Blake Ritson is somewhat unique among the actors on Krypton: fans already have a lot of baggage for his character, and a specific expectation for what they might see.

Ritson plays Brainiac, an alien intelligence that moves throughout the universe collecting worlds. Inspired largely by Geoff Johns's take on the character (which was adapted directly into the animated movie Superman Unbound, Brainiac is a character who is always "the next villain" that any given version of the movies was going to use, and has appeared in live action on Smallville. So which of the various takes from the comics is he working with most closely -- and what makes his Brainiac different than the various live-action and animated versions already seen before?

"There are many, many iterations of Braniac out there, so certain things I can probably tell you, and certain things I have to be a little coy about," Ritson told reporters during a recent set visit. "I suppose the first thing I should say, is this is a Braniac you have never seen on screen before. This is a very different. I think the only time he's ever been in live action is Smallville, where he was effectively self-aware AI, and in that version, he appeared as a 20th Century human professor. This one will not be like that. He will be infinitely more terrifying."

Brainiac in the comics has undergone numerous changes, from generic, green-skinned supervillain, to robot, to circus psychic with alien ties, to a borderline god, populating a whole planet with dead realities in Convergence. That last one sounds closest to where Ritson plans to go.

"This one is the full-fledged collector of worlds, so this version of Braniac is a hyper-intelligent alien android who is busy traversing the universe in his gigantic metal skull ship," Ritson teased. "He is effectively in the process of cataloging and absorbing all of creation. He views each world as a form of a receptacle of intelligence, and he's got to have it all. He rips a whole city from each planet before destroying it, or not, and then moves on. And the idea is, he then miniaturizes [the city], puts it into a tiny bottle on his ship, and sucks the information out of it -- So he is basically in the process of becoming creation."

That Ritson should mention the bottling of cities specifically is no great surprise: the main portions of Krypton take place in the city-state of Kandor -- best known to comic fans as the "Bottle City" captured by Brainiac and later recovered by Superman.

Are you excited to see more of Superman's birth world? Chime in below to discuss your hopes, expectations, and reservations.

Krypton is coming to SYFY on March 21st.

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