Is Lanterns worth watching?
Yes, if you want a slow detective drama with a Green Lantern ring in it. No, if you want a superhero show on the scale the name promises.
Lanterns is at its best when it's about people. John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) are the reason to watch, and the season gives their relationship time to change. Where it falls down is the mystery holding everything together. It moves slowly for most of its run, then answers its biggest questions in a rush, mostly through explanation, and leaves the consequences for later. For a mystery, the ending is the part that counts.
What is Lanterns about?
Lanterns is HBO's eight-episode Green Lantern series for DC Studios, created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King. Veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan and his new recruit, John Stewart, are drawn into a murder investigation in Rushville, Nebraska, a small town that turns out to be hiding a great deal. The story cuts between 2016 and 2026, with flashbacks further back.
It was announced as a True Detective-style series, and that's what it is. Most of the season is interviews, long drives and arguments, with the ring used sparingly. Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), Rushville's sheriff, completes the central trio.
Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler
Kyle Chandler plays Hal as a man worn down by the job rather than hardened by it. He's proud, funny and hard to be around, and he gets better material the further the season goes.
Aaron Pierre does most of John's work in silence. The season asks him to play a man who has been prepared for a job his whole life and isn't sure he wants it, and he makes that slow change believable. John's arc is the storyline Lanterns handles best.
Kelly Macdonald gives Kerry real weight. The younger Bernadette Stewart (Jasmine Cephas Jones), John's mother, turns a single episode into the emotional centre of the season. Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) and Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) are both good value, but neither gets enough time.
Fear is the real subject of Lanterns
Lanterns keeps returning to one question: are you afraid? Episode 3 places it inside John's family, and almost every major decision afterwards becomes a different answer. John's mother raises him so that he can never give his father's answer. Hal's apparent fearlessness turns out to be damage rather than courage. Fear drives the murder at the centre of the season, while John finally learns to acknowledge it without obeying it.
John's arc is the season's answer. He spends eight episodes treating fear as something that should disqualify him, and the show's best idea is that courage is something you do while afraid. That gives John and Hal's relationship its purpose. Hal can't teach John to stop being afraid. By the end, he's the one telling John he's ready anyway.
Character writing versus plotting in Lanterns
Character writing remains Lanterns' greatest strength, even when some of the finale's decisions are reached too quickly. The season's best hour, Episode 3, is about a childhood rather than a case.
As plotting, it's much weaker, and it gets worse towards the end. The mystery stalls completely for whole episodes. A blackmail subplot takes up time across the back half and ends without materially affecting the main story. New questions keep arriving late, and when the answers finally come, most of them arrive as conversation, explained rather than shown. The people keep developing while the story around them stalls.
Scale, action and budget in Lanterns
Lanterns rarely looks like a superhero show. Hal's flight in Episode 2 works because it's restrained, and the attack on Rushville in Episode 5 is the one hour with real scale. Otherwise the action is rationed, and the finale has almost none.
It's easy to assume the money ran out. Damon Lindelof has said that skipping a big action set piece in the finale was a choice. Either way, character and spectacle aren't mutually exclusive. Arrow managed proper superhero set pieces on a CW budget, and Lanterns comes from the network behind Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Across eight episodes, it gives you very little sense of how big the Green Lantern Corps is supposed to be.
Lanterns Season 1, episode by episode
The weekly scores tell the story of the season. The first five episodes all landed at 3 or 3.5. The premiere was dense and well acted, Episode 2 let Hal fly, Episode 3 was the best hour and the least urgent, Episode 4 finally moved the mystery, and Episode 5 was the biggest.
Then the back half slipped. Episode 6 dropped to 2.5, Episode 7 recovered to 3 on the strength of Hal's family history, and the finale fell to 1.5.
What Lanterns Season 1 leaves open
The finale answers most of the season's immediate mysteries, including the murder at its centre. What it postpones are the consequences. Sinestro is still alive, the threat the season built up is still at large, the Guardians haven't responded to John, the killer faces no consequences, and whoever set fire to Hal's house is never identified.
HBO hasn't ordered a second season, though the writers have been working on one. Aaron Pierre's John Stewart is confirmed for Man of Tomorrow, next year's Superman sequel. For now, the season ends like a trailer for a sequel that hasn't been ordered. The Lanterns Mystery Board tracks every question still open.
Why Lanterns Season 1 is a 2.5
Taken one at a time, the eight episode scores average exactly 3. The season gets less than that, because a mystery is judged by where it ends up. Lanterns answers its questions in a rush, mostly through explanation, and very little follows from the answers. The finale, the hour that should have made the slow build worthwhile, is the weakest of the eight.
The 2.5 is for Pierre, Chandler and Macdonald, for a real idea about fear at the centre of the season, and for several strong hours. None of that makes up for a story that stops short of its own payoff.
Lanterns Season 1 verdict
Lanterns is a character drama dressed as a superhero mystery, with two excellent lead performances and a genuine idea about fear. Its first half promises to bring a detective story and comic-book scale together, and the closing hours never quite manage it.
Who killed Hal Jordan in Lanterns?
At the end of Episode 1, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) is found dead in the bleachers of Rushville's football field in 2026. The finale reveals that Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) shot him. Hal had found out that her son, Noah Macon (Shea Pritchard), is a Manhunter, and wanted to take them both away from Rushville. Kerry panicked and killed him.
When she confesses, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) tells her not to turn herself in. Our Episode 8 review goes through the finale in full.
Lanterns Season 1 ending explained
The Manhunter. Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan) was the Manhunter hiding in Rushville, protected by a town she had saved one person at a time. Episode 4 reveals her, and John kills her in Episode 5.
Abin Sur. Abin Sur brought Zoe to Earth to spare her from the Guardians' purge of the Manhunters. She killed him afterwards.
Noah. Years earlier, Zoe's technology healed Kerry, and Kerry later found out she was pregnant even though she hadn't been with anyone. Noah broke Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) out of the Guardians' prison so that Sinestro could forge him a lantern. In the finale, Noah asks John to kill him, and John lets him live.
The portal. It was Zoe's, and she used it to revisit the world she had destroyed. Noah kept using it. Hal followed him through, found Sinestro there and then hid the portal in his vault so nobody could use it again.
Hal's ring and the Halogram. After John handed Hal's ring back to the Guardians in 2016, it was taken out of service, and Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) was given a new one. John digs Hal's ring up after the funeral and uses it to summon the Halogram, a copy of Hal's mind last saved in 2006. Charging the ring in the finale erases it.
Fear. John's father lost his chance at the ring in 1986 by admitting he was afraid. Hal passed the same question because, as the Halogram puts it in Episode 7, he was broken rather than brave. Kerry kills Hal out of fear for Noah. John takes the ring with an oath that embraces fear instead of denying it.
John. John becomes a Green Lantern on his own terms, using the lantern Sinestro forged. He tells Guy he'll look after Earth without the Guardians.
What's left open. Sinestro is alive and stranded on Antaan's world. Noah is alive and still dangerous. Kerry avoids responsibility. The Guardians haven't answered John, nobody has explained what the fear-infused lantern will do to John, and nobody knows who set fire to Hal's house.
Bright Bulbs
- Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), worn down by the job rather than hardened by it.
- John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), whose slow arc is the season's best-handled storyline.
- The ring's question about fear, which ties the whole season together.
- Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) and the younger Bernadette Stewart (Jasmine Cephas Jones), both excellent.
- A score and soundtrack that keep the quiet stretches tense.
Dull Bulbs
- A mystery that stalls for whole episodes at a time.
- A blackmail subplot that takes up the back half without affecting the main story.
- Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) and Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), both good value and both underused.
- Action that rarely matches the scale of the Green Lantern name.
Shattered Bulbs
- A finale that ranks as the season's weakest hour, just when it needed to be the strongest.
- Big answers delivered through explanation, without enough groundwork.
Cast
- Aaron Pierre as John Stewart
- Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan
- Kelly Macdonald as Kerry Kane
- Garret Dillahunt as William Macon
- Poorna Jagannathan as Zoe Macon
- Jason Ritter as Billy Macon
- Shea Pritchard as Noah Macon
- Cary Christopher as young Noah Macon
- Jasmine Cephas Jones as young Bernadette Stewart
- Nicole Ari Parker as Bernadette Stewart
- J. Alphonse Nicholson as young John Stewart Sr.
- Sherman Augustus as John Stewart Sr.
- Paul Ben-Victor as Antaan
- Laura Linney as Lianna
- Ulrich Thomsen as Sinestro
- Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner
- Hannah Christine Shetler as Maggie
Related articles
- Lanterns Mystery Board: Every Unanswered QuestionA numbered tracker of every Lanterns mystery: what the Season 1 finale answered and what is still open. Spoilers throughout.
More from Green Lantern
The Green Lantern Corps, ExplainedLanterns barely explains its own organisation. Here is what the Corps is, how the ring works, and how someone gets handed one.- How Lanterns Connects to the DCULanterns' main investigation begins nine years before Superman, but Guy Gardner and John Stewart place its mystery firmly inside the wider DCU.
- Will Lanterns Get a Season 2? What HBO Has and Hasn't SaidLanterns has not been renewed, but a writers room has been working on season two for weeks. Here is where things actually stand.
- What Is Parallax?Parallax began as Hal Jordan's villainous identity. Eleven years later DC made it fear itself, and rewrote one of Green Lantern's biggest stories.
- Who Is Abin Sur? The Green Lantern Whose Death Started EverythingAbin Sur crashed, gave Hal Jordan his ring, and died. In the comics a buried prophecy led him there, and Lanterns has moved the crash site.
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