Everything is crystals, for some reason, so it’s honestly difficult to tell how much of this is the computer and how much is interior design. The way that you activate it is to take one of the crystals, and put it into one of the glass tubes, and then you take it out again, and put it down in a big stack of identical crystals. Every once in a while, one of the crystals turns green, if that helps. You know, they say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but there’s still such a thing as a user interface.

As we’ve seen, Jor-El is a powerful and intelligent science wizard, but like all parents, he has a hard time wrapping up a phone call.

“You will travel far, my little Kal-El,” he says, strapping the baby into his personal spacecraft. “But we will never leave you, even in the face of our death.” The kid shifts restlessly in his car seat.

“The richness of our lives shall be yours,” Jor-El continues. “All that I have, all that I’ve learned, everything that I feel, all this and more, I bequeath you, my son.” I swear, this is the end of every phone call I’ve ever had with my mother.

“You will carry me inside you, all the days of your life,” Jor-El goes on. “You will make my strength your own, see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine. The son becomes the father, and the father the son. This is all I can send you, Kal-El.”

Meanwhile, the kid is like, Okay, do you just want to come? Because I am not getting any younger here, and if I stick around, I’m not going to get a lot older. Maybe a little less talk and a little more altitude, Pops.

Then there’s a muffled, rumbling thud from outside, which is the planetary catastrophe version of Hey, sounds like my ride’s here.

Jor-El moves across the room towards something that for the sake of argument I’m going to call the control panel, and he touches one crystal with his left index finger and one crystal with his right index finger, and that, as they say, is that.

And from that point, everything goes exactly as planned. The Last Son of Krypton ascends in his experimental lifeboat, the world’s first crèche test dummy.

And he rises, an innocent child elevated into the infinite, on a one-way trip toward every medium that’s ever been invented. He has an honorable discharge from his origin story, and experienced his last restful moment. It’s all flying, from now on.

Oh, and he’s also the first Kryptonian infant to break through the glass ceiling. This is a typical act of destruction; it wouldn’t be Kal-El if he wasn’t smashing some kind of architecture.

And then — who could have predicted it? — the civilization made entirely of chandeliers comes to its inevitable messy end.

So that’s a wrap on the home planet, as the science council comes to the hasty conclusion that Jor-El might have known what he was talking about. To be fair, the planet’s orbit does shift a bit, so maybe we could call it a draw.

Ultimately, they died of a lack of imagination; they simply couldn’t conceive of a situation where they might be wrong. And then, avoidably, their world dies.

“Ha! Ha!” they said. “We have observed Earth people with our astro-telescopes! They are thousands of eons behind us, mentally and physically! Why, they do not even possess X-ray vision!”

 

“Would you send us to live among such a people, Jor-El?” they said. “Death is preferable to life in such a world of inferior people.”

 

“What you tell us is sheer nonsense,” they said. “Krypton is not doomed, nor will it ever be!”

 

“If Krypton is to die,” they said, “we shall die with it.”

And then they died, repentant and concluded. And that’s why you always leave a note.

Tomorrow:
How did a sci-fi serial overshadow
the first superhero movie?
1.13: … Except for Star Wars

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Footnote:

For anybody keeping score, the Science Council quotes in today’s post are from the first episode of the Adventures of Superman radio show, “The Baby From Krypton” (Feb 1940), The Adventures of Superman novel by George Lowther (1942), and “The Origin of Superman” in Superman #53 (Aug 1948).

Tomorrow:
Why did a sci-fi serial overshadow
the first superhero movie?
1.13: … Except for Star Wars

Chapters
Movie list

— Danny Horn