Lanterns - “OutKast” Review
“OutKast” is a flashback-structured hour, framed as John’s interview with a Guardian of the Universe disguised as a mysterious woman played by Laura Linney, and it accomplishes something the series has been building toward since its premiere: a genuinely thorough understanding of who John Stewart is and why he has become the person we have watched clash with Hal Jordan across two episodes.
The episode’s central achievement is depicting an upbringing that has so often been reported by Black millennials: raised by parents determined to secure their child’s excellence at any cost in the hopes of allowing them to have the opportunities they never had for themselves, even at the cost of an ordinary childhood. John’s parents, Bernadette and John Stewart Sr., played with real conviction by Jasmine Cephas Jones, understand something the Guardians – newcomers to Earth and its specific racial histories – do not: that their son will have to be extraordinary simply to be given the chances his white peers receive by default. Their response is to raise him through a program of rigorous, almost religious testing – apples shot off his head, survival trials, a childhood alienated from his own siblings in service of forging something exceptional. That this parenting is delivered with genuine love does not make it any less painful to watch, and the show is wise enough not to resolve that tension. It simply presents it.
Aaron Pierre’s performance carries the full emotional weight of this material with a withheld anguish that never tips into melodrama. His John is a man who has made peace, or something resembling peace, with the cost of what he was raised to become – and Pierre lets us see the cracks in that peace without ever letting the character fully break. The scene in which John, discharged from the military after Hal steals his mission’s objective, finally gets his mother’s blessing to pursue art school – only to be recruited as a Green Lantern in the one place he thought he had some reprieve from his destiny – is a pointed piece of dramatic irony.
That Hal arrives at the Stewart home before John can share his own good news, then declares that John will only get the ring over his dead body, gives their rivalry a specificity that was only hinted at in the premiere. The confirmation that the Guardians aren’t recruiting a backup but planning to replace Hal outright adds a genuinely destabilizing new layer to the season’s central mystery.