Lanterns Episode 1 Ending Explained: Is Hal Jordan Dead?

Hal keeps a backup of himself inside his ring. Green Lanterns are meant to record one every week, like a dash cam. When John triggers it, a hologram of a younger Hal appears with a message: there is hail in Rushville, Nebraska.

Hail means aliens. It is a code word, and the show never dresses it up as more than that.

Two odd things about that hologram. It is about ten years out of date, because Hal stopped recording them. And it is noticeably kinder to John than the real Hal is — you are watching a man’s recorded past be nicer to his trainee than he is now.

The show does not answer this, but it makes sure you notice it.

The simple explanation is burnout. He stopped bothering.

The more interesting one: those backups sit inside a ring the Guardians of the Universe issued him. If Hal had learned something about Rushville he did not want his employers reading, the way to keep it from them is to stop writing it down. The ten-year-old copy already knew about the hail signal — so whatever he found, he found after that.

Hal tells his origin story in a bar, like a drunk telling a war story. He was a test pilot sleeping off a bender when he woke up inside a green bubble and was asked whether he was afraid. He said no. He was pulled to a crash site where a dying alien handed him a ring. That alien was Abin Sur of Sector 2814.

That much is roughly the comic book version. The part the show invents is where.

Abin Sur crashed just outside Rushville.

Hal also says he has never believed the crash was an accident, and that he has been quietly watching this town ever since. So he did not fly to Rushville because a signal came in. He came back to the place where all of it started.

The man arrested at the football field. He says he is a truck driver from Kimball — which is also where the four dead people in visiting-team shirts came from. X-rays say he is human.

He is not. Hal points out that fourteen known alien species can pass as human, and no test on Earth can tell the difference.

Sheriff Kerry Kane will not let Hal near the man in custody. He does not argue and he does not force it. He fakes some dollar bills for the bar jukebox, plays the same song over and over until somebody swings at him, and gets himself arrested into the same building as Waylon.

He hands John the ring before it starts.

Bail is set at $100,000. He objects, and the judge doubles it. The lawyer who turns up to sort it out is Billy Macon — William Macon’s son — and his father pays.

It is the clearest look at how Hal works. He never openly defies anyone. He just goes around them, and he is willing to take a beating to do it.

This is the best scene in the episode, and the trick is a good one.

Hal’s theory is that someone pretending to be from a place will memorise the facts but never pick up the opinions. So he asks Waylon a few questions. The football ones, Waylon gets right. Then Hal asks who Barack Obama is, and Waylon answers, flatly and correctly, that Obama is the President of the United States.

That is the tell. A real person from rural Nebraska in 2016 would have had something to say about it. Waylon had the fact and none of the feeling.

Waylon has a bomb built into his skeleton. Before it goes off he says three things worth remembering: his purpose has to do with war, it is being kept from the Green Lantern Corps specifically, and he personally is there for revenge. Hal shields him and survives. Most of the police station does not.

He also asks Hal a needling question — he has been in town 48 hours, did he bring his lantern to recharge? In the comics a ring runs on a 24-hour charge.

The woman John meets in the bar, who knows a suspicious amount about rings and about who Lanterns report to. They end up in her truck. Afterwards he lights her cigarette with the ring, minutes after telling Hal not to treat it casually.

She is William Macon’s wife. Macon owns half the town, runs a militia on his ranch, and believes aliens are coming to replace humanity. At the barbecue the next day he makes it clear he knows what happened, and does nothing about it.

Macon also says the ranch is not his. He is only the caretaker, and he cannot say who he is caretaking for, because of a non-disclosure agreement. That unnamed party is the season’s real question.

John drives into Rushville through snow. Driving, not flying, with no ring on his hand. On the way in there is the wreckage of an enormous silo that stood intact in 2016. Noah Macon is the high school quarterback now. Kerry meets him at the field.

And Hal is in the bleachers, in the exact seat he sat in ten years earlier, frozen, dead, blood on his face, his hand bare.

Earlier in the episode Hal says the job is his and nobody is taking it while he is alive. Shows do not write that line by accident. The season is a murder mystery, and the ring is the motive.

The episode shows you a body. It does not show you anyone confirming whose body it is, and by that point it has already handed you two reasons to be careful about the difference.

The ring keeps a copy of him. Lanterns are supposed to record their memories into the ring every week. Hal’s copy is ten years out of date because he stopped, but it exists, and the episode goes out of its way to show it working — the hologram talks to John, answers him, knows things. If the show ever wants Hal back, it has already built the door. It has also built the catch: a Hal restored from that backup would be missing the decade in which all of this happened.

The Manhunters can change shape. The episode tells you that fourteen known species pass as human and that no test on Earth can tell them apart. The trailers confirm the season’s main antagonists are shapeshifters. Put those together and a corpse that looks like Hal Jordan is not proof that it is Hal Jordan — recognising him by sight is exactly the check the show has already told you does not work.

None of that means he is alive. It means the episode is careful never to close the question, in a season whose whole engine is that you cannot tell who anyone is.

Not from this episode, but it is public and it points somewhere.

Sinestro is imprisoned, and Hal visits him. In the comics he was Hal’s mentor before he became his worst enemy. In one clip he tells Hal that John may not be there to train — he may be there to take the ring.

The Manhunters are the season’s main antagonists, and this version can change shape. In the comics they are robots the Guardians built as their first attempt at policing the galaxy, before the Corps existed.

A Guardian appears on screen, played by Laura Linney, so the council is not distant lore this season.

Guy Gardner turns up to deliver a warning. He already holds Earth’s ring by the time of Superman.