Supergirl: What Villain Was Teased In the Season 2 Finale?

Spoilers ahead for the season 2 finale of Supergirl, titled “Nevertheless, She Persisted.”

In the waning moments of the Supergirl finale tonight, as showrunners promised, audiences got a glimpse of the season 3 big bad — although it’s not yet clear just who or what the being might be.

What do we know?

Well, apparently the villain will hail from Krypton, where

LAR-ON

Recently featured in writer Steve Orlando’s Supergirl comic, Lar-On is a Kryptonian werewolf.

…Yes, they have those.

Originally introduced in the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths era, Lar-On was a scientist who was tasked with studying Earth-2 — something that could obviously be retooled to be “studying Earth-1,” and hel precipitate next year’s crossover.

In the more recent take, Lar-On was a Kryptonian who was banished to the Phantom Zone by Supergirl’s father, Zor-El, when exposure to Red Kryptonite turned him into a werewolf. Zor-El quarantined him as a last resort to protect him from himself and the Argonians from him until a cure could be found.

For the purposes of the TV series, this could be a nice parallel to Mon-El, whose stay in the Phantom Zone in the comics was meant to buy time until he could be cured of lead poisoning; he was discovered a thousand years later by the Legion of Super-Heroes and became the hero Valor.

Lar-On came to Earth (in the current mythology) Phantom Drive engine, the Department of Extranormal Operations accidentally opened up to a rift to the Phantom Zone and released Lar-On. Upon examination at the DEO, Supergirl realized that the Red Kryptonite had fundamentally changed his DNA such that Lar-On wasn’t really technically Kryptonian at all.

…So, why would this guy make sense? Well, when you’re looking at Kryptonian monsters, there’s pretty slim pickings…and the whole “lets’ hold out a bloody finger to you before you go” thing has a very definite vampire/werewolf vibe to it.

 

DOOMSDAY

This one seems really unlikely, not least of all because it Doomsday was just used in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but it has to be on the list because it’s the first thing a lot of Twitter thought of — understandably, given that Lex Luthor created Doomsday in the movies by slicing his hand and using the blood to mingle with Zod’s corpse and Kryptonian super-science.

Created by Dan Jurgens, Doomsday was introduced almost by accident. In the early ’90s, the Superman family of titles — there were four of them at the time, meaning there was a new Superman solo comic almost every week — were tightly interconnected, and so there used to be creative summits to help chart the direction of the titles and to determine what the year’s big stories would be.

In 1992, the whole year was going to be building toward the wedding of Lois Lane and Clark Kent. The pair had been engaged since Superman #50, and (depending on who you ask) were set to be married in either Superman #75 or The Adventures of Superman #500, due out a few months later.

When Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was ordered to series, Warner Bros. asked DC to hold off publishing the wedding story until they could plan it to coincide with the wedding on the TV show. That meant radically reworking the plans for the year’s comics.

The various writers and artists working on the series at the time brought in their pitches, and Doomsday was Jurgens’s. He wanted a bombastic, widescreen slugfest the likes of which the best-selling Marvel and Image Comics of the day were publishing. The rest of the creative team — fearing a big battle would not be a great showcase for strong storytelling — were skeptical but ultimately were won over. Soon, the plan was clear: Superman would battle a rampaging monster to the death…and die.

That story became a pop culture phenomenon, and the best-selling collected edition in DC’s history. The “Funeral For a Friend” and “Reign of the Supermen” stories that followed it were equally well-received by readers at the time and continue to be solid sellers for DC years later.

But that, predictably, wasn’t the last we would see of Doomsday.

First of all, when the characer was introduced, he was essentially a force of nature. Drawing fairly obvious comparisons to the Incredible Hulk, Doomsday was violence incarnate, and tore a swath across the Eastern United States before dying alongside Superman in front of the Daily Planet building.

Like Superman, though, Doomsday returned. Luckily for everyone in Metropolis, he had been tossed out into space on an asteroid by then, but when he revived he ended up on Apokolips, where he battled Darkseid.

It was revealed that Doomsday was a Kryptonian genetic experiment, created centuries before humanoid Kryptonians would come to dominate the planet and essentially forced to evolve by generations of rapid cloning, torture, death, and re-cloning at the hands of an alien called Bertron.

Bertron, it should be noted, got mentioned on the Man of Steel Blu-ray special features.

Over thousands of years, the creature that would eventually become known as Doomsday fought and killed its way around the universe; it would be killed, and then evolve past whatever had killed it, unable to be destroyed in the same way twice. Eventually, after defeating it, an alien race had bound the alien as tightly as it could and then blasted it into space. The giant metal container in which Doomsday was held would eventually hit prehistoric Earth and bury itself miles underground — only to be discovered when the monster awoke, smashed its way out, trashed the Justice League and killed Superman.

After its battle with Darkseid, Doomsday would resurface every so often — most notably in a battle where his mind was briefly inhabited by Brainiac, creating essentially the perfect Superman villain. It was Doomsday itself that eventually forced the invading consciousness out.

At one point, a revived Doomsday was used as a weapon by Lex Luthor against an invading alien called Imperiex; following the defeat of Imperiex, Doomsday would gain some kind of sentience and consciousness for a time. It would aid Superman in a battle against Gog, and after another death would square off with the Kryptonians of Kandor during the New Krypton storyline.

After that death, Doomsday returned one final time before Flashpoint rebooted the DC Universe, targeting Superman and a number of his allies and adversaries strategically in an effort to become the most powerful being in the universe.

In the alternate universe of Flashpoint, Doomsday had been discovered by the U.S. government and was being used as a living weapon, its rudimentary mind controlled by a helmet broadcasting a signal from the Department of Defense. When Doomsday — called “Project Six” — went rogue, he was stopped by the main DC Earth’s Booster Gold — ironically the hero who had named him “Doomsday” prior to his killing Superman.

Post-Flashpoint DC Universe, Doomsday’s origins are unknown; he attacked Krypton and was repelled by Colonel (later General) Zod, who hurled the beast into the Phantom Zone. When he evolved past the Phantom Zone and made his way to Earth, he targeted the last Kryptonian, Superman, and Superman was forced to kill (we assume) Doomsday by hurling him into a black hole.

That still wasn’t the end, though, because while the post-Flashpoint Doomsday has yet to resurface, the first post-Rebirth story in Action Comics centered on the return of the classic Doomsday, who battled Rebirth Superman and a battle-suited Lex Luthor until finally the Man of Steel figured out a way to use a Phantom Zone Projector to get rid of Doomsday…except that instead of banishing the beast, it sent Doomsday into the clutches of Mr. Oz, a villain seemingly aligned with Doctor Manhattan.

H’EL

A twisted, delusional Kryptonian, H’El was obsessed with the House of El, and it was that obsession that led him to madness.

Created during the New 52, H’El believed he was a Kryptonian space explorer who worked for Jor-El and Lara. H’El loved the two dearly as if they were his own parents. When Jor-El became aware of Krypton’s impending destruction, he constructed a prototype spaceship and tasked H’El to protect Krypton’s history and knowledge among the stars.

However, the journey was a dangerous one. H’El survived many dangers and reached Earth, twenty-seven years after Kal-El, the son of Jor-El, had arrived.

Ultimately, not realizing that the world was doomed, he tried to save Krypton and ended up in a battle with Superman and his allies, including Supergirl and Superboy. After his defeat, H’El was thrown through a temporal rift and arrived on Krypton, decades in the past, to be discovered by a young Jor-El. 

In fact, H’El was a genetically-engineered being created from the genetic matter of various Kryptonians, and not a natural-born Kryptonian at all. After realizing that his memories were a lie, he attempted to use his power to enslave Krypton. Ultimately, he was stopped by a cosmic being known as the Oracle, who guided Superman, Superboy, and Supergirl to stop and defeat H’El once again.

 

BLACK ZERO

When we think of creepy Kryptonian cults, we think of Black Zero.

The name “Black Zero” has been associated with several characters and organizations throughout DC’s history, but they’re always bad news.

(It was also the name of Zod’s ship in Man of Steel, which…still, bad news.)

The characters are almost always tied in with the death of Krypton itself: in the earliest incarnation, Black Zero was a world-sabotaging villain who destroyed Krypton and later attempted to do the same to Earth. In the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity, one version was a terrorist group that fought for clones’ rights on Krypton and ultimately used a giant nuclear cannon to destabilize the world’s core, hastening its destruction; another version was a powerful, grown-up clone of the Connor Kent Superboy who tried to take over Earth with an army of Doomsday clones.

There was eventually a version of the Black Zero military group — that’s the verison that came to popularity in Smallville — led by Ursa in the comics. That elite group, most of whom died battling Brainiac, also included the parents of Thara Ak-Var, the Kryptonian superhero known as Flamebird.

 

DEV-EM

Dev-Em was a Kryptonian juvenile delinquent who was sentenced to suspended animation. Because of this, he survived his planet’s destruction. He later arrived on 20th Century Earth and plagued Superboy and later the Legion.

When Dev-Em traveled into the 30th Century, he turned over a new leaf and became a member of the Inter-Stellar Counter-Intelligence Corps. The Legion of Super-Heroes offered Dev-Em membership, but he declined, preferring to work with the I.C.C.

In the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths era, Dev-Em appears in the “Time and Time Again” storyline in which the Man of Steel bounces between the 30th century (home of the Legion) and the 20th century.

In that story, Superman encounters Dev-Em, an insane Daxamite, as a full grown adult whose powers rivaled Superman’s. He tried to destroy the Earth’s moon but was challenged by the Legion. Dev-Em makes short work of Superman, Laurel Gand and the rest of the Legion. Dev-Em is seemingly stopped by Shrinking Violet as she shrinks to a small size and enters Dev-Em’s ear, scratching his insides. However, he soon initiates the Dominators’ covert Triple Strike program, destroying the moon and causing massive damage to cities across the Earth.

Later in the post-Crisis era, another Dev-Em — this one Kryptonian — would appear as part of Geoff Johns’s Action Comics run that has influenced much of Supergirl. Trapped in the Phantom Zone, Dev-Em almost manages to kill Superman in a battle with no powers, but Superman ultimately defeats him and escapes.

In the Man of Steel prequel comic, Dev-Em killed almost everyone on board a Kryptonian scout ship bound for Earth before Kara Zor-El defeated (and possibly killed) him. The scout ship then crashed. It isn’t clear what happened to either of the two, although thousands of years later, that scout ship would be discovered by Kal-El.

 

REIGN

A reader pointed this one out to us, so we’re adding it before the West Coast sees this list:

This is one that’s objectively and undoubtedly a Supergirl villain — something that the show has often found in short supply as fans have been treated to shared Superman/Supergirl villains, or even just Superman villains reinvented for the TV show.

Introduced in 2012, Reign is a Worldkiller and her origin a mystery even to her. All she knows about herself is her name, that she is a Worldkiller, and that Krypton and Earth hold the answers for her questions about her origin.

In the comics, she attempted to find her answers on Krypton, only to arrive and find it already destroyed. She tracked down the remains of Argo City, and ultimately made her way to Earth to face off with Supergirl.

Reign would be a solid character to include because she has very little story to fall back on, so writers could build a life around what’s there and have flexibility without too badly breaking what comics fans expect.

The fact that she’s a Worldkiller in the comics also could tie her to the original Black Zero and give some credence to the “death cult” look of the people sending the pod off.

Thanks to Angel Jordan for jarring our memories!

 

MORE SUPERGIRL

SUPERGIRL is an action-adventure drama based on the DC character Kara Zor-El, (Melissa Benoist) Superman’s (Kal-El) cousin who, after 12 years of keeping her powers a secret on Earth, decides to finally embrace her superhuman abilities and be the hero she was always meant to be. Twelve-year-old Kara escaped the doomed planet Krypton with her parents’ help at the same time as the infant Kal-El. Protected and raised on Earth by her foster family, the Danvers, Kara grew up in the shadow of her foster sister, Alex (Chyler Leigh), and learned to conceal the phenomenal powers she shares with her famous cousin in order to keep her identity a secret.

Years later, Kara was living in National City and still concealing her powers, when a plane crash threatened Alex’s life and Kara took to the sky to save her. Now, Kara balances her work as a reporter for CatCo Worldwide Media with her work for the Department of Extra-Normal Operations (DEO), a super-secret government organization whose mission is to keep National City – and the Earth – safe from sinister threats. At the DEO, Kara works for J’onn J’onzz (David Harewood), the Martian Manhunter, and alongside her sister, Alex, and best friend, Winn Schott (Jeremy Jordan). Also in Kara’s life are media mogul Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart), James Olsen (Mehcad Brooks), a photo journalist who moonlights as Guardian, a masked vigilante, Lena Luthor (Katie McGrath), and Mon-El of Daxam (Chris Wood), whose planet was ravaged by Krypton’s destruction. As Kara struggles to navigate her relationships and her burgeoning life as a reporter, her heart soars as she takes to the skies as Supergirl to fight crime.

Based on characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, SUPERGIRL is from Berlanti Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (“The Flash,” “Arrow”), Andrew Kreisberg (“The Flash,” “Arrow”), Sarah Schechter (“Arrow,” “The Flash”), Robert Rovner (“Private Practice,” “Dallas”) and Jessica Queller (“Gilmore Girls,” “Gossip Girl,” “Felicity”).

More Supergirl news:

• Did Rhea Already Create A Baby With Mon-El And Lena Luthor’s DNA?
• Supergirl: Will Lena Luthor Learn Kara’s Secret Identity In Season Finale?
• Melissa Benoist on the Supergirl Season Finale: “I’m Sorry to All the Fans In Advance”
• First Look At General Zod In Supergirl Season Finale Trailer