"Will to Power" – Krypton S02E03 Review

Finally! With "Will to Power" we have an above-average episode of Krypton. Not that the last two episodes have been bad, and they've contained hints of this episode with a somewhat lighter approach. But this week had humor, and not just Lobo, ad some actual emotion involved. Those are pluses right there.

For the first time, some of the Kryptonians actually seemed... human. Ironic as that might sound. But the relationships actually felt solid. As if the show has decided to move past all of the re-introduction of the plot lines from season one and get on with season two. Granted, there's still the Jayna/Dev thing to remind us that there are still some leftover season one plot lines. But baby steps.

The Kryptonians acting recognizably human is the key. Yes, the show is set on Krypton and they're Kryptonians. But it's hard to relate to aliens, even humanoid aliens, if they don’t act in a way that the viewers sympathize with. And us viewers on Earth are human. Well, most of us. :) This episode, the characters felt more recognizable. Even as the plot lines with Nyssa and Jayna tottered on.

So what happened this week? The episode divided into four subplots. The main one has Seg trying to free himself from Brainiac's mental influence. He and Adam are running through the Canadian... umm, I mean, the Coluan forest. Seg pauses to have a mental conversation with Brainiac inside his brain. Which is also Brainiac's brain, since they're sharing consciousness and the surrounding cave-like mindscape is greenish. Brainiac makes the usual bwah-hah-hah "You can't resist me" speeches and Seg makes the usual heroic "Yes, I can, and your time is limited" responses. It's all very Comic Book 101. But I've always liked Blake Ritson, as I've said many times before. And Cameron Cuffe as Seg has manned up this season. These scenes give him someone to man up against. I'm still not that interested in Superman's grandfather, but now you can at least see where the Man of Steel got some of his steel from. And I'd rather have comic book tropes than Game of Thrones tropes.

It's harder to imagine Seg as Jor-El's father. Where is Jor-El, anyway? We keep hearing about Seg's son Cor-Vex, but nothing of Jor-El yet. Did Superman have an uncle? Did he have another uncle called Con-Cave?

Between mental conversations, Seg and Adam run. And run. And run and run and run. Eventually, Seg latches onto a memory of Brainiac's natal chamber. Which is a small white chamber at the end of a dark tunnel. It has convenient Brainiac-Away equipment that will pull Ole Greenskin out of Seg's mind so they go there. Lobo shows up, and isn't in a talkative mood. For some reason the chamber sprouts a force field that goes across the doorway, severing Lobo's hand. Lobo takes that in stride, blows off his head, and then his hand inside the chamber regenerates into a legless Lobo clone. Or at least, the legs haven't grown yet.

Legless Lobo manages to get the drop on Adam (why is he a hero again?). In the mindscape, Brainiac takes on the form of Lyta. Seg manages to resist his/her womanly advances, completes the process, or waits until the process kicks in (it's not clear), extracts an unconscious Brainiac onto the couch he's lying on, and teleports away with Adam. Legless Lobo is happy to have Brainiac at his mercy and drives his hook-chain into Ole Greenskin's chest.

Seg and Adam arrive on Krypton, and Seg dies of a heart attack brought on by teleportation strain. End of series. No, I kid. But you wonder why they bother with the heart attack: it's not dramatic since we figure Seg isn't going to die in a snowbank somewhere of a heart attack. It also makes you wonder who was around to administer CPR to Adam the first time he teleported, the way that Adam does to Seg here. Unless it gaslights something down the road: maybe Adam teleports Zod away, and Zod dies of a heart attack?

And hey, Kem (Rasmus Hardiker) finally shows up! Twice. First Brainiac takes on his appearance in the mindscape to show that he can read Seg's emotions. And later we see a brief bit of him as a member of the Sagitari conscripts. More on that in a bit. I missed Kem.

Back on Krypton, I guess the Rebellion raid against Zod's forces went okay since it's off-camera. There's some exposition between Val (Ian McElhinney) and Jax (Hannah Waddingham), to the effect that Nyssa (Wallis Day) did real good by betraying Zod. They're still unaware that Nyssa is secretly working for Zod and the whole thing, as Admiral Ackbar so profoundly put it, is a trap.

This leads to a weird out-of-nowhere do-nothing scene where Val lets Nyssa out from under guard after giving her a pep talk about how she's not her father Daron. I'm still liking McElhinney as Val, even if he seems somewhat wasted as a Rebellion leader. Nyssa goes to a former lover and Military Guild member, Araeme (Kae Alexander), who is now with the Rebellion. And they end up having sex. They're lesbians, if that means anything on Krypton. And because it's 2019 on U.S. television. The sex is just as meaningless and plot-irrelevant as if they were heterosexuals, so yay, equality. Afterward, Nyssa checks some device and gets some readings that she doesn't like. Araeme must sleep like the dead.

In subplot 3, Dev tells Jayna (does she have a brother Zan, and will they gain shapeshifting powers?) that the whole system is screwed up, and he's no longer part of it. So whatever status she had is meaningless. And then he leaves, and Jayna finds him in a snowbank. And hauls him inside to the cantina from last week where all of the customers (and the bouncer that works there) have disappeared. He wakes up and she hugs him. What this all means, I have no idea.

In the final subplot, Lyta wants to deal with the Rebellion on Wegthor in person and try to negotiate a truce because they're all Kryptonians and Kryptonians shouldn't be killing Kryptonians. Zod doesn't want to let her go. He eventually offers her a drink and reveals that in the original timeline she lost hope and refused to take chances. Zod doesn't want to see her die again, but he's sworn to uphold Krypton's future which involves letting Zyta go to Wegthor to deal with the Rebellion. She hugs her son, and this is the first time I've gotten a sense that Lyta has some feelings for Zod, who is her son but is older than her because he came back through time. It looks a little goofy watching Georgina Campbell hug the much taller and older Colin Salmon, but they both manage to pull it off. The drinking goes on a little long, and I did keep expecting Zod to reveal that he drugged Lyta's drink to keep her on Krypton. So the fact that they didn't go that route is a relief.

Campbell also sells that Lyta is allied with Zod both because he's a blood relative, and because she lost Seg. The whole thing is a bit unpredictable: will Seg returning cause her to join the Rebellion because we know he's not going to ally himself with Zod? Or will she side against her former lover? We've kind of seen Zod succeed since Adam returned to 2019 Earth and saw a statue of Zod as its conqueror. Although it was in a Brainiac city-bottle. Defeating Zod means letting Krypton blow up real good. So there's that conflict going on. So unpredictability is good in this case.

There's also a bit of the conscripts, including Kem, heading out to take on the rebels where Zod apparently lured them thanks to the inside info that he slipped them via Nyssa.

There's no mention of Doomsday. And I guess Lobo is out of the picture since he's off on Colu and no indication that he'd have any interest in going to Krypton. Brainiac is apparently dead, or at least as dead as a machine intelligence can be when he's hooked up to the computers that downloaded him into a body in the first place. So there's a fair amount of board-clearing here. Brainiac and Lobo are both seemingly out of the picture, and I'll miss both of them. Hopefully their jaunts into villainy and humor will stick. The humor does seem to have taken hold elsewhere: the banter between Seg and Adam as they flee Lobo is good, and Kem has apparently returned. And we have Val.

It's not that I expect slapstick humor every five minutes. But Star Wars had humor. And adventure. And drama. And soap opera. And romance. And aliens, humanoid and otherwise. Doesn't seem to have hurt that franchise. Krypton could take a few lessons.

The Jayna subplot seems to just meander along. I'm rapidly losing interest in the Nyssa subplot as well. Having her pair off with a random personality-less lover doesn't help. Neither does the apparent death of her father Daron two episodes ago, when his head was unceremoniously blown open. Since Lyta did that, I imagine the next conversation between her and Nyssa will be a little tense. Nyssa continues to wonder if her father's shenanigans define her. But it's been 42 or so weeks and he got killed off, so her lamenting feels a bit hollow.

Overall, congrats to writer Lina Patel, who managed to lighten up things considerably. Granted, "Will to Power" is tonally different than what had come before. But that tone was a bit dour and uninteresting, so changing the tone was a good idea.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?