Syfy’s ‘Krypton’ Ends Season 1 With a ‘Phantom’ Menace & More!
Spoiler Alert
[Spoiler Alert! This interview features info about “The Phantom Zone,” the Season 1 finale of Kyrpton, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, pull a cape over your eyes and move on.]
In a move worthy of a Daily Planet front-page story, Krypton‘s Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) sacrificed himself to send world-consuming alien Brainiac (Blake Ritson) right up to the Phantom Zone as Season 1 of Syfy’s series came to an end.
In the season finale’s closing showdown, young Seg was pulled up into the space prison’s vortex along with the green-skinned villain and locked away in another dimension.
It was some seriously heroic business, but at the worst possible time: Just as Seg was sucked away, the thawed-out Doomsday busted free from his cryo-chamber, and General Zod (Colin Salmon) enacted his plan to lord over a grateful Krypton following his role in Brainiac’s capture.
Here, showrunner Cameron Welsh gives us a couple of peeks into his plans for next season and clears up a few of the DC Comics easter eggs fans surely picked up on as the first season progressed.
You name-dropped the planet named Cygnus 4019 a couple of times as Brainiac’s next target, and you know people are going to go crazy because this is the planet Salvation from DC Comics. Do you have an intention to bring in The New Gods of Apokolips next season?
Cameron Welsh: I would absolutely love to, but no, we won’t be doing that. I would love to do that — like I can’t tell you how much I would love to do that.
But, you know, it was actually the day of our screening at South by Southwest where we learned that Ava DuVernay was directing the New Gods film. We are super-excited but had no idea that was possible. I was with Cam Cuffe, we were in the theater about to watch the premiere, and we heard that news and were like, “That’s awesome, but that probably means the New Gods are off the table for us.” [Laughs]
There are shots in this finale that are straight-up cinematic. The image of Brainiac’s ship hovering over Kandor, I mean, stunning! The entire season has looked amazing … and on a cable schedule and budget, no less.
Yeah, honestly I think people would be shocked to realize what our budget truly is. But it’s our job to try and squeeze every penny out of that, and there’s no fat left on the bone for us — we put it all up on the screen.
We really work hard at that. I love the way the finale looked. There is one moment in the finale that I really loved, when the Skimmers are shot down with Rao on the horizon with that orange glow. Yeah, I kind of love that moment.
I’m assuming that Doomsday and Zod will be our big bads for next season?
Oh yeah. And Brainiac … he sort of goes to what we are talking about. We spent a lot of time trying to develop Brainiac and get him looking right, and there was a lot of build-up and anticipation.
Of course, he’s still up there in the Phantom Zone with Seg. Will they partner up to escape?
That would be interesting to see. I think one of the things that Seg went through in Season 1 was, in his growth as a character, he was too trusting in some ways [with] people, whether it was Adam (Shaun Sipos) and then later with Lyta (Georgina Campbell).
But I think he learned some lessons. Should an opportunity come to him to team up with Brainiac in some way in order to survive the Phantom Zone or escape the Phantom Zone, the question is I guess whether he learned from those issues earlier in the first season or not.
Have you decided who Seg should be with?
Not really, no, no. This is going to sound really corny, and I know and I apologize in advance, but sometimes you almost just want the characters to tell you themselves where they want to go.
Like when you’re really deep into [writing] it, going back and forth, sometimes it’s an instinct, I guess, but it really comes from deep in the character and trying to figure out, within each moment, what their true response would be or action would be. Hopefully, going forward they’ll guide us to the right path. [Laughs]
Shaun Sipos as Adam Strange.
And Adam is back on a Zod-controlled Earth?
Yeah, Adam zeta-beamed back to Detroit, back where he came from. So it’s present-day Detroit, and there’s two key pieces of information that we get there, but a lot is happening in the finale, so this this could get lost.
The first is the obvious one, explaining what it’s like inside one of Brainiac’s worlds, what it means for the inhabitant. They are paralyzed, but their brains are still functioning, they are still cognizant. We see that in all the people surrounding Adam. So we are in Detroit and see that somehow in the future Brainiac has taken Detroit.
But we also know that in our time, back in Krypton, Brainiac has just been in the Phantom Zone with Seg, so this suggests that Brainiac will get out at some point and that he will remain a threat.
And the second piece of info?
The second piece is that we see in Zod’s speech he talked about building an empire with Krypton at the center of it. That suggests at some point, Earth is colonized by Zod.
How long have you waited to get to use the “Kneel before Zod” line?
It was awesome to write that line, it’s surreal. Even just thinking about it now just gives me a shiver. But it’s also one that you want to use sparingly … in that moment it felt real, and it felt like it worked.
Krypton Season 2 is set to premiere on Syfy in 2019.
To help with the wait, here’s the teaser trailer that ran during the closing credits of the Season 1 finale!
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