We know so little about the plot of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that fans are clamoring over everything said by anybody involved with the film. For example, Michael Shannon recently set the internet on fire with the comment that in the sequel to Man of Steel General Zod will have flippers instead of hands. He recently went on Larry King Now to clarify his comments, but has really only succeeded in being more confusing.
ComicBook.com has the details on the interview between Michael Shannon and Larry King, summarizing the appearance and including quotes the actor. Going back on his flipper comments from a few weeks ago, he told the host that his appearance in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will be as a ghost who haunts Superman. No, really. Said Shannon,
It’s the same thing like in the first one with Jor-El. Russell Crowe’s character is kind of like a ghost... So I guess I’m a ghost, kind of.
Wait, what? While Russell Crowe’s Jor-El certainly had ghost-like qualities, he wasn’t a ghost. In Man of Steel, Superman was able to communicate with a sort of "dad hologram" because a Jor-El A.I. was programmed into the Kryptonian scout ship that Clark Kent discovered. So are we to understand that there’s a General Zod A.I. out there too? Does Lex Luthor figure out how to download Zod’s consciousness into a command key? Shannon will surely be appearing in the movie as more than just a corpse (as we’ve seen in the trailer for the film), so there’s surely something that gets Zod up and around. Since Shannon says he’s only "kind of" a ghost, perhaps he’s just part of Kal-El’s subconscious. We know a large part of Dawn of Justice will deal with the aftermath of the destruction of Metropolis. Maybe Zod will just be part of Superman’s mind - the guilt that he feels for letting so many people die. Is that better? We’re not sure that’s better.
It’s also possible that Michael Shannon has discovered he enjoys trolling the fans. He says that his flipper hands comments were just a joke, so maybe this is too. Maybe Shannon is just going to spend the next nine months feeding us misinformation just to see how big a rise he can get out of people. Let’s see how many different plans for Zod we get before the film comes out. So far we know have Ghost Zod, Flipper Zod, and Doomsday Zod. Anybody else want to place any bets on the Zod Lottery?
With that clarification out of the way, we look forward to the next clarification - which, at the rate we’re going, will make the entire film utterly unintelligible. We really hope Michael Shannon is just trolling us. Please let him just be a dead body. Please. We’ll find out when Batman v Superman releases March 25, 2016.
