Lanterns Recap: Long Live Hal Jordan

Lanterns
Bad Optics
Season 1 Episode 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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After its pilot tease, Lanterns finally moves into 2026, while staying tethered to some part of its Manhunter mystery. Its nature isn’t quite clear yet — the show’s sixth episode feels like a soft reboot or a brand-new season premiere — but it makes for a riveting coda to the Hal-John relationship, in an hour of television weighed down by grief in surprising ways.

Much of what we learn about the 10 years since the Rushville kerfuffle is through implication and exposition. Hal spent much of the past decade in jail (which is to say, human jail) while John, rejecting the Green Lantern ring, sent it to former gym teacher Guy Gardenerer — seen in last year’s Superman film, and now on billboards for cheap energy drinks. John, having left both the military and space policing behind, has teamed up with one of his brothers for the adjacent career of intergalactic preparedness, by way of designing bunkers and panic rooms en masse, a perfect combination of his love for architecture and his experience in the field.

However, the almost-Lantern’s world is tipped back towards chaos when his mother calls, telling him that she not only maintains regular contact with Hal — what the hell, Bernadette? — but that his former mentor wants to apologize for their tumultuous past. So, he makes his way back to a still-decrepit Rushville for the first time in a decade, where it turns out Hal moved to try and make amends (and to finally date Sheriff Kerry Kane). One person he doesn’t try to make nice with, however, is John, revealing his mother to have been lying to him once more. It’s no surprise. His family life has hardly been repaired. His brothers still mockingly call him “chosen,” and the only contact he seems to have with his father is John Sr.’s attempts to get his attention from his new elder care facility.

John’s café rendezvous with equally complicated father-figure Hal ends with him punching the hotshot pilot in the face, in what turns out to be an ugly goodbye. The next thing he knows, John is receiving a call from Kerry telling him of Hal’s demise, as seen in episode one. We revisit a truncated version of the scene before John learns more about Rushville’s current state, from its hatred of the Lanterns to its unsuccessful attempts to rebuild. Kerry’s son Noah (played by Shea Pritchard) seems to be doing well for himself, at least, as a kid with college prospects.

With the town motel still not having been rebuilt, John stays at Hal’s for the night, where feeding his carnivorous alien plant Earl helps the former hero’s demise truly set in. It’s a small dwelling, humble for such an egomaniac, but its emptiness echoes with a sense of absence. There’s also a minor mystery in the form of a box-like structure Hal left behind at a storage unit, which John and Kerry can’t get into, but before we have the time to delve into it, the episode takes a meaningful turn surrounding John’s attempt to ensure Hal has a funeral worthy of a Lantern — whatever that may be. 

He tries to summon Guy with a Lantern-signal akin to Batman’s skylight, which the locals (including Kerry’s ex-husband) don’t take too nicely, leading to an assault and, eventually, John’s arrest when Kerry finds out. Guy finally shows up when John is behind bars, only to learn that rather than needing help with finding Hal’s killer — a fair assumption on Guy’s part — John simply wants help retrieving Hal’s decommissioned ring from Oa so that he can be buried with it. John balks at the accusation that he would perversely use the ring for himself, after all this time. Ew, can you imagine?

There’s also a subplot involving John being blackmailed by a café waitress regarding him punching Hal right before he was killed. This ought to be a bigger deal, since it’s the episode’s one attempt at flimsy commentary about race — John doesn’t want this known because of the aspersions it’ll cast on him as a Black man in the rural Midwest — but it doesn’t end up having much of an impact. Few of the episode’s mystery or conspiracy elements do, but it’s still a riveting watch because of the thorny dynamic between John and the recently deceased Hal. 

This is no more apparent than at Hal’s funeral, attended only by John, Kerry, and Hal’s ex Carol Ferris (Amie Mackenzie) — a nice addition for comic fans — leading to the bittersweet hilarity of John reading Hal’s grandiose, self-written eulogy. Hal really seems to be dead. Despite its many shapeshifters, Lanterns doesn’t seem like the type of show to pull a trick in this regard, and the hole he leaves for Kerry and John is a complicated one, to say the least. This makes it all the more prickly when, near the end of the episode, John does in fact dig up Hal’s grave in the dead of night to retrieve his ring.

So, where do we go from here? Is John finally taking on the mantle of Green Lantern, albeit for a very different cause? It’s hard to say just yet, but he does summon Hal’s projection, promising (hopefully) more banter between Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre in a very different context. The question of who killed Hal still looms, as does whatever the hell is going on with an allegedly jailbroken Sinestro. But in the meantime, before all these cosmic, life-and-death questions can be answered, this episode of Lanterns makes for a meaningful memorial to a deeply imperfect hero.

This Week’s Coolest Constructs

• None to speak of, in a relatively low-key episode, but Guy constructing the risky portmanteau “Spazkaban” (space + Azkaban) is remarkable in its own way.