WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Jupiter’s Legacy, available now on Netflix.
Oftentimes in adapting a story there are elements that get lost in translation, and with Jupiter’s Legacy that element lost may just be its plot. The Netflix series makes several innovations of its own in delving into, altering, and expanding the story of the comic. But in doing so it constructs a final twist that just doesn’t make much since.
The core mystery to the show’s premiere season is the culprit behind cloning Blackstar and identifying what motivations they could possibly have. And though the reveal may have shocked some viewers it should leave many more scratching their heads.
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The overarching plot of Jupiter’s Legacy revolves around the failure of the new generations of heroes to live up to the standard set by the old guard, represented most of all by the hero Utopian. Utopian preaches ad nauseum about the importance of the Code that the Union of Justice must maintain, but steadily it seems that fewer other heroes agree with him. Most concerning of all is Utopian’s own son, who murders the villain Blackstar early on in the series only to discover Blackstar was cloned by some unknown enemy. But who?
It turns out that the culprit is Brainwave, the Utopian’s own brother and Paragon’s uncle. In the final stages of the season the heroes temporarily resurrect the clone of Blackstar just long enough to infiltrate his mind and seemingly discover that the supervillain Skyfox laid a trap for them to temporarily escape. Simultaneously with that event the real Blackstar is released from prison (a crime also pinned on Skyfox) and the Utopian and Paragon are the only ones left to fight him. In the course of their battle Paragon’s faith in his father is shaken, and that seems to be the goal all along. Brainwave sought to drive a wedge between Paragon and the Utopian this whole time, so he … created a plan that hinged at multiple points on decisions that risked his own life and he had little control over?
Let’s start with the battle with the Darkstar clone at the start of the series. Brainwave himself seems to be making sincere efforts to psychically shut down Darkstar during the battle until he is attacked himself. The audience sees his psychic assault, one he would have had no reason to be actually making, and one which if successful would have spoiled his whole plan. Thereafter Paragon makes the decision to kill the Darkstar clone, but there is no indication that Brainwave could have expected that to happen. It’s literally the first time Paragon ever killed someone in the line of battle that we know of.
Throughout the rest of the season, Brainwave’s master plan then demands that several other heroes die in various calamities he had little control over in order to whittle down the heroes’ numbers so that Paragon and Utopian were the sole options to tend to Blackstar’s breakout. His plan then also depended on Raikou (who by his admission he didn’t want to involve) psychically inserting Lady Liberty into his duel with “Skyfox” (which also seemed to threaten his life) in order to sell the ruse that the supervillain was involved in the first place. To make the plan work, the audience is forced to develop contrivances the show never explains and assume a genius intellect on Brainwave’s part we never see previously.
Especially given that the plot of the comic involved a much simpler, straightforward plan and explicit evidence of Brainwave’s superior intellect, the adaptation just falls completely flat by comparison. Its master plan seems less like the machinations of a megalomaniacal mastermind and more like the convoluted result of a script working backwards from plot ideas like “Paragon kills Blackstar” and “Blackstar escapes prison” rather than a sensible progression of character decisions.
As the series sets itself up for additional seasons it may be able to loop back around to explain this in a sensible way. But given just how difficult such a task would be, fans would likely do best not to hold their breath.
Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy stars Josh Duhamel as The Utopian, Ben Daniels as Brainwave, Leslie Bibb as Lady Liberty, Elena Kampouris as Chloe Sampson, Andrew Horton as Brandon Sampson, Mike Wade as The Flare, Anna Akana as Raikou and Matt Lanter as Skyfox. Season 1 is available on Netflix now.
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