In tonight’s episode of Krypton, titled “Zods and Monsters,” fans got to see how the creation of Doomsday happened in the series — and it bears quite a bit of resemblance to how it happened in Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey, especially as compared to the very loose adaptations fans have seen in Superman/Doomsday, The Death of Superman, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Smallville whenever the monster that killed Superman steps out of comics.
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The biggest difference in Doomsday’s origin is a simple one: the identity of his creators. As revealed during Krypton‘s first season, the TV version of the beast was created by the ancestors of Seg-El and Dru-Zod. In tonight’s episode, we meet Wedna-el (Toni O’Rourke) and Van-Zod (Dempsey Bovell), who created Doomsday by taking a willing participant (Dax Bron, played by Staz Nair) and transforming him into Doomsday my killing and resurrecting him over and over again — hundreds of times. Each time he would be revived and “evolved,” then killed again.
While Bertron, who created Doomsday in the comics, is replaced by a Zod and an El, the basics of the origin remain untouched. In the comics, it was an unnamed baby rather than Dax, but the idea of using Kryptonian technology to hyper-accelerate evolution by subjecting an innocent being to horrific death over and over again remains the same.
“I certainly understood, in the Batman v Superman film, why they had to change the Doomsday origin to something that involved Luthor for the economy of storytelling,” Doomsday’s creator Dan Jurgens told ComicBook.com during a recent look back at Hunter/Prey. “Obviously if you really start to show it, this becomes 15 minutes of the film….At the same time, I think the downside to not working with it more is when you really get down to it, there is something rather horrific, I think, about taking a creature and trying to cultivate something that can evolve to face whatever the obstacle is on a much quicker rate. To watch them die over and over again, and recreating them so you push that evolutions progress along at a much faster rate — I think the kind of mind that would engineer something like that is something that is worth exploring, and I think it is also something that has helped make Doomsday’s origin unique. I think that’s part of what really makes the character work.”
Fans did get to see a little bit of what kind of mind could conceive of such cruelty in tonight’s episode (even with a nice little nod to Hunter/Prey when Dax is referred to as “the subject”) — and may have been a bit surprised to see that it was an ancestor of General Zod who tried to pump the brakes while an ancestor of the Els was full-speed ahead on the experimentation. Given that fact, it may turn out to be easier than expected for General Zod to turn Doomsday against Seg-El and Val-El…!
