Lanterns Full Season Review - In Brightest Day
After watching all eight episodes of this season of Lanterns, I can only come away from it saying that it is unequivocally the most technically accomplished series that either DC or Marvel has ever produced for television, if not necessarily my personal favorite. It may disappoint anyone who came for an hour of ring-slinging spectacle each week. But it will reward anyone who wants a drama in which the Green Lantern mythology exists to deepen character rather than replace it.
The show’s model is True Detective rather than a cape-and-cowl adventure. It starts as a murder mystery in Rushville, Nebraska, in 2016, where a shape-shifting alien called a Manhunter hides among the townspeople. Showrunner Chris Mundy, with writers Damon Lindelof and Tom King, understood that the idea of space cops with wish-granting rings sounds cartoonish on its face, and that the cure for that is human stakes. We rarely see Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan in costume, let alone Aaron Pierre’s series protagonist John Stewart. The visual identity comes from small-town dread, tilted cameras, and long conversations in cars. When the show does spend its effects budget, as in the thrilling battle sequences of “Lights Out,” the action carries real weight because it has been earned by the character work.
That character work rests on the partnership of Chandler and Pierre. Chandler plays Hal as a grizzled veteran who is hostile, paranoid, and overconfident in roughly equal measure, a man who correctly suspects that the Guardians are grooming his replacement. Pierre’s John Stewart is a former Marine with a quiet, coiled intensity, absorbing his mentor’s nonsense because the ring is the one thing he has wanted all his life. The show wisely refuses to give them an easy reconciliation. They stay prickly antagonists right up until Hal is dead, and only then does John get to hear, through the Halogram, the man Hal might have been. It is a clever way to build affection: the show withholds it until it can no longer be had.
But the third episode, “OutKast”, is where the series announces its ambitions. John’s upbringing, shaped by parents who tested him relentlessly because he would have to be extraordinary just to get the opportunity that Hal received by default, is dramatized with love and without easy judgment. It is painful to watch precisely because the love is real. It’s been noted that the show captures the duality Black Americans often face, a hunger for the ideals of justice combined with a rueful understanding that the institutions meant to deliver them are inherently broken and often exploitative. The Guardians are the embodiment of that, and John’s arc is the question of how to serve a greater good without being co-opted by it.
The season’s structure is bold. The fifth episode, “Lights Out,” ends the 2016 storyline with the Manhunter Zoe dead, Rushville in ruins, and John walking away from the ring. Then the sixth episode jumps ten years forward and dives headfirst into the murder mystery surrounding the death of one of the show’s two leads. That is a risky choice, and the show makes it work by turning to grief. John feeds Hal’s carnivorous plant, reads his mentor’s self-written eulogy at a funeral almost nobody attends, and digs up the grave for the ring. For these last few episodes the show becomes a mystery about who killed Hal, but it is really about what the survivors do with the silence he left.
That brings me to “The Jordan Boys’ Legacy.” Opening in 1975 with Hal’s father Martin and a lockbox he says Hal’s mother “can’t carry,” the episode traces a line of emotional inheritance running from Martin to Hal to John, along with the father figures who failed them along the way, Sinestro among them. Later in the episode when John knocks Sinestro out and the Halogram says, “Great arm, kid,” it is what any son longs to hear. Ending the episode on Queen’s “Father to Son” is a little on the nose, and it works anyway.
The finale, “Dirt and Stars,” is quieter and resolves the mystery in a truly moving way. Kerry’s son Noah turns out to be a Manhunter himself. He freed Sinestro from prison, and Kerry, in a moment of tragic conflict, was the one who shot Hal. The payoff is a quiet conversation in which Noah confesses his nature and begs John to kill him, and John, shaped by his own militaristic conditioning, understands the war between conscience and programming. Kerry’s love for her son pushes John to choose differently. He lets Noah live and prepares for the possibility that he may do harm. Then, for the first time, John accepts the mantle of Green Lantern, but on his own terms, going around Guy, the Guardians, and, in a way, his own parents. The oath he composes is a tribute to his mentor, and the show closes on a family reunion rather than a battle.
This is a season is full of men trying to atone for terrible decisions while asking whether atonement is even possible. And fans of the comics may miss the brash, noble Hal Jordan of the comics, who is intentionally downgraded here. These are the complaints of a viewer who wanted a different show, because they do not reduce the one that exists.
What Lanterns proves is that the DC Universe can succeed with creative voices other than James Gunn’s. The series reportedly opened to 9.3 million viewers over its first three days and has become an unlikely hit for HBO. With Clayface arriving in two weeks and John Stewart appearing in Man of Tomorrow next year, the franchise has established a solid foundation, based on flawed people with super-sized problems rather than merely heroes with oversized effects budgets.