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⚠️ Spoilers for Lanterns through Episode 3. Comics history is a separate continuity and is named as such.
The alien who gave Hal Jordan his ring has not appeared in live action through Episode 3. He exists only in Hal's account of the night he got the job, and everything in Lanterns still runs through him.
He crashed outside Rushville. Hal has never believed it was an accident. In the major comics versions, the crash was the consequence of an attack rather than an accident.
Who is Abin Sur?
An Ungaran, from the planet Ungara, and the Green Lantern of Sector 2814 before Hal Jordan was born.
He was a history professor before he was a Lantern, which turns out to matter: he is a character drawn to what happened before him. He served for a very long time and was regarded as one of the best in the Corps.
He first appeared in Showcase #22, cover-dated September to October 1959, created by John Broome and Gil Kane. That is the same issue that introduced Hal Jordan. Abin Sur was created to explain how Hal Jordan got the ring. Over nearly seven decades, the comics have turned that brief narrative function into a life whose decisions reshape the whole mythology.
How did Abin Sur die?
Not in an accident, and not simply from a crash.
He was attacked in space, mortally wounded, and his ship came down on Earth. He survived long enough to send the ring for a replacement, and died shortly after handing over the job.
Who attacked him has changed. In the 1959 origin it was an alien called Legion. The 2008 Secret Origin retelling replaced Legion with Atrocitus, one of five survivors of the massacre the Manhunters carried out in Sector 666, and the founder of the Red Lantern Corps.
That change is what makes his death matter. In the modern version, Abin Sur was killed by a survivor whom the Guardians' first police force had made their enemy.
Why was Abin Sur flying a spaceship?
This is the question the show raises in passing and has not answered through Episode 3, and it is the best thread in his whole history.
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A Green Lantern does not need a ship. The ring flies. Abin Sur used one anyway, and the reason is that he had stopped trusting the ring.
The explanation arrived in 1986, in a story called "Tygers," and Secret Origin later folded it into the crash. A prisoner called Qull told Abin Sur a prophecy about a coming catastrophe, and that his ring would fail him when he needed it most. When Abin Sur pursued it, the Guardians dismissed the warning as an enemy lie, ordered him to stop discussing it, and restricted the relevant records.
That doubt helped kill him. In Secret Origin, Atrocitus exploits Abin Sur's fear, which weakens his will and with it the ring constructs holding the prisoner. The prophecy does not merely predict his death. It helps create the opening that makes it possible.
He was killed by Atrocitus after a forbidden prophecy hollowed out his trust in the ring.
Who was Abin Sur carrying?
The prisoner in the ship was Atrocitus, and Abin Sur was bringing him to Earth as both captive and guide, because the prophecy pointed here.
Which produces the tightest knot in Green Lantern history. The Guardians built the Manhunters. The Manhunters destroyed Sector 666. A survivor of that massacre became Atrocitus. The Guardians then concealed the Sector 666 massacre and restricted the prophecy. Abin Sur, carrying that survivor and doubting a ring he had been warned would fail, died and passed the job to a test pilot who knew none of it. The concealment did not create the fear. It left him alone with it.
Much of Hal Jordan's modern origin is downstream of something the Guardians built or buried.
Abin Sur's family: Sinestro, Arin Sur and Amon Sur
He is more connected to the rest of this story than anyone realises.
- Sinestro was his student, and later his brother-in-law. Abin Sur trained him, Sinestro trained Hal, and Hal now visits Sinestro in a cell to ask about Manhunters.
- Arin Sur, his sister, married Sinestro. Their daughter Soranik Natu became a Green Lantern herself and Abin Sur's niece.
- Amon Sur, his son, grew up resenting his absent father and the Corps legacy he left behind. He became a criminal, and was eventually chosen by a yellow ring of the Sinestro Corps.
That last one is worth sitting with. The man whose death created Earth's Green Lantern had a son who believed that legacy should have been his.
Abin Sur on screen before Lanterns
Temuera Morrison played him in 2011's Green Lantern, in a version that keeps the essentials: attacked in space, crashes, hands over the ring, dies. He appears across animated films and television episodes too, usually briefly and usually for the same purpose. Green Lantern: First Flight already made his murder the subject of an investigation.
What Lanterns does differently is make the crash site itself a continuing local mystery, tied to one town.
What Lanterns changed about Abin Sur's crash
Two things, and both point the same way.
The location. In the comics the ship comes down in a desert near Coast City. In Lanterns it comes down outside Rushville, Nebraska, the town at the centre of the series' investigation. The show moved a nearly seven-decade-old crash site to its own front lawn.
Hal's reading of it. He says plainly that he has never believed it was an accident. In Secret Origin, that suspicion would be justified: the crash runs through Atrocitus, the Manhunters' massacre and a prophecy the Guardians tried to suppress.
And in Episode 2 the show goes further than that. Hal raises the possibility that Abin Sur was transporting a Manhunter, and that whatever he was carrying is what brought the ship down.
If Hal's theory is correct, that would echo the comics story with one part swapped. There, the prisoner was a victim of the Manhunters. Here, Hal suspects Abin Sur was carrying one of the machines themselves. Either way the same shape would hold: a Green Lantern brought down by the consequences of something the Guardians created and buried.
We are tracking every open question in the series on the Lanterns Mystery Board, updated after each episode.
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