You know, there's a lot of mileage in conspiracy stories. Faceless, unknown men and women hidden behind a veil of secrecy, taking advantage of political instability for their own reasons and to benefit their suspicious, unsure goals. Imagine a beloved General involved in an attempted coup, a respected rocket scientist destroying a whole city full of people, occult madmen sacrificing whole herds of endangered sacred animals in a bid for immortality and framing an innocent for ther crime. Imagine unheeded warnings about planetary scale disasters, a respected family fallen on hard times, laughed and derided by the people. And imagine all the whole the doomsday clock ticking closer and closer to the end of the entire world while the populace writhed against itself, seeking to find new ways to imprison its people.
Imagine this, and you imagine the end of a world. That world was Krypton.
By the middle of the Silver Age the mythologization of the world of Krypton had hit a fever pitch. The flora and fauna of that lost paradise were established, complete with creatures who projected their thoughts onto their own foreheads, animals that could create their own rebirth, and at least two separate species that could breathe fire. The mountains were pure crystal. The waterfalls burned as they fell. And the people of Krypton lived in a paradise ruled by scientists, thinking men and women in a council of Science who supposedly governed their planet outside of the hobblings of superstition and irrationality. And yet, the cracks were showing by the time Jor-El first realized something was wrong. His own family, the house of El, now had an arms merchant among its number. His former friend and mentor, General Zod, led an attempted coup against the Science Council itself while another of his former respected colleagues blew up the moon Wegthor while attempting to develop a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead anywhere on Krypton's surface, killing an entire colony. Nam-Ek, a respected scientist, wipes out a population of sacred animals known as Rondors in an attempt to attain a form of immortality and actually succeeds. Geneticists and scholars, cryogenicists and martial arts experts, it's strange to consider how many experts in their fields end up going mad and being imprisoned in an extradimensional gulag at this time.
If you were of a mind to, of course, you could think about the implication that the impending destruction of the planet was looming large in the collective unconscious of the Kryptonians themselves. It's even more tempting to see the Phantom Zone itself as a kind of borderland between dimensions, in effect saying that Krypton chose to imprison its criminals in a land of pure thought (on many occassions it was shown that the Zone was affected only by thought and that the Zoners could send their thoughts into our reality, even once trying to use Jor-El himself to get free). Is the Phantom Zone Krypton's Akashic Record? Was the choice to imprison so many here what caused them to go mad and commit crimes that got them imprisoned there, a cause and effect and cause nightmare similar to an ourborous, and was all this planned for? Did someone want to make sure that some of Krypton survived, visionaries and experts who could convievably use their abilities to rebuild a new Krypton somewhere else? You have Zod and Faora to defend the nascent New Krypton, Nam-Ek and Va-Kox could theoretically recreate many of its flora and fauna, Jax-Ur and Kru-El could develop new weapons... if you wanted to create a pocket army of Kryptonian conquest, the Phantom Zone is a great place to stash it.
Another paradox to consider when thinking about Krypton and its ultimate explosive end is that, in great part, it was made worse by alien intervention. Specifically, little blue aliens and their green garbed servitors. I'm speaking here of the Guardians of the Universe and their Green Lanterns, especially the GL of Krypton's sector, Tomar Re. As per the Guardians orders, Tomar Re dampened the radioactive reaction at the core of Krypton, allowing the planet more time to learn of its perilous circumstances, yet in so doing he also caused a major problem for Jor-El, the scientist who did learn of it. Mainly that Jor-El's findings indicated that the planet should have already blown up. As a result, no one would believe him, and he was unable to convince the Science Council to fund his project to evacuate the planet. Am I the only one who thinks it possible, perhaps even likely that the Guardians, immortal psionic intelligences, might well have known this was going to happen? Perhaps they even wanted it to happen?
One Kryptonian on any other planet than Krypton can change the course of development for a world, maybe multiple worlds. He can change history, even. But ten? A hundred? A thousand? All of them? If Jor-El had succeeded in his plan to evacuate the planet, what happens next? A planet of Kryptonians exposed to conditions in the greater universe could rise to become a power so great that even the godlings of Apokolips and New Genesis must contend with them. Could even the entire Green Lantern Corps stand against tens, hundreds of thousands of Kryptonians? And keep in mind that despite their enormous power (or potential power) the people of the planet Krypton have proved themselves to be just as irrational, just as capable of love or hate, cruelty or kindness as any other mortals. These are not cosmic embodiments of ideals, these are flesh and blood men and women... with the possible power to crack planets. Do you want to let them out into the cosmos? And if not, how do you stop them?
If a group of meddling immortals who have been manipulating the cosmos for eons finds itself face to face with the possible rise of a power that would blot it out of existence, do they subtly invade said power's culture and begin manipulating it? Do they try and direct the culture's energies inwards, subvert its best and brightest down blind allieys and into paths of egotism or narcissism? Do they try and cause the leadership to exile their greatest minds to a hoary netherworld to reduce their influence while preserving their genius? And do they in the end make sure that the planet's greatest visionary is reduced to a near-gibbering wreck launching his son's pets off into space in a doomed effort to save some small corner of his own world, until strapping his own son into a rocket seems like all the choice left to him? The Guardians sure look like prime suspects here. But there are other candidates. What, after all, about the future?
By coming to Earth, Superman forever changes it. He brings with himself his heritage, and builds an outpost of his lost homeworld on our soil like a seed. He stands as an immigrant, keeping his alien traditions alive while embracing ours, an adopted son of our star and our soil. He is raised a man, and seeks to be a good one, to protect the only home he'll ever know. Earth changes him from infancy. And he changes it. Who is this near-god who walks like a man? Who never seeks to profit by his enormous power, his titanic intellect? No Zod, to attempt to sieze control. No Nam-Ek, no Jax-Ur, not even a Jor-El who fails ultimately to save his people. In a cosmos where most remaining Kryptonians are stuck in a bottle, or on a dome over a lead sheet that will eventually fail them, or as hate-choked ghosts who escaped death by being for all intents and purposes angry undead trapped in Krypton's netherworld, the Last Son of Krypton manages to bring all that was good and noble about his lost home and weld it in himself to all that is kind and worthwhile in his new one. He starts a legacy that lasts for over a millennia, which leads to a United Planets which forges peace and colonizes the stars, and a mighty Legion of Super-Heroes which patrols that future. Through him comes the utopia.
Would the utopia sacrifice millions, if not billions, of Kryptonian lives in the past to ensure that their future came to be? Would they travel back to lost Krypton and use their shape shifting, their telepathy, their uncounted 12th Level Effector intelligences to shape and manipulate the direction Krypton travels? Would they take it upon themselves to ensure the existence of the Superman by, in effect, orphaning him? They certainly could do it. One can imagine a Legion Espionage Squad tale of the suspicions of some members of the team as to the actions and whereabouts of others... why did Chamelon Lad and Brainiac 5 take the Time Bubble to the early 20th Century while the rest of us were fighting Universo? Why did Saturn Girl and Dream Girl have Mon-El write that account of his ancient visit to the planet and how Jor-El warned him away? And why does it seem like the Time Trapper is helping them?
In the end there are no answers, because these are just questions asked in passing of stories long since told. But it's curious to realize that, just before it destroyed itself, the world of Krypton seemed to go completely mad. Not that you or I would know anything about a world suffering and seemingly divided against itself when it should in fact be working together, each woman and man, to solve the terrible catastrophes looming on the horizon.
This is awesome. Fantastic ideas I've never thought of before, though there was always something nagging in the back of my mind: would all humanoids living under a red sun be god like if they found their way to a yellow one? I just didn't follow the thought out.
Posted by: Jason Yarn | July 14, 2007 at 11:47 PM