Doomsday is coming to Krypton — and he will apparently have more in common with his comic book counterpart than previous screen iterations.
During a presentation at the Television Critics Association in Los Angels today, Krypton executive producers talked at length about the benefits of having a continuity separated by time, space, and even alternate realities from any other current iteration of the DC Universe onscreen.
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“We get to do our own iteration of Doomsday, untethered to anything else, so we get to explore Doomsday in a way that hasn’t been done and is kinda more true to the comics,” DC Chief creative officer Geoff Johns said.
Johns had previously announced Doomsday — along with Brainiac and Adam Strange — at this summer’s San Diego Comic Con. No details had been revealed at the time.
The character, created in 1992 by Dan Jurgens, is no stranger to TV and movies. In addition to numerous animated appearances, Doomsday has been seen in live-action both on Smallville and in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
In both of those stories, Doomsday’s origins were significantly altered or truncated from the comics, in ways that would suit the individual narratives. It seems likely from Johns’s quote that Krypton will go a little more in-depth with the creature’s backstory.
That story, established in a spinoff series years after Doomsday’s first appearance in “The Death of Superman,” centers around a character named Bertron.
Bertron was a Kryptonian scientist who lived hundreds of years ago. Fixated on creating the “perfect” life form, he evolved something he thought could bear the ravages of the planet’s most unforgiving landscape, and then set the cloned infant free there to be devoured by the elements and local animal life. Scraping up the leftover genetic material, Bertron did this hundreds of times, essentially forcing the clone to rapidly evolve.
Ultimately, the being that was created was virtually indestructible and had evolved the ability to resurrect itself after death, having “evolved” past whatever killed it so that it couldn’t die the same way twice. Bertron had succeeded in making an immortal and powerful being…but that being was barbaric and impossible to control. As a bonus, it carried with it the genetic memory of generations of abuse, driving it to destroy Bertron and basically anything else that crossed its path.
Eventually subdued and bound, the being known as Doomsday was fired off into space–where its cell crash-landed in what would later become Ohio and was buried deep underground. There, Doomsday “hibernated” for decades or centuries before he woke up and tore through the East Coast of the United States, stopped only when Superman sacrificed his life to destroy the beast.
In the Blu-ray special features for Man of Steel, a hidden piece of text warned, “Beware Bertron’s curse, for he is named Doomsday.” While Doomsday would appear in the film’s sequel, his mythology was largely unexplored and the version that killed Superman was created by Lex Luthor using the corpse of General Zod.
Krypton will premiere on March 21 on Syfy.
