalties. All the pieces are falling into place to ramp up for the final escalation near the end of the season.

Episode 8: ‘Savage Night’

PLOT SUMMARY: A resistance movement begins to form to impede the Voice of Rao’s increasing power and influence.

CAMERON WELSH: We had that big action sequence in the Genesis Chamber, the idea being that the Voice of Rao or Brainiac was using the embryos there as a power source, which was a really disturbing kind of horror image that we were fascinated with — and he had to be stopped by any means necessary. Kind of a whatever it takes sort of thing, which allowed for the forming of an uneasy alliance between Black Zero, who had been the villains for most of the season, and Jayna. So to see Jayna, who is the head of the Sagitari, sit down opposite the head of Black Zero, and the two of them forming an alliance to take on a great threat to both of them, was wonderful. That really speaks to the power of serialized storytelling, because we feel like we earned that moment. At the start, that idea would have been inconceivable, but by the time we got to that in episode eight, it felt like it was earned. We’d put in all the steps in order to get there, so it was a good pay off. At the same time, we saw Adam trying to find a way to stop Zod, who he alone knows the truth about, which forces him to kind of form an uneasy alliance of his own with Daron.

CAMERON WELSH: I think it’s where he sees what’s going on with Ona [a young follower of Rao], who has been controlled by the Voice of Rao in the same way Dev was, but in a much more subtle and more personal manipulation. Much more classic manipulation. Ona had kind of fallen under the spell of the Voice of Rao/Brainiac, and was going to blow up the convent and the resistance. Adam came in at the last moment and activated his zeta beam to create a force field to protect Seg, but Ona, sadly, didn’t make it. A really tragic ending and it just felt like, again, we wanted the show to feel like it had real stakes. We didn’t want to be pulling our punches. Ona was the most innocent character on the show. She absolutely didn’t deserve to go that way, but it showed the kind of insidious evil of the Voice of Rao/Brainiac. In ramping up to the end of the season, it allowed our characters to steal themselves for that final fight.

Episode 9: ‘Hope’

PLOT SUMMARY: Seg must decide if he is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in service of the greater good of Kandor.

CAMERON WELSH: This, to us, embodied the expression the night is darkest before the dawn. It’s the classic three-act structure in film where at the end of the second act you’re at your lowest point before things start to turn around in the third act. That’s kind of where we were at here; we had reached our lowest point. Yes, it appeared that the Voice of Rao had thrown himself off the edge of the Genesis Chamber at the end of eight, and we didn’t know whether he lived or died. Ona had been killed and things looked kind of hopeless. It’s here where Seg suffers the most self doubt, really, and questions everything he’s been told by Adam. He can no longer trust Zod. Adam’s gone, Ona’s dead. He’s at his lowest point and questions whether he really is the person to do everything that’s been asked of him. And it takes a bit of a pep talk with Val and a reminder of the greatness of the House of El and and some faith from Nyssa as well, surprisingly. We’ve seen Lyta start to fall under Zod’s sway a little bit and so her loyalty has started to shift away from Seg and more towards her son. So Seg’s feeling quite alone and it takes some faith from Nyssa and a reminder from Val of what the House of El stands for. That it truly is about hope and for him to kind of snap out of it, embrace his heroic destiny, and to get ready to take it to Brainiac and end it all. That to me is part of that classic Superman mythology. It’s not a question of how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you’re prepared to get back up again, and Seg keeps getting up. That’s where I think he really evolves into a hero.

Episode 10: ‘The Phantom Zone’

PLOT SUMMARY: Seg races to save his city from being overtaken as the bottling of Kandor begins.

CAMERON WELSH: At the time it was our biggest episode from a production point of view; it was super challenging with the real arrival of Brainiac. At the end of nine we saw Seg use the sunstone and plunge it into the Voice of Rao, resulting in his dematerializing and coming back together as the real Brainiac. In this episode, the protective dome around Kandor goes down, so it’s exposed and vulnerable. It’s what we’ve been building up to for the whole season, which is the battle for Kandor and Seg versus Brainiac. Besides the main storyline, we had a lot of other character storylines come together as well. In episode nine, we had Lyta shoot Jayna, leaving her for dead. Now we see her return and her confronting the reality of what she’s done. She talked to Dev about it, and he helps to bring her out of that and to motivate her to fight again for what’s right, to fight for Kandor. So she leads the Sagatari into this battle.

We also had that great moment where all the ships are coming in towards Brainiac and he just wipes them away with a wave of his hand. It’s just a chilling moment. You start to appreciate just how powerful Brainiac really is and how woefully mismatched our heroes are. But in order to defeat Brainiac, we lean into some real character stuff. When Seg is introduced in the first episode, he’s a hustler, he’s there on the streets kind of scamming these guys out of their money. Here we see him basically pull a bit of a ruse on Brainiac to lure him to the Fortress and ultimately to get him into the Phantom Zone, and it works.

That’s what separates Seg from a lot of the other heroes, really. He doesn’t have Superman’s powers. He doesn’t have that kind of might. But he’s a hustler and he leans into the skills that he has and uses them and is able to defeat someone who, on the surface, is a far superior adversary and is able to defeat him through cunning, which is just a real character trait of his. So it’s really satisfying to have a big epic season finale, but then let it kind of resolve through a real character motivated action.

CAMERON WELSH: We really tried to resolve some storylines, but also kick off some others to sort of hook the audience for season 2. We see that Doomsday is unleashed, Seg gets pulled into the Phantom Zone with Brainiac, which promises more from both of them. We see Zod take control of Kandor and there’s something chilling about the way he does that. He’s gone full Zod — he has the leaders of the other city states kneel before him, and you realize that he’s gone full authoritarian dictator.

We get to the bottom of Nyssa, who has probably had the most character growth of anyone throughout the season. We see her start as this manipulative political mover and shaker, really, and then by the end of the season she lets all that go. She’s walked away from all of that and aligned herself with Seg and the rest of the heroes. By the end of it, with Jax-Ur in the Genesis Chamber, she learns that she’s a clone. Which, again, sets up more story. So just when she felt like she understood who she truly was, everything that she felt she knew about herself has been thrown into doubt and she’s left questioning it all again.

Superman No More?

In the final moments of season 1, we see Superman’s cape — the one that Adam Strange brought to Krypton as proof — transformed, the House of El symbol changing to the House of Zod, suggesting that the Man of Steel has been wiped from existence.

CAMERON WELSH:  I think that moment did a couple of things. First of all, this is Zod’s Krypton now; this is Zod’s story and that’s scary, because we’ve seen the way he’s come to power and he’s truly frightening in that final scene. But it also tells us that Krypton isn’t really a prequel anymore. This is not the show conceptually that is tracking the events that lead to Krypton’s destruction and that little baby placed on that rocket ship destined for us. We are no longer that. That’s not the timeline we’re a part of now and truly anything can happen with the Superman logo disappearing. It was suddenly like the shackles on the show had been cast off; the shackles of expectation, in a way. And there’s something kind of liberating about that. Now it feels we’re able to do whatever we like. Maybe things will turn out that Superman will still be born, but if it does happen, it’ll happen in a very different way.

One suggestion is that like J.J. Abrams‘ 2009 production of Star Trek, the events of Krypton have created a new timeline branching off from the original. 

CAMERON WELSH: That’s well-supported in any kind of DC mythology. It’s the multiverse. There are multiple timelines and one doesn’t necessarily have to cancel out the other. Our show is now set it in a different timeline. Superman might still exist, but maybe he won’t be Clark Kent or he may not be Kal-El. He may be something completely different.

The journey of Krypton continues with the season 2 premiere of the show on Syfy June 12.