Jayna struggles with the conflict between her sense of duty as a Zod and her love for her daughter. Seg makes a bid for freedom that doesn’t quite go according to plan, and Nyssa and Daron argue about the best way to proceed as Lyta’s life hangs in the balance.

Oh, Krypton. You continue to be a wonderfully schizophrenic show, at once compelling and a little dull. This week, as the title might suggest, we get a bit more focus on the Zods, mainly through flashback recollections by Jayna of her childhood, and specifically an early lesson in the very real seriousness with which the House of Zod treats the idea of their honour and a duty to maintain it above all else. As it plays out through the episode, it’s a brutal reminder that she got her parenting style from somewhere.

The reason for Jayna’s mental conflict over the fate of Lyta, awaiting her execution on charges of treason, is Nyssa’s attempt to draw her into the plans of her and her father to overthrow the Voice of Rao in exchange for the sparing of Lyta’s life. Nyssa is, week by week, proving to be the more devious, the more manipulative and the more ambitious of the two Vex’s and you may start to wonder why she hasn’t already gotten rid of her father and struck out on her own. The episode provides an answer to that question well, which throws Daron in a new light.

Lyta meanwhile, is stoically awaiting death. A touching exchange with Dev reveals that maybe there’s more there in her feelings for the man to whom she is engaged than we might previously have been thought, teasing the possibility of a bit of a love triangle later on in the series, perhaps?

Oh, and there’s Seg. Seg is still the dullest thing about the show, and his ability to walk into trouble even as he walks out of trouble is fast turning from an endearing character flaw into a major writing defect. This week, he escapes the custody of the mysterious figures who captured him, only to wander into bigger problems as the episode progresses. Adam and Kem are just sort of there, being equally as pointless as Seg but having, at least in Kem’s case, the advantage of being at least slightly more charismatic screen presence to make up for it to a certain degree.

It really has become a show of two halves – on the one hand you have interesting characters engaged in a political and physical war of intrigue, double dealing and backstabbing, against a backdrop of a corrupt religious order having displaced the previous, more agreeable ruling council and established a rule of terror, and on the other you have the story of a bland, unengaging hero who spends more time wandering around wondering what’s going on and getting into trouble than he does anything else.

Verdict: With two increasingly separate storylines competing for the viewer’s attention, I can’t help but feel that the wrong horse was backed here. The Zod/Vex stuff is fascinating, the Voice of Rao an eerie and captivating villain. The stuff about our central protagonist is dull. I’m still enjoying it, but not, I suspect, for the characters it wants me to. 6/10

Greg D. Smith