Lanterns - “Trust Fall” Review
There is a small, strange moment in “Trust Fall” when John Stewart, still largely untrained, thinks intensely enough about flight to conjure a sparrow out of nothing – and the bird keeps flying even after Hal takes the ring back.
Nobody in this episode treats that moment with the weight it deserves. Hal raises an eyebrow and moves on. But it is perhaps the most important thing that happens in “Trust Fall,” a piece of information the show trusts its audience to file away and worry about later. That patience – the willingness to let a genuinely strange detail sit unexplained rather than immediately mined for exposition – is what makes this low-key second episode work better than its modest ambitions might suggest.
Set entirely within the 2016 timeline of Lanterns, “Trust Fall” primarily splits its runtime between Hal and John pursuing separate errands that eventually reconverge. It is a structural choice that pays off specifically because both characters are compelling enough to carry individual storylines rather than depending entirely on their combative chemistry to generate interest.
John’s thread is the stranger and more consequential of the two. Sent to retrieve the lantern's power battery from a pocket dimension in Hal's closet – one of the episode’s more delightful small touches – he is kidnapped by a group of aliens who turn out to belong to the same species as last week’s exploding suspect. Their information, delivered largely through dialogue rather than shown directly, concerns a shape-shifting entity called a Manhunter, responsible for the destruction of their homeworld and possibly connected to the Lanterns themselves. The aliens’ secondary revelation lands with even more intrigue: creating a sentient construct is difficult even for an experienced ring-bearer. Sustaining one without the ring in hand is unheard of. Whatever John is becoming, it exceeds what his brief training should allow.
Kyle Chandler’s Hal, meanwhile, gets the episode’s most purely entertaining sequence – hauling alien corpses from the morgue to test them against metal detectors before depositing the leaking bodies at the gates of William Macon’s compound in an act of pure, absurd provocation. It should not work as character comedy. Chandler’s locked-in commitment makes it work anyway, a man whose one-track determination to cut through everyone’s nonsense manifests as increasingly bizarre behavior that the show never quite winks at. Sheriff Kerry Kane remains a step ahead of him throughout, and her hospital bedside banter with Hal after he takes a bullet from Macon’s men adds a note of genuine chemistry to an episode otherwise focused on mystery mechanics.
The episode saves its best material for its final scene. Hal’s journey to Oa to confront his imprisoned former mentor Sinestro, played by Ulrich Thomsen with an icy, magnetic calm that makes the character instantly compelling, delivers the hour’s most consequential reveal: Sinestro considers John Stewart a greater threat to Hal than the Manhunters themselves. It is a genuinely destabilizing note to end on, raising real questions about John’s training and why the Guardians of the Universe selected him at all.
“Trust Fall” is content to nudge its mysteries forward incrementally while keeping its characters in clear view, and it largely succeeds at exactly that modest goal. Hal and John, it turns out, are just as watchable apart as they are locked in their prickly, uneasy partnership – which bodes well for a show that clearly intends to take its time getting where it's going.