Originally Posted by
TheCasualReader
I mean, Kryptonians are easy to imprison since you basically just need a prison with a yellow sun and then boom, you got non-powered people.
The reason the Zods were able to launch their attempted coup in the future was because they were paroled, not imprisoned, and then *bided their time for over a decade before setting their plan in motion (Lor-Zod was born months after his parents' release and was fifteen when his dad smuggled them off-world. He was also still fifteen when they got imprisoned)
By the time Zod was smuggling them off-planet, they probably weren't considered worthy of actual oversight or they had finished parole. That or the future is so incompetent that an entire colony of paroled prisoners was able to just skip without anyone noticing.
Lor-Zod is a villain with a sympathetic plight: he doesn't want his parents to spend the rest of eternity imprisoned in a sensory hell (which is why I do actually hope that they are freed and just end up in a comparatively normal prison because jesus, that is an actual example of a fate worse than death)
It's easy to see why their fate is so unbearable to him and why freeing them is the actual core of his motivation. That said, he and his parents are absolutely villains, although Lor-Zod is a sad case since the show makes it clear that his villainly is due to thorough brainwashing by his parents to the point where the idea of defying family is a completely foreign concept to him.
I saw an interesting theory that someone posted: the Zods get out, Lor-Zod is born and, due to the situation, he is adopted and raised by the Kents and that's how he becomes Chris Kent (which would be a smart way for the show to have a villainous "Chris Kent" as well as the actual heroic Chris Kent) I imagine Lor-Zod either ends up in the Phantom Zone (god, I hope not) or he is taken back to the future by the Legion to stand trial there.