Green Lantern and the DCU: where Lanterns fits
Green Lantern is not DC's most popular character. He isn't Batman, he isn't Superman, he isn't Wonder Woman. But he sits comfortably in the tier just below, and most of that standing comes from the Justice League — if you grew up on the animated shows, you know exactly who these people are without ever having opened a comic.
The name has also had a miserable time in live action. The 2011 Ryan Reynolds film is a punchline, and DC has been careful with the property ever since. The new DCU has already given us Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner, mostly played for laughs, but Lanterns is its first attempt at a serious drama about the Corps.
Its answer to the question of how you make Green Lantern work is unexpected: don't go to space.
The three timelines: 1996, 2016 and 2026
The episode runs across three periods, and understanding the split is most of understanding the show.
1996. John Stewart is a boy. Hal Jordan is in his prime and has just gone public — the episode opens on his first television interview, in costume, roughly a decade into the job. Meanwhile John's father (J. Alphonse Nicholson), a military man, is in the business of manufacturing his son's fearlessness, by methods the show presents as parenting and which are closer to something you'd report. It is the most disturbing scene in the episode and it happens in the first five minutes.
2016. The bulk of the runtime. Hal still has the ring but has stopped wearing the suit. He has a trainee, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a former Marine sniper who has been at this for two months and hasn't been allowed to put the ring on. Over the hour the ring passes back and forth between them, which is a neat physical shorthand for the entire power dynamic.
2026. One short scene at the end, which reframes everything before it. Not here.
For anyone coming in cold: the Green Lantern Corps is an intergalactic police force run by the Guardians of the Universe. Every Lantern is assigned a sector of the galaxy and is responsible for order inside it. Hal puts it plainly in the 1996 interview — they're beat cops, and each cop's beat happens to be a chunk of the universe. Earth sits in Sector 2814, and Hal is the first human to hold the job.
Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan
The show skips the origin story, and that is its best decision. By 2016 Hal has been Green Lantern for about thirty years, and we only get pieces of that past when the plot needs them. What the three timelines let you watch instead is the job wearing him down. That is what the episode is really about.
In 1996 he is open and a little earnest, a man who still believes in what the Corps is for. By 2016 that is gone. He has stopped wearing the suit, and when someone asks why, he jokes that a suit is like a tie you wear when you are young so people take you seriously, and that he is past that now. He is dodging the question. The real answer is that he stopped believing in any of it a long time ago.
The best way I can describe him in 2016 is a man still doing the job after he stopped believing in it. He has seen enough and done enough, and he does not particularly want to keep going, but he cannot walk away either. Chandler keeps the old cocky pilot visible underneath, which stops the whole thing turning grim. He is also, plainly, a jerk: he needles his trainee, gets in the way of the local police, and treats the job like a chore.
Something happened between the man in that interview and the man in the truck. The show clearly knows what, and clearly isn't saying yet.
He also takes risks he has no business taking, and this is where the show separates him from Superman. Superman is close to indestructible — almost nothing he meets can hurt him. Hal has a ring that makes him powerful and a body that does not. He knows the difference. He goes in anyway. That gap is where the tension in this show lives.
Aaron Pierre as John Stewart
John was drilled from childhood to show no fear, and whether he actually feels none is a question the show leaves open. Pierre plays him almost entirely through stillness. He answers Hal with "yes sir" and nothing more. Hal hears that as backchat and says so, but he is wrong about it. John is holding himself in, because he wants this job and will not risk losing it.
In 2016 he has been selected by the Guardians to serve as Hal's backup. We never learn how, when or why, and Hal is openly contemptuous about it, since he himself never had to interview for the job. For comics readers, this isn't invented: John was appointed by the Guardians as Hal's backup in the early 1970s, and Hal wasn't thrilled there either. What the show adds is the friction underneath — a man who fell into the job by luck versus a man who seems to have been trained his whole life for it and may well be better at it. The episode never says this out loud. It doesn't need to.
What trips John up is how badly he wants to prove he deserves the ring. He follows the chain of command right until he thinks he has spotted something the professionals missed, and then he acts on his own. He also lectures Hal about the ring being serious and not for casual use, and then uses it casually himself within the hour. The show knows it is a contradiction and lets it sit there.
Neither of these men likes the other. They're tolerating each other, and the show is honest enough not to rush a friendship.
The case: the Rushville shooting
A signal reaches Hal about Rushville, Nebraska. Four people in visiting-team shirts were shot dead in the crowd after a high school football game, and Hal is convinced aliens are involved. Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) is not, and she wants him gone — Lanterns have no jurisdiction over human crimes, only over extraterrestrial ones.
Hal's argument for why she's wrong is the best piece of reasoning in the episode: for a mass shooting, this town is far too calm. Nobody is falling apart, because nobody knew the victims. Nobody knows who they were at all.
Macdonald is the standout of the supporting cast. Kerry is calculating where Hal is reckless, managing a crime scene and a town's panic at once, and she has no interest in handing over authority just because a celebrity has arrived — which is what Hal is in this world, a famous person rather than a mystery. She bonds far more easily with John than with Hal, and she warns them both, in plain language, to leave.
They don't, because of the Macons — the family that owns half of Rushville. William (Garret Dillahunt) runs an armed militia on his ranch and has built an entire worldview around aliens arriving to colonise and replace humanity. Dillahunt delivers it over a barbecue, calmly, while cutting meat, and it's the best scene in the episode. Around him are his lawyer son Billy (Jason Ritter), Billy's boy Noah, and William's wife Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), all of whom the show is plainly holding in reserve.
They have a very familiar flavour: the small-town family with money and something ugly underneath, the sort of thing Arrow and that whole school of shows ran on, except with better actors. And the show leaves the most enjoyable possibility open: the people most afraid of an alien invasion may not be who they say they are. By the end of the hour it has quietly taken away every way you would normally check.
Scale and budget
Lanterns certainly doesn't look like it's spending House of the Dragon money, and it isn't trying to compete with Superman for spectacle.
Normally a superhero show covers for a small budget with spectacle: the big set piece, the heavy effects work. This one does not try. It puts everything into the story and the people instead, and the result is that the premiere does not feel like a superhero show at all. It feels like a mystery thriller that happens to have a space cop in it.
The closest comparison I can find is Smallville crossed with The Dark Knight Rises: a smaller world than a superhero film, but a heavier one. Hal barely uses the ring, and when he does it is for something trivial. It is also possible they are simply saving the money for later episodes, which is a normal shape for an HBO season, and the trailers do suggest the show goes to space eventually.
The one thing the show asks of you is attention. The details are the point, and I suspect a lot of what looked like background colour in this episode will turn out to matter later. That should make it worth rewatching, as long as the writers actually pay it off instead of just piling it up.
Why this gets a 3 out of 5
The skeptical read is that the components are all present — multiple timelines, two incompatible detectives, a mystery, a sense of place — and the hook isn't. That an hour in, you can admire the assembly without being able to say why you should care. Marketing this on True Detective invited a comparison it can't yet survive, and the premiere doesn't have the single unforgettable image that show opened with.
I think that's fair, and it's why this is a 3 rather than a 4.
Two sequences are carrying this episode: the interrogation and the Macon barbecue. Without them it is a much flatter hour, and a lot of the rest is setup that has not paid off yet. But they are part of the episode, and both show what Lanterns can do when the characters, the mystery and the comic-book premise all work at once. That is worth a 3. It is not yet worth a 4.
The questions the episode raises are also the right kind — the kind that suggest the writers know the answers, rather than the kind that suggest they're improvising. That's a reason to keep watching. It isn't a reason to inflate the score for an hour that hasn't answered any of them. If the payoffs land, this was underrated. If they don't, I'll have been generous. Episode 2 gives a partial answer: the craft improves before the momentum does.
Verdict
A dense, confident, well-acted opener that trusts you to keep up, funnier than the marketing suggested, and more interested in people than in powers.
If you came for constructs and space battles, you'll be disappointed, and a chunk of the fanbase will be. For now that's the right choice — this is a show about what a man with unlimited power does in a town that doesn't want him, and the power is the least interesting thing about him.
Everything below gives away the episode, including the ending.
The opening scene. John's father catches him watching Hal's interview, sends him outside, makes him stand against the garage with an apple on his head, asks if he is afraid, and shoots the apple off when the boy says no. John does not flinch, because he has clearly done this before. Then his father hugs him and offers to buy him a burger. The detail that matters: John Sr. never saw the interview, but he knows to ask the exact question that qualifies a person for a ring.
The hologram. Lanterns are supposed to back up their memories into the ring every week, like a dash cam. The copy John triggers is about ten years old, and it is kinder to him than the real Hal is. So there are two questions: why has Hal not backed himself up in a decade, and why did a ten-year-old copy already know about the Rushville signal?
Hal's origin, and why the location matters. He tells it in the bar. He was a test pilot sleeping off a bender, woke up inside a green bubble, was asked if he was afraid, said no, and was pulled to a crash site where a dying alien handed him a ring. That alien was Abin Sur of Sector 2814. The part that is not from the comics is where it happened: just outside Rushville. Hal has never believed the crash was an accident, and he has been quietly watching this town ever since. He did not come here because of a distress call. He came back.
The bar fight was deliberate. Kerry will not let him near the man in custody, so Hal fakes some dollar bills for the jukebox, plays the same song over and over until somebody swings at him, and gets himself arrested into the same building. He hands John the ring first. This is how he works: he never openly defies anyone, he just goes around them.
Zoe. The woman John meets at the bar knows a great deal about rings and about who Lanterns answer to. They end up in her truck, and afterwards he lights her cigarette with the ring, minutes after telling Hal not to treat it casually. She is William Macon's wife. Macon lets him know he knows.
The interrogation. The suspect is Waylon Sanders, supposedly a trucker from Kimball, which is also where the dead visiting team came from. X-rays say he is human. Hal's theory is that someone pretending to be from a place memorises the facts but never picks up the opinions. Waylon answers the football questions. He is asked where Harry Potter went to school. Then he is asked who Barack Obama is, and gives a flat textbook answer, and that is the tell — a real rural Nebraskan in 2016 would have had something to say about it.
He has a bomb built into his skeleton. Before it goes off he says his purpose has to do with war, that it is being kept from the Corps specifically, and that he personally is here for vengeance. He also asks Hal a pointed question: he has been in town 48 hours, did he bring his lantern to recharge? Hal shields him and survives. Most of the police station does not.
The ending. The episode jumps to 2026. John drives back into Rushville through snow, driving rather than flying, and wearing no ring. On the way in there is the wreckage of a huge silo that was intact in 2016. Kerry meets him at the football field. And up in the bleachers, in the same seat he sat in ten years earlier, is Hal Jordan, frozen and dead, blood on his face. His hand is bare.
Earlier in the hour Hal says this is his job and nobody is taking it while he is alive. Nobody writes that line by accident. The season is a murder mystery, and the ring is the motive.
Bright Bulbs
- Kyle Chandler plays Hal as a man worn down by the job, not hardened by it
- Aaron Pierre does almost all of John's work in silence
- Kelly Macdonald's sheriff is the best thing in the supporting cast
- The interrogation and the Macon barbecue are two genuinely excellent sequences
- Not an origin story — it trusts you to catch up
Dull Bulbs
- A lot of the hour is arranging pieces for later episodes rather than doing anything with them
- Three timelines and a full town of introductions in 57 minutes
- Selling this on True Detective invited a comparison it can't survive yet
Cast
- Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan
- Aaron Pierre as John Stewart
- Kelly Macdonald as Sheriff Kerry Kane
- Garret Dillahunt as William Macon
- Jason Ritter as Billy Macon
- Poorna Jagannathan as Zoe Macon
Related articles
- Who Is Guy Gardner? Powers, Origin and Why He Matters to LanternsGuy Gardner qualified for the ring on the same day Hal Jordan did, and lost it on distance. Here is who he is and what he can do.
- Who Is Sinestro in Lanterns? Powers, Origin and Why He TurnedSinestro was the greatest Green Lantern who ever lived, and then he became the Corps' worst enemy. Here is who he is and what turned him.
- What Are the Manhunters in Lanterns? Their Powers and DC Lore ExplainedThe Manhunters are the robot police the Guardians built before the Green Lantern Corps. Here is what they are, what they can do, and why they matter.
- Lanterns Mystery Board: Every Unanswered QuestionA running, numbered tracker of every unanswered question in HBO's Lanterns. Updated after each episode. Spoilers throughout.
- Lanterns Episode 1 Ending Explained: Is Hal Jordan Dead?Hal Jordan is found dead in the final scene of Lanterns episode 1 — or is he? What happened, what hail means, and what the 2026 jump sets up.