Lanterns - “The Weenie” Review
At the end of “The Weenie,” Hal Jordan pulls the same trick he pulled on John Stewart in the premiere – exiting a moving vehicle without warning as a training exercise in preparedness. Only this time, he doesn’t leave John with the ring to catch himself. John slams into a pole instead, and the show lets the moment land as a small, almost petty act of violence in the context of a series otherwise concerned with alien conspiracies and android infiltrators. It is also devastating, precisely because “The Weenie” has spent its runtime building the most functional, almost warm version of Hal and John’s partnership the show has managed so far – only to detonate it in the episode’s final minutes.
The episode opens by resolving last episode’s cliffhanger: Hal’s covert meeting with imprisoned mentor Sinestro, staged by director Geeta Vasant Patel with a disorienting, tilted camera that captures the scene’s Hannibal Lecter-inflected menace. Sinestro’s counsel is characteristically ruthless – if John is being groomed as Hal’s replacement rather than his backup, the solution is simple, and it colors every subsequent interaction between Hal and John with a low hum of suspicion that Hal can’t quite shake.
What follows is, structurally, one of the show’s most entertaining hours yet. Hal and John’s investigation into Macon’s compound produces the episode’s best sequences – a booby-trapped stronghold, an confrontation involving darkness-generating weaponry, and a genuinely strange, thematically rich scene in which a naked Macon monologues about the Manhunter curing his cancer, explaining his quasi-religious devotion with an unsettling sincerity while also providing the episode’s title with its double meaning.
What the episode gets unambiguously right is its performances. Aaron Pierre’s work in the car-ride scene, where Hal probes John about the Manhunter’s likely identity and John deflects rather than voice his real suspicion about Zoe, is a genuine master class in withheld emotion – Pierre communicates an entire internal calculation through microexpression alone, letting the audience see exactly what John is avoiding saying even as the character himself refuses to say it. Kyle Chandler matches him beat for beat, playing Hal’s gradual realization that John has been sitting on information with a controlled fury that makes what follows feel like the inevitable eruption of tension that has been building since Sinestro’s warning.
The Zoe reveal – her apparent death by satellite strike turning out to be staged, and that she’s been the Manhunter all along – is the episode’s most successful twist, giving John’s earlier flirtation with her retroactive weight and complicating his loyalties in ways the show has earned through multiple episodes of genuine chemistry between the characters. Whether Rushville can survive what happens to Hal and John’s partnership in this episode’s final moments is now the season’s most urgent question.