Krypton season 2, episode 4 review: Danger Close

The war for Krypton’s freedom takes center stage, as Seg-El discovers, to nobody’s surprise but him, that General Zod is a very bad man.

Over the last three episodes of SyFy’s Krypton, the saga of Superman’s ancestors veered off into a kind of small-scale, intergalactic buddy comedy road trip. It’s been Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) and Adam Strange (Shaun Sipos) yucking it up on the planet Colu, desperately trying to purge Brainiac (Blake Riston) out of Seg’s head. Lobo (Emmett J. Scanlan), the galaxy’s most insane bounty hunter, was in hot pursuit, almost as though the series was saying, “Look at this awesome and hilarious character we can make a whole television series around!”

By the end of the third episode, and after several close calls, Brainiac seemed permanently deleted, and Seg and Adam finally wound up back on Krypton, outside the city of Kandor. During their absence, a civil war has escalated between Krypton’s new regime, led by Seg’s son General Dru-Zod (Colin Salmon) on one side, and a group of rebels on the moon of Wegthor led by Seg’s grandfather, Val-El (Ian McElhinney).

With the season’s fourth episode, “Danger Close,” the Kryptonian civil war no longer remains on the periphery as fuel for a couple of subplots. It also means a resurgence of the more dramatic, internal struggle and politics between two rival families. Yet with this return to form, a new wave of predictable and misguided developments also emerge.

Fond (and not so fond) memories

The very first scene of “Danger Close” isn’t Seg and Adam camping outside of Kandor. Instead, we’re treated to Seg’s dream about the first time he and Lyta-Zod (Georgina Campbell) met. Here, we see that Seg, taking a drunken Kem (Rasmus Hardiker) home before the city-wide curfew, stumbled into Lyta as she was shopping for cloth for her and Dev-Em’s (Aaron Pierre) “binding ceremony.” It’s a very love-at-first-sight, meet-cute moment, complete with Seg showing Lyta how to properly wrap the binding ceremony cloth that’s loaded with obvious symbolism and foreshadowing.

Seg, however, isn’t the only Kryptonian to reminisce about Lyta, which also, coincidentally, involves Kem. In another flashback, Dev relates to Jayna-Zod (Ann Ogbomo) the story of how he ended up being branded a traitor under the new regime. While on Wegthor, he was given a direct order to gun down a suspected rebel hideout, even though it also meant killing innocent civilians. Dev refused and, after being beat up and arrested by his own men, eventually escaped with Kem’s help. The person who gave him the order? Lyta.

Thus, we’re now left with Krypton’s female lead as defined by her two romantic prospects. To Seg, Lyta is still the woman he loves, regardless of what she has done for Zod. That love and hope also makes him believe their son, Zod, can change, too. To Dev, that his former fiancee gave him an illegal order is more proof that she’s a lost cause. His disillusionment with her is what fuels his disillusionment with the Sagitari, with Zod’s regime, and Krypton in general. And if you think this male gaze of Lyta sounds problematic, it’s about to get worse thanks to one of this episode’s major twists.

More Kryptonian mind games

The moment Seg reunites with his beloved Lyta (in more than one), the more he suspects she’s not herself. Between Lyta having nose bleeds, her acting super-possessive over Seg and Nyssa-Vex’s (Wallis Day) infant son, Cor-Vex and her total devotion to Zod’s dictatorship, something’s definitely wrong. Seg definitely gets the hint that things aren’t right when he also sees a now compliant Raika (Sonita Henry) have a psychotic break. It doesn’t take long for a suspicious Seg to discover that, yes, Lyta has also been reconditioned by Zod.

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As far as his villainous deeds go, Zod brainwashing his own mother definitely ranks as the most disturbing. Yet it also undermines Krypton’s conceit that, although they’re based upon the characters from the Superman comics, these are also complex characters who don’t fall into simple good versus evil dynamics. All this does is reaffirm how evil and irredeemable Zod is, completely eliminating all the empathy the series built for him up to this point.

This development also sacrifices what complexity Lyta had as a character, too. And even Worse, it makes her lose all of her agency. It was far more interesting when it looked as though she was willingly going along with Zod simply because he was her son or given her insistence on leading the assault on Wegthor, that she was a possible double-agent. Instead, she’s essentially little more than a robot. Also, what was the point of all those discussions between her and Zod, where he questioned her allegiance and capabilities, if he already knew she would obey his orders without question?

Speaking of reprogramming, Zod also tries having Seg undergo reconditioning except it doesn’t take. That’s because–surprise, surprise–there’s still remnants of Brainiac within Seg’s mind. Thus now, within the span of four episodes, we’ve had two fake-outs when it comes to Brainiac’s death. Sure, Krypton’s Brainiac is an absolute standout, but this particular subplot better be heading somewhere pretty soon.

“The End of the War”

Surprisingly, the strongest aspects of “Danger Close” all revolve around the ultimately short-lived Kryptonian civil war. It does have a disappointing start, though, given how the last episode gave a potential cliffhanger about the Sagitari conscripts, of which Kem was a part of. We don’t even see the actual battle. Once Kem becomes a captive of the rebels and reunited with the sudden arrival of Adam, things begin to turn around quick and seamlessly. If the Seg, Lyta, Zod storyline lacks the moral complexity and interpersonal conflict, this storyline more than picks up the slack.

It’s also a chance for Adam to be more than just Seg’s comedic sidekick, as the episode reminds us that, since he’s from Earth, he also acts as the audience’s viewpoint character. Seeing the back-and-forth Sipos has with Hardiker feels much more natural than it does with Cuffe. Moreover, we get a great scene between him and McElhinney’s Val-El, and the later reminds Adam that, although not from Krypton, lives up to the ideal of the House of El. It also drops a key bit of exposition; it seems Adam can’t return to the future because there’s literally no future to return to.

Things also seem just as dire for the rebels. It turns out I was wrong about the data Nyssa uncovered last episode. What Nyssa actually found out was that Val second-in-command, Jax-Ur (Hannah Waddingham) turned Krypton’s Codex into a bioweapon that can be programmed to target specific DNA. In this case, it’s programmed to kill all Sagitari. Of course, it’s intended as a last-minute measure should the rebels assault on the space elevator fail, and fail it does. Those oxygenators the rebels obtained thanks to Nyssa’s intel? It turns out they were poisoned by Zod. The result the bulk of the rebel force literally suffocating to death when they step out onto Wegthor’s thin atmosphere.

Also, exactly as Zod planned, when a desperate Jax activates the Codex gene bomb, it doesn’t work. That’s because Nyssa told Val, who, because his ethics couldn’t stand for it, disabled the bomb and gave it to Nyssa. Of course, it didn’t occur to him that Nyssa is likely taking the Codex bomb to Zod in exchange for her son. For someone who’s Krypton’s most intelligent scientists, he sure can be an idiot.

By the end of “Danger Close,” the uprising against Zod is practically over before it begins as Adam, Kem, and small squad are also captured at the space elevator by Lyta and her troops. Even though next week will mark the halfway point of the second season of Krypton, it’s already starting to feel like the fight with Zod is prematurely reaching its climax.