Krypton: Season 2 Finale Ending Explained

Last season, Krypton ended on a decidedly bleak note: the timeline had been fractured, Superman no longer existed, and General Zod was in control of the planet, while Seg-El had found himself trapped in the Phantom Zone along with Brainiac.

It has been a long trek to get to the season two finale, and while it certainly has a little ambiguity for our heroes, things are a lot less dour this time around.

That said, things are also a little less clear, and it seems like as good a time as any to do our best to break down what the heck we just saw, and make some predictions about what we might see when Krypton comes back for its third season (which isn’t official yet, but considering it just got a Lobo spinoff, pretty much everyone is expecting it).

Read on, and let us know if we missed anything in the comments below or at @russburlingame on Twitter.

Seg and Lyta’s Revolution

In the series pilot, Seg’s monologue said that his family would lead a revolution against tyranny — and while most folks assumed that would be Jor-El’s fight, years in the future, it seems to have begun on tonight’s episode, as Seg-El and Lyta Zod overthrew the rule of General Dru-Zod in order to restore order and peace to Krypton and prevent it from trying to take over nearby worlds.

Zod and Doomsday Incapacitated

With Doomsday buried under a sheet of ice and likely still under the influence of the Black Mercy toxin, it seems likely he will be back to cause more trouble later on.

Similarly, General Zod being trapped by an already-compromised Black Mercy is probably not a long-term solution for that problem either.

Still, both of them are in what amounts to a state of suspended animation, out of the way of the main characters for now and ready to be a threat again when things start to calm down a bit.

Brainiac’s Terrifying Plan

Brainiac’s plan is maybe the most understated, but scary, part of the whole ending. 

In the final moments of the season, it looks like he has set his sights on Earth. That would be a version of the planet that, roughly 200 years ago, is entirely unprepared to take on a threat of Brainiac’s magnitude.

But that is not the scariest part. What is, in fact, the worst part of it all is his declaration that Jor-El is to become “a god.” A little simple math suggests that he plans on turning Jor-El into a Superman-like super-powered Kryptonian, and that after he does so, he can use that being as a weapon in the same way Zod used Doomsday.

Nyssa Vex on Thanagar

We touched on this already, but it seems likely that Nyssa Vex is stranded on Thanagar.

During her final scene, she looked to the sky in one of the final shots and saw an army of winged beings flying above. Some may suggest that the winged beings are not the winged Thanagarian law enforcement officials, but rather Parademons, since just before she saw them, she encountered an Omega symbol, seemingly drawn in blood, on the exterior entrance to a cave. In all likelihood, though, that symbol is a nod to The Omega Men, a strange DC super team that Krypton stars and producers have teased might show up on the series.

Thanagar also likely sets up the arrival of Hawkwoman, who was reported to be a part of the season one cast way back when the first announcements about the show’s plot were made at Comic Con a couple of years ago.

The Rann-Thanagar Wars

During the 2005 event Infinite Crisis, there was a war between Rann and Thanagar that ultimately led to the destruction of Rann and a long domino effect of consequences in-story.

But part of the reason that the two races were so easily manipulated into battling one another is that there was already a long history of distrust between Rann and Thanagar. Before the first Crisis, in Showcase #101-103, Hawkman and Hawkwoman teamed up with Adam Strange to avert a catastrophic battle between the two worlds, which was launched after Kanjar Ro successfully took over Rann with a diverse army of alien races that Strange had previously repelled, but who decided that they couldn’t be defeated if they stood together.

Prior to that, Thanagar had been taken over and its citizens more or less lobotomized, leaving everyone on the world to be “completely equal,” in a way that basically meant there was no diversity of thought and everyone worked as a hivemind for the conqueror. Hawkman and Hawkwoman were unwelcome during this time, because they weren’t part of the hive, but when they learned that Thanagar was planning an invasion of Rann, they were confused: how had that happened?

It turned out, a cosmic queen called Hyanthis had unseated the previous conqueror and then positioned herself as the ruler of Thanagar instead. It was she and Kanjar Ro who were competing to see who could control both worlds, and that led to a brief war between them. Both worlds were destabilized when Kanjar Ro was defeated and exiled, and a long period of political unrest on Rann and tensions between Rann and Thanagar followed.

Hyanthis, a rarely-seen villain, recently reappeared in the comics as an antagonist in Superman: Lois and Clark, which set her up as a major villain in Dan Jurgens’s Superman run. She never popped up again, likely because Brian Michael Bendis’s defection to DC caused changes to the long-term plans for Superman.

Kanjar Ro shows up a lot more often, and was actually name-dropped in an early episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

The Omega Men

Another group of characters who have been mentioned a few times and even outright teased by Warner Bros. TV and Krypton execs is the Omega Men. It was in their comic that Lobo made his first appearance, and a recent “gritty” reboot of the property from Tom King and Barnaby Bagenda might provide a primer to fans on not just who they are and what they do, but what their role might be in Krypton if they show up next season…which seems likely.

Worth noting that the Omega Men played a not-insignificant role in Invasion!, the comic book series that saw Earth face the same kind of multi-pronged invasion (this time headed up by the Dominators, not Kanjar Ro) that Rann had.

Lobo’s Strange Adventure

Speaking of Lobo, the Last Czarnian showed back up — and as you might expect, he wants Seg and Adam’s help in tracking down Brainiac. It seems entirely likely that in season 3 (or maybe in Lobo’s own show, if that’s how they decide to play it), we’ll see a jet-pack-wearing Adam Strange, a version of Seg-El with super-powers, and Lobo squaring off against Brainiac in Earth’s atmosphere. 

This show is crazy.