Okay reworking the question to make more sense for the answers I'm looking for .

In rewatching the series, I have made it past S3D1 for the first time in a very very long time..

Has it been 30 earth years since the NKers left K?

Or has it been longer?

Did they all stay in the sort of suspended animation that we tend to read about Clark being in while he traveled? How long do we think that travel took with the 'new hyperlight' drive?

If so, how would that have affected the NK population? Did their ship just sort of float around the universe looking for some kind of planet to land on using AI of some kind so they were all in suspended animation? How long would the trip to/from NK take - did they say?

I had one thought that it had taken Clark' ship 2000 years to get here but i realized that couldn't be the case b/c Zara is Clark's birthwife and so presumably his parents knew her parents etc. unless they were all suspsended... Zara is about the same age as Clark. Unless they left her [and Nor?] in suspended animation until about the same time Clark would have 'woken up' but everyone else just went on, but that doesn't make sense to me...

That made sense in my head, but I'm currently sleep deprived and have 'nap hangover'...

Anyway - thoughts on any of that? Am still not sure it's making sense but...

Carol [who points she never said this has anything to do with BIII]

Well, in the Movieverse, Jor-El's AI states that he (Jor-El) has been dead for thousands of years - but that isn't canon for L&C.

I think you have to postulate for L&C that Krypton had some variation of 'warp' drive and Earth is only a few days or weeks travel time from New Krypton. Kal-El's ship was either faster than that (to get him to Earth really fast) or had some sort of suspended animation system to keep him safe and comfortable for the trip from Krypton.

Once you remove the logistics of travel - everything else basically falls into place. Zara really is about Clark's age.

In my endless quest for backstory I am thinking:

I believe that the New Krypton colony was set up some considerable time before Krypton was destroyed. Zara was merely one of the last loads of emigrants to travel to NK. But there was probably regular travel between K & NK for years before Zara got there.

Because I just can't believe that NK was founded after K's destruction. With the way the NK society was described, it seems to me that NK has been in existence long enough to have developed its own social customs and mores.

I refuse to watch the whole NK arc again, so if someone has watched it recently, could you please tell me if this hypothesis is full of doo-doo? Or, more politely, am I mistaken?

From Sarah's transcript:

/me shrugs

Queenie and I were talking about it and wondered if 1000 meant only the nobility with a total of say 10000 or something when you include everyone else but...

To *me* it implies, they escaped not long before Clark did.

Anyone else?
Carol

Just had to *cough* *choke* and *sputter* all over this. You know, for kicks. :p

Anyway, in reading Jorel's messages in the Foundling, I was thinking about his search to find a place to send Clark, and it strikes an odd chord with me that he found Earth, and the expedition that set out found a rock. So it sounds like they were all searching at the same time. (And possibly the nobility missed a whole planet on their way to the rock that became NK? Or maybe they found Earth too but didn't have the resources to get there like Jorel planned for Clark?)


If my grammar dwindled, I'm so past my bedtime. :p
JD

It just doesn't seem plausible. And 1000 people? Not enough genetic diversity. I'm having serious issues with the NK backstory.

(Of course, I hated it the first time anyway...)

Well, the back story I've been using is that NK was a colony and the 1000 Zara speaks of were the last minute refugees.

Of course, you still have to deal with the fact that Kal-El was sent to Earth instead of NK.

I remember an old thread where I think Carol Malo suggested the idea that the privileged classes in a society might only mention themselves when asked about numbers and exclude any of the lower classes.

It makes sense to me. Remember that when the death toll was announced after the great earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 , it only included whites. Masses of Chinese dead in Chinatown weren't even counted, let alone included in the fatality figures as they weren't deemed important.

So it seems a perfectly plausible theory to me that Zara would be spouting skewed figures, especially given the arrogant nature of the NKers and the social structure they maintained.

LabRat

I'm too tired to post something coherent about NK, but I did see the thread and thoughts did wonder before I read this
Red herring? Or just coincidence and disclaimer against fans-gone-wild

Michael

You know, that's a really good observation and very probably what did happen. Considering that the NK'ers did have concubinage...there was a strong suggestion that people were owned (e.g., slavery or bound servitude). Certainly that fits very well with what Labrat proposed above.

Regarding the question of why Clark was sent to Earth but the NKers only found a 'barren rock':

It seems to me that Jor-El, for reasons unknown, deliberately kept Kal-El seperate from the NK colony. It seems clear, given that he includes a recording in case Kal-El and Zara have been reunited, that he knew of the NK colony and that Zara had been sent with the refugees.

Why didn't he send Kal-El with them? Don't know. Perhaps he could not leave Krypton himself and feared that Kal-El would not be safe without his parents to protect him from the plotting of the rival houses. So he chooses instead to hide his son by sending him to an inhabited planet where he will blend in to the population.

The NKers either didn't know about Earth (Jor-El is a talented scientist who might have had good reasons for not sharing his find with the NKers) or they knew of it but were too weak to attempt an invasion and too proud and 'advanced' to be willing to assimilate into Earth's primitive culture. So they are left wandering the galaxy looking for a compatible home that is not already populated so they can keep their own culture without conflict with the natives.

Another possibility: Earth was too far for such a large population to get to, but Jor-El was able to get one small capsule here. Explains why he didn't save his wife and himself as well as his son. Or perhaps they just didn't make the lottery for the limited space available to the NK refugees, or were kept out for political reasons. So Jor-El is left to save his son with his own limited resources, hence the small capsule again.

Of course, if the House of El is on the outs with the NK founders, that doesn't explain why Kal-El is suddenly ruler of all NK when he appears.

A third possiblilty: Jor-El never intended for Kal-El to be reunited with the NK colony. He didn't like/trust them and thought Kal-El would be better off raised on earth with no knowledge of the NK colony's existence and hoped that the NKers would never find his son. But, knowing that, if they did find him after all, they would greatly outnumber him, he left Kal-El the back-up plan of pretending that he had really meant to marry Zara all along. Sort of making a virtue of necessity, but hoping that it wouldn't come to that.

Hope that makes some kind of sense.

That's interesting HG. The 'Foundling' script has Jor-El saying something about Clark's powers - iirc this was left out of the show. It's very possible that he didn't ... trust[?] the NKers with those powers. He could easily have envisioned an Earth where the Kryptonians took over, subjugating them all - some with a benevolent bent but also those like Nor unstoppable [did he know about Kryptonite? I'd think not or he surely would have mentioned it...]

So baby Kal is one thing - a chance to grow up away from Kryptonian society [which Jor-El may not have been crazy about in the first place?], but also protecting Earth from what happened during the second half of the arc.

Hi again, Carol,

I think I added my last paragraph above while you were writing your response. GMTA. But you took it even farther with the idea that Jor-El might have been saving not only Kal-El but also all us little earthlings from the NKers. Hmm...

This sounds almost like my perpetual WIP (which I swear I'm going to work on more eventually, really!).

Dragon, would that be a prequel? A story with Jor-El as the protagonist trying to decide what to do about the immanent destruction of his world? That could be interesting.

It's amazing to me that, after more than ten years, there are still new plots to be spun off of this show.

That's the beauty of the Superman mythos. It fits right into to several deep-rooted archetypal stories (the hero, the royal or godlike babe removed at birth and raised as a commoner, the man with powers) and as such, the story possibilities are endless.

No, actually. In my fic (see the link in my signature), Jor-El and Lara are actually still alive, and in the most recent chapters, they explain things to Clark, Lois, Martha and Jonathan (and Zara and Ching, but only because they were there when Clark brought Lara and Jor-El to his apartment) thirty years after Clark landed. Jor-El's explanation for the birth marriage is actually somewhat close to what you mentioned earlier.