Seg, Kem and Adam face a race against time to recover a probe sent by Brainiac before it can infect a host and doom all of Krypton to the attentions of the Galactic Collector. Meanwhile, Lyta struggles to balance her new duties against her conscience, as the Sagitarii engage in a crackdown on Sector 19 to try to root out Black Zero’s command structure.

I’ll say it up front: after two episodes which failed to ignite my interest at all, this week Krypton steps up and delivers something far better. The main plot, the search for the parasitic drone, is a fairly standard ‘race against time to find the McGuffin’ plot which you could find in a hundred other places, although credit to it for at least trying to inject some suspense in there… but it isn’t really why this episode shines.

Where we get into things is in the Lyta subplot. Last week, she killed her unit commander in a ritual duel, in order to take command of the unit herself. Now she has to deal with the challenges of leadership, which include balancing her own sense of what is just and right against her responsibilities to the men and women under her command, and not allowing the one to undermine the other.

This is made all the more difficult when the Sagitarii are ordered to cordon off Sector 19 (guess which sector Seg comes from?) as part of an initiative to reveal the suspected command hub of Black Zero, which intelligence points to being based there. Lyta is in a fairly unique position among her peers, with no sympathy for Black Zero whom she sees as terrorists and murderers, but also able to see the Rankless as merely people trapped in the middle of a conflict they haven’t asked for. Her comrades, unsurprisingly, are largely not so conflicted, and this leads to some of the best and tensest moments of the episode.

Indeed, Lyta’s whole story is just far more interesting to me than Seg’s – it feels like a missed opportunity by the showrunners to insist on the main focus of the show being an ancestor of the Big Blue Boy Scout who is (shock horror) a noble guy with a heart of gold who stands up for the little man. Right there next to him, we have an ancestor of one of Superman’s greatest and most tyrannical villains, standing up for the little guy and trying to change a powerful military regime from within to be a little more humane – that’s a Kryptonian history lesson that I want to see, and it’s to the episode’s credit that we spend more time with the character this week and really get to see her wrestle with these quandaries.

Other than that, it’s actually a solid episode. The real world parallels cannot be ignored (military personnel applying heavy-handed tactics to civilian populations in the name of rooting out terrorism) and they’re handled with a surprising amount of deftness and skill, considering how ham-fisted the writing has been previously. There’s also a pleasing lack of mass info-dumps in this instalment – they’re still there in the odd bit from Val, but they’re shorter and less intrusive.

Verdict: Colour me surprised, after a glacially slow start, this prequel series finally picks up a head of steam and allows more interesting characters and stories to take prominence. If it keeps this up, I may even start to enjoy my weekly sojourns to Kandor City. 7/10

Greg D. Smith