Lanterns - “Lights Out” Review
There is a single tear on John Stewart’s face after he puts a clean headshot through Zoe’s synthetic skull, and it says more about the cost of this victory than any dialogue could. He has just killed the Manhunter that Hal Jordan spent an entire episode failing to capture. He has proven himself, by every objective measure, just as effective as a hero. And the show lets us see, in that one small gesture of grief, that this triumph has cost him something he cannot easily name.
“Lights Out” brings Lanterns’ 2016 storyline to its climactic conclusion, and it does so with an episode that ranks among the most purely thrilling this show has produced – a genuinely adrenaline-fueled hour that never once sacrifices the character work underpinning it for the sake of spectacle. Director Geeta Vasant Patel stages the episode’s action with real command, from a POV sequence rendered in green-tinged night vision as Hal battles Antaan’s forces in total darkness, to the visceral horror of Zoe severing her own arm rather than remain handcuffed. This is genuinely some of the finest action the superhero genre has produced on television.
But the episode’s real achievement is in the accumulating moral complexity it grants Zoe, revealed here as far more than a synthetic villain. Her history in Rushville – saving Sheriff Kerry from Gotham hitmen in 2007, forming a genuine bond with Macon, offering John a second chance at life after Hal’s recklessness nearly kills him – complicates the show’s central conspiracy in ways that make her eventual death feel like a genuine loss rather than a simple resolution. She may be a Manhunter, one of the Guardians’ original, more ruthless enforcers designated expendable, but the show refuses to let us forget that her attachments, however manufactured their origins, produced real consequences for real people.
Hal’s willingness to sacrifice John – literally using him as bait once their positions reverse, telling Antaan that Macon is the disguised Manhunter to clear his own path – reveals the character’s moral compromises in ways that finally catch up with him. That reckoning produces the episode’s most important development. Aaron Pierre’s performance in the final scene – conveying an entire crisis of purpose through carefully controlled stillness – earns the emotional weight of John’s decision to walk away from everything he has spent his life training to become. Having watched what pursuing the ring has done to Hal, and what it has already begun doing to himself, John’s realization that servitude to distant, manipulative masters is not heroism but something closer to indenture is the season’s most genuinely courageous character beat thus far.
With only three episodes remaining to resolve the 2026 timeline, “Lights Out” leaves Rushville a bloody, smoking ruin and its central relationship fundamentally reordered. Where this story goes from here – with Hal seemingly murdered and John having rejected the very calling that brought him to this town in the first place – is now the season’s most compelling open question.