Lanterns Recap: In Blackest Night

Lanterns
The Jordan Boys Legacy
Season 1 Episode 7
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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After a quiet episode focused on Hal Jordan’s passing, Lanterns’s penultimate chapter deepens the mystery in surprising and wrenching ways. At this point, the answer to who killed Earth’s former protector might not even matter, given how writers Damon Lindelof and Tom King (and director Alik Sakharov) emotionally spring-load this week’s episode with flashbacks that go very quickly from hilarious to haunting, and conversations that seem on the nose but quietly unlock exactly what’s going on with all these characters.

It begins in 1975, with a childhood flashback of Hal’s father, Martin, being called in by his baseball coach to reprimand the young pitcher for not handing the ball to his teammates. This layered (if obvious) dilemma explains why Hal flies solo later in life, while mirroring father and son through expert filmmaking. Not only does Martin subsequently get into fisticuffs with the coach — the Jordan boys are clearly cut from the same cloth — but even the way he turns to face him, his familiar leather jacket squeaking as he moves his shoulders, conjures instant flashbacks (or in this case, flash-forwards) of the hotshot Hal both in his civvies and in his stiff Lantern gear. John may have been on a training regimen to become the new Green Lantern, but Hal, in his own way, was bred for it too. 

“You scared?” Martin asks him before telling him it’s okay if he is as they eat Popsicles together and nurse their bruises. It’s as if the die has already been cast, and Hal just takes a slightly different path from John to get where he’s going. A healthier path perhaps, given his father’s gentleness? Not so fast: It isn’t long before Martin begins speaking in morbid code about his emotional inheritance from his own father, who never returned from war — not to mention his actual inheritance, a lockbox, not unlike the alien device Hal left behind for John. Martin hands Hal a key to his own box too. “Shouldn’t Mom have this?” Hal asks, to which Martin replies ominously, “It’s not something she can carry.” 

Regardless of what’s in these various boxes across generations — pictures, coins, and, eventually, alien gizmos — what they represent is much more important. They’re the walls surrounding these men’s most vulnerable secrets and the parts of themselves they don’t want seen. 

Back in the present, the Halogram (last updated in 2006) susses out that John is lying about the grandeur of Hal’s funeral when the former protégé mentions sitting next to MOGO, the Lantern who famously doesn’t socialize. Also, you know … he’s a planet. It’s the first of several callbacks to earlier in the season, and the beginning of some delightful banter between the fed-up John and a younger, more optimistic Hal who, it appears, has little to lose when it comes to getting on John’s last nerve. At the very least, they’re on the same page about wanting to solve Hal’s murder. 

The Halogram learns more about the real Hal’s final years, including his relationship with Sheriff Kerry, so he refuses to use his voice to open the alien lockbox until John takes him to meet her. En route, John tries to get his brothers — who appear as disembodied, almost ghostly voices over the phone — to transfer him an enormous sum of money to pay off the waitress blackmailing him about punching the real Hal and being the last person to see him alive. But before any of that is made relevant, John tracks Kerry down at her son Noah’s hat ceremony (where he’s meant to choose the college of his choice, but delays the decision until after football season) so that she and the Halogram can have a chat. Interestingly, a fleeting scene of Noah leaning on his teammates becomes a tragic mirror to Hal never having been able to do so (as a kid or as a Lantern) and John never getting along with his brothers. 

When John reveals the Halogram to Kerry (after fair warning), the look on her face is a mix of shock and agony. It’s tremendous work from Kelly Macdonald, who leads a trepidatious, curious Kyle Chandler in a still and quiet emotional tête-à-tête. The late Lantern seems surprised he could actually be open with someone and be himself. It’s here that the show’s unique departures from the comics begin to fully cohere. Uploading a Lantern’s consciousness to their ring has never been a major part of the DC mythos, but doing so on Lanterns has meant bringing back not just a posthumous memory of Hal but an embodiment of possibility, before he became the more cynical man we met. It’s captivating drama.

It’s also immediately undercut — intentionally so — by the whiplash of the Halogram immediately casting suspicion on Kerry as the real Hal’s killer. This is the language the show has used thus far, in that Hal often comes to conclusions and fills in the gaps for us after the fact. So it isn’t all that hard to believe, but the claim itself ceases to matter once the Halogram and John actually confront the nature of the mystery head-on. Instead of waiting for Kerry to catch up to them after she appears at her son’s party, they rush back to the storage unit without her (racing the ring’s failing battery all the while) and finally unlock the device, revealing a backpack with a gun and some basic supplies and a brown paper bag containing a handy alien device we’ve seen before: a fabric that forms a portal between distant points in space. 

It leads Hal and John to a barren planet with an abandoned, high-tech city floating up above and a rowboat and flaming beacon in the distance. They also discover a shallow mass grave beneath their feet, as John experiences déjà vu before realizing where he’s seen all this before: in the vision shown to him by Antaan and his people, which the audience never saw. This opaqueness from earlier in the season pays off in the form of John recounting the brutal methods the Manhunter used to decimate this planet, involving a fear gas that made people kill one another and jump to their deaths.

As any Green Lantern fan will tell you — or, really, anyone who has seen the show and listened to the ring’s question when it chooses a successor — fear is a Green Lantern’s greatest enemy. This also foreshadows exactly who is waiting for them on the other side of the water, if you’re comic-savvy enough. More important, it establishes just how central (and how mysterious) the nature of fear will seem during the episode’s concluding scenes, which are some of the most powerful not just in any superhero show, but on any show this year. 

As the duo rows through pitch-black darkness toward the flame, John experiences harrowing visions of his father and of his younger self, revealed to be an effect of the fear toxin lingering in the air. However, the real gut-punch comes in the form of their subsequent conversation, where this younger Hal reveals that even though his father died in a plane crash, it may have been intentional, since his lockbox also contained a suicide note. It’s another enormous change from the source material, but one that sends emotional ripple effects throughout the series’ fabric, introducing the question of whether Hal may have also suffered the same, self-imposed fate, owing to the festering darkness and depression living within him too. 

Truth be told, this is probably not the case, but the mere possibility (owing to Hal being so prepared for his own demise) snaps the show’s emotional pieces into place in haunting ways — even more so when the former rookie and mentor reach their destination and find a cloaked Sinestro waiting to ambush them. The Lantern mythos has long involved inheritance, through its rings being passed down, but the show explores the weight of that inheritance by tethering it to fear. 

The comics have a whole pile of explanations about which emotions are linked to what colors, but you needn’t be immersed in all that to appreciate how expertly the series has woven the idea of fathers (and father figures) being so closed off, despite being present, that they cause generational harm in the process. This is true for Hal, Martin, and Martin’s father before him, and it’s passed down to John, not just from John Sr. but from Hal as well. Throw Sinestro in the mix — Hal’s mentor who betrayed him — and you’ve got a stew going. It’s a heartrending tale of men bred for conflict by fathers who know of no other way to live, lest their truest selves be seen or recognized. Hell, it may even explain why Hal is such a cocky a-hole; maybe it’s just a mask for the all-consuming emptiness he hopes to keep at bay. 

“Great arm, kid,” the Halogram tells John when he incapacitates Sinestro before he can steal the duo’s dinghy. But really, it’s what any son is dying to hear from their father about catching a ball. The writing is simple and obvious but immensely powerful. So while ending the scene with Queen’s “Father to Son” might seem like putting a hat on a hat, the cumulative effects of the episode’s themes and its audiovisual storytelling make all of Lanterns make sense in a deeper, more instinctive way.

No matter where things go in the season finale — no matter who it turns out broke Sinestro loose, or who killed Hal Jordan, or whatever else is happening with the mystery plot — these mechanics are all firmly rooted in some of the most piercing, powerful drama of any live-action story based on a DC comic. Sure, the answers will probably matter, and the possibilities could be varying degrees of satisfying or disappointing. But emotionally speaking, Lanterns has almost certainly already stuck the landing.