Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7

Warning: major spoilers and discussion of suicide follow.

What happens in Lanterns Episode 7, "The Jordan Boys' Legacy"

In 1975, a young Hal Jordan won't come off the mound. He fights his own teammates rather than hand over the ball, and the game gets forfeited. His father, Martin, doesn't tell him off. He goes after the coach.

Later, Martin gives Hal the key to a family safe that only the Jordan men are meant to open. He also tells him to get rid of the baseball, because holding on to something forever is exhausting. Hal throws it away. Not long after, Martin dies, and the official story is that a test pilot's plane went down the way test pilots' planes sometimes do.

Back in 2026, John Stewart has just used Hal's ring to summon the Halogram, a construct built from a copy of Hal's consciousness last updated in 2006. It knows John only as the trainee Hal gave a message to. Everything after that is missing. It doesn't know what happened in Rushville, or about the Manhunter, the prison sentence or the man Hal turned into.

John needs its voice to open the vault in Hal's storage unit. The Halogram wants answers first.

The best version of Hal Jordan arrives twenty years too late

Kyle Chandler isn't just playing the same man with less information. This Hal is lighter and quicker to joke, and he can still be impressed by somebody else. He's arrogant and suspicious, but he hasn't yet had twenty years of failure and resentment to hollow him out.

When John takes the ring off and the Halogram stays put, Hal is stunned and tells him most Lanterns can't do that. John doesn't know what to do with the compliment. The Hal he worked for in 2016 never gave him one.

The Halogram is also hard work, and John figures out how to dismiss him. If he can get Hal out of his head, the construct disappears, and the quickest way to do that turns out to be singing OutKast's "SpottieOttieDopaliscious". It's a good running joke, and it pays off later when it gets John out of real trouble.

The arguments are better than the jokes. The Halogram wants to know why John came back to Rushville, and John lists everything Hal did to him in 2016. The construct apologises. John doesn't want an apology from a backup. He wants it from the man who actually hurt him. Then the Halogram asks whether John ever noticed the older Hal was in trouble, and neither of them comes out of that exchange looking completely right.

This is the partnership Lanterns kept promising, except one of them has to be dead before the two men can stand each other.

The Jordan boys' legacy, explained

The best material in the episode is about Hal's father.

Martin didn't die in an accident. He crashed the plane on purpose, after leaving a note in the safe about a pain he'd carried his whole life, one that was getting worse and harder to hide. He was convinced his family would be better off without him.

Martin had received a similar note from his own father, describing the same pain. Only Martin's suicide is stated outright, but the episode makes it clear this has been handed down, father to son. So the legacy was never the safe or what's in it. It's the pain, and the habit of keeping it locked away.

The Halogram puts it bluntly. Hal was never fearless because he was brave. He was fearless because he was broken. When the ring asked if he was afraid, he could truthfully say no, for the worst possible reason.

That's a real change to Hal's origin. In the standard modern comics version, Martin's test-flight crash is an accident. It also makes sense of Chandler's whole performance in a way that was hard to see before. The bravado, the empty house, the refusal to give up the ring and the eulogy Hal wrote for himself all belong to the same man now.

The Halogram eventually wonders whether the real Hal went the same way, and whether Kerry Kane found him and took the gun, the way Hal once protected his father's name. That's a theory, not an answer. What the episode does confirm is that Kerry knew the truth about Martin, and that Hal trusted her with it.

Queen's "Father to Son" plays over the 1975 scenes and comes back for the final image. Melanie's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" plays as young Hal throws the ball away and runs on into his father's funeral. One song is about what a father passes on and the other is about letting go, which is the whole episode in two needle drops.

Kerry meets the man Hal used to be

John tries to explain what the construct is until Kerry and Hal both tell him to stop. Kerry touches Hal's face. The Halogram asks whether they were close, and whether he was honest with her. She says yes to both.

Kelly Macdonald doesn't play it as a reunion, and that's why it works. The man standing in front of Kerry looks like the man she loved and has no memory of loving her.

Then the Halogram decides she probably killed him. It's funny, and it shows the limits of the thing. He has Hal's instincts and none of the history he'd need to make sense of what's in front of him. The scene doesn't move the investigation much, and it doesn't need to.

Can Lanterns bring Hal Jordan back?

The episode sets up a way to keep Kyle Chandler around without raising Hal from the dead. John's bird construct remained after Hal took the ring back in Episode 2, and now the Halogram stays after John removes the ring.

It isn't Hal. It's a stored consciousness that John is somehow keeping going, on a ring with almost no charge left. But if Lanterns gets a second season, the mechanism is sitting there. The risk is that Hal's death carries most of this season's emotional weight, and a Hal who can be called up whenever he's needed would cheapen it.