Posted in: Review, SYFY, TV | Tagged: krypton, lobo, syfy

"Krypton" S02, Ep01: "Light-Years From Home" and Sleepy as Hell (SPOILER REVIEW)

This review of the second season premiere of Krypton is a few days late. I could blame scheduling issues, or perhaps Adam Strange (Shaun Sipos) zapped me with his Zeta Beam and I disappeared for the better part of the week.

Or, it took me a while to muster up the words to really capture how I felt about the beginning of the second season of Krypton on SYFY.

In a nutshell? I'm really sleepy after this episode. My wife didn't even make it all the way through. Huzzah! My insomnia is cured!

It's not that the show was without merits, and I will get to those in a moment. It's the sloppy pathos of the thing, dammit. I've already had a mountain of sudsy operatics with my DC shows over on the CW, and in most cases (excepting Arrow), the CW shows manage to balance the melodrama with a mix of humor, charisma, and action that makes it (excepting Arrow) work.

Krypton, on the other hand, has all of the serious, portent spewing seriousness of a major Shakespearean drama, but with all the impact of a middle-school stage play. At one point, Nyssa-Vex (Wallis Day) is alarmed that Dru-Zod (Colin Salmon) has taken her infant son, and she wails with the kind of anguish a day-time soap star would envy. But it's still so far over the top that it's almost comical. (For more on the soap-opera qualities of Krypton, check out this analysis from our own Adi Tantimedh.)

A good chunk of the episode revolves around Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) trying to make his way out of the Phantom Zone. He finally makes it, but mistakenly takes Brainiac (Blake Ritson) with him. The living machine takes Seg to his home world, in the hopes of getting repaired and returning to his crusade.

Seg doesn't cotton to that, and the results were pretty impressive. Adam Strange shows up to resuce Seg, but the two get waylaid by a certain Main Man. I would call that a spoiler, but SYFY has been screaming about Lobo (Emmett J. Scanlan) showing up on Krytpon since about the dawn of time.

"Light-Years From Home" is certainly not without its merits, though. There are a couple of moments (and a partial disintegration) that pulled this sluggish episode of Krypton out of a major mug of Sleepy-Time tea, but those moments were fleeting.

For a show about a brewing rebellion rising up against a tyranical

Kyptonian Exceptionalist, things seemed pretty low-key. I think that's going to change, though.

First off, Brainiac's few moments of screen time were worth the price of admission alone. The make-up effects are fantastic, and the filter over Ritson's voice were chillingly effective.

The same could be said for Lobo, but his appearance was merely an epertif, a little something to hold us over for the bigger (hopefully) payoff that should be coming next week. Scanlan's Lobo is a tad hard to understand, but that works even better with the character. He's crass, and looks the part, even if he is a little more human sized than I would have liked. Minor quibble.

Most of the effects work looks pretty good, and the visual impact of the setting is suitably impressive, but still pretty sleepy.

Hopefully, the next episode of Krypton will have a little more "Biff-Pow" to it than "Snooze Now", but there are still far worse ways to spend an hour. You could be watching Arrow.

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