“The Phantom Zone” is episode ten of season one of Krypton and the season finale.
At the end of the previous episode, “Hope”, Nyssa had driven the sunstone into the head of the Voice of Rao as he/it was siphoning off power from Kandor’s forcefield, causing him to shatter and stopping him from sending Seg to his death. However, the remains of the Voice reassembled, as Seg and Nyssa fled, forming into Brainiac, and the protective dome fell.
This episode opens with Brainiac looking over Kandor City and saying to himself ‘Yes, it is time.’ Below, the citizens are fleeing as with the dome down the weather is taking a definite turn for the worse and snow is falling whilst Brainiac’s ship is arriving above the city. General Zod and Lyta, for she chose her son over her mother and shot Jayna (to stop her from killing Zod; Jayna fled into the Outlands, injured, when they weren’t looking) are in the city trying to contact Seg. Zod says that they need to get to the Fortress, and need Seg’s help for this, as Zod knows someone he thinks can help stop Brainiac – Val-El.
It goes back 14 years to the events of “Pilot” when Val was sentenced. This time we see Val activate a device in his hand as he is sent outside the city’s dome after being sentenced. This causes a device in the Fortress to activate and, just before Val hits the ground, some sort of portal opens and he disappears.
At the Fortress in the present, General Zod tells Seg that Val entered the Phantom Zone, where Zod himself was sentenced. Zod was trapped in the Zone with Val, where time and space have no meaning. Zod has the device that Val used, having stolen it from him – Zod believed that stopping Brainiac required a Zod, not an El. Although he himself is both, as he has now discovered. To rescue Val, someone has to enter the Phantom Zone and find him, which Zod volunteers to do. However, once Val is released, he tells them that he has seen many possible futures, and in none of them was Brainiac stopped. When Zod suggests using Doomsday – who is currently in a failing stasis chamber somewhere in Kandor; a worry for later – Val says that leads to the worst possible future.
Val explains that the cities bottled by Brainiac are all stopped in time. As he tells what happens, a city that Brainiac has already bottled is seen. This is the place where Adam ended up after using his device to protect Seg in “Savage Night”. A city where everyone, but Adam, is frozen in time. A city that looks as if it might be American in origin. Yet it’s a city that would not be of Brainiac’s current time, the time that Adam travelled back to.
Lyta wants to get back into Kandor to take the fight to Brainiac, even though Seg doesn’t want her to go. However, Nyssa quietly offers to show Lyta a way in, because Nyssa wants to return as well, for her own reasons. In the city, the Sagitari appear to want to flee, except for Dev-Em, who is now sporting a prosthetic arm. Lyta arrives and rallies them into attacking Brainiac.
Nyssa gets some shocks when the Black Zero leader, and former friend of Val-El’s before he was executed, Jax-Ur, tells her the truth about her past. If Brainiac is stopped, what will happen to the future? Surely that would change a lot of things. Not precisely a cliff-hanger ending, but many threads are left unresolved and some new problems arrive, leading into season two. And yes, we finally get to hear the famous line – ‘Kneel before Zod!’