Lanterns Said ‘Timshel’

This piece contains spoilers for the finales of Lanterns and East of Eden.

The foundation of Netflix’s East of Eden, like the Steinbeck novel it’s adapted from, rests on a single word: timshel. Lee (Hoon Lee), the longtime companion and house manager to the story’s troubled, ambitious Trask family, explains the concept in a scene from episode five. In the King James Version of the Bible, Lee says, God informs Cain, “Thou shalt rule over sin,” implying that Cain’s destiny has already been decided — “shalt,” as Lee explains it, is a promise. But the translation is different in the American Standard Version, and upon researching the original Hebrew, Lee finds the word timshel can be translated as “thou mayest.” “Our future isn’t determined by God, or by our past,” Lee says. It is a choice, a series of decisions rather than a destiny. “Even Cain, in his weakness and filth and the murder of his brother, can still choose his course.”

It is a complicated but ennobling idea: We can choose differently than we have chosen before. We can be better than we have been. It’s also an enduring idea, so much so that East of Eden was not the only television series last week to explore that particular theme. In an odd coincidence of the TV calendar, Lanterns, the HBO prestige comic-book series based on the Green Lantern stories, ended by asking the same questions: How much of human nature is immutable? How much capacity do people really have to choose between goodness and evil?

The Lanterns finale arrives at its existential quandary through a double-twist plot reveal. There’s a secret Manhunter (a race of alien robots bent on power) living somewhere in the small town of Rushville, Nebraska. Although one Manhunter was uncovered and destroyed earlier in the season, Green Lanterns John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) realize she allowed herself to be caught to distract their attention from another Manhunter in town: her grandson, Noah (Shea Pritchard). This is the first twist. Noah, the star football player and the son of town sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), a woman Hal has been in a relationship with, is actually a violent alien overlord capable of murder and manipulation. Kerry has known Noah’s nature the entire time and protected him by (second twist) murdering Hal after he uncovered the truth.

After confronting Noah about his true identity, John drives the boy to his final high-school football game. John probes how Noah sees himself, what he wants for the future, and whether he seems at all capable of controlling his actions. Noah has acted counter to his programming, John points out. He rescued Hal from a burning home rather than letting him die there. John tells Noah he has struggled with the same questions he imagines Noah wrestling with. John’s parents spent his childhood attempting to turn him into a superhero by forbidding him from feeling fear, and the trauma of their parenting made it impossible for John to access his own humanity. “For a long time, I couldn’t tell where I started and my programming ended,” John says. But he has overcome that now, he tells Noah. (Lanterns does not make it clear exactly when this shift happens in John, although it’s presumably during a period when he’s trapped in a dreamscapelike alternate universe, drowning in physical embodiments of his own fear.) Later, John and Kerry stand on the sidelines of the football game, discussing whether it’s safe to let Noah keep living his life on Earth or whether his fundamental nature will always push him toward destruction. “He wants to be good,” John tells her.

Conversely, East of Eden unfurls its consideration of human nature and inheritance across multiple generations. The Trask brothers, Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles (Mike Faist), and later Adam’s sons, Caleb (Joseph Zada) and Aron (Joe Anders), all confront their own experiences of the same inner struggle: Can they alter their destinies? Their personalities and desires are innate, to some extent — one brother finds it easy to be obedient and gentle, while another finds himself drawn to aggression or power. Caleb, in particular, is haunted by his belief that he has inherited his mother Cathy’s (Florence Pugh) propensity for violence and cruelty. Upon discovering his mother’s identity as a madam, Caleb takes Aron to her brothel to force him to confront her depravity. Distraught, Aron ships himself off to fight in World War I. When news comes that Aron has been killed in battle, Adam suffers a deadly stroke.

Grieving his brother’s death, Caleb comes to his fatally ill father’s sickbed in the series’ final scene. Lee puts Caleb’s hand in his father’s, urging Adam to reconcile with his son before he dies. “Adam, give your only son your blessing,” Lee says. “Let him be free.” Struggling to speak, Adam is able to say one word: “timshel.” In the last moments of East of Eden, Adam gives his guilt-laden son the ability to choose, a gift and a blessing and a burden. It’s up to Caleb to decide who he will be, regardless of who he has been before.

Both series close on a young man who feels trapped by dangerous potential and believes it’s futile to fight against his impulses to harm others. Each offers a glint of optimism too: There’s no way to know what choice these young men will make, but the ability to make a choice is itself a reason for hope. While Lanterns presents Noah’s future as a potential for disaster somewhere down the line, it immediately offers John as the guardian of his goodness, someone who will step in to fix whatever problem Noah may later cause. John insists he’s had to make his own choices to resist the lessons of his childhood, but he presents that choice as something in the past. He did it — he surmounted the trauma of his early parenting. He can continue into the future as a wiser, self-determined man. The tension of Noah’s character, which Lanterns presents as a parallel to John’s, is immediately blunted by the show’s need to soften and resolve everything left uncertain in John’s. Maybe Noah will turn evil in the future, but John has faced hard things already and come out the other side. Maybe Noah will fail, but there’s no need to worry because John will step in to stop him.

Lanterns’s version of self-determination is oddly nonchalant: Can people choose to be good? Hopefully. But even if they don’t, someone else will pick up the slack. Unlike the comfortable safety net of John’s newly solidified self-knowledge in Lanterns, East of Eden allows the weight of its closing message to rest entirely on Caleb. He, too, has a guardian figure in Lee, who helps him grasp his dying father’s hand and who is there to ensure Caleb fully understands the message Adam gives at the end. But Lee makes no promises about stepping in to stop Caleb from future wrongdoing. He does not infantilize Caleb, nor does he put himself forward as an unshakable steward of goodness. Caleb’s choices must come from within himself, and he alone will be responsible for their consequences. The burden of choice isn’t just something one can move past. It is a perpetual present tense, a responsibility that will always be hard and never be complete.