Now what? When a show has its audience asking that question halfway through its first season, it’s difficult to say whether that signals triumph or trouble. Either way, it means the series is doing something unusual.
That was the position HBO’s Lanterns left us in at the end of its fifth episode. The three-sided conflict involving aliens, Green Lanterns, and Zoe the Manhunter—with Rushville, Nebraska caught in the middle—came to a bloody close. So did the battle over the Green Lantern power ring. John Stewart pulled it from Hal Jordan’s still-living hand, then handed it directly to Lianna the Guardian, declining the spectacularly terrible job after all. When Sheriff Kerry Kane confronts an angry mob surrounding John, she manages to disperse them. And then the episode ends.
Leaving the series’ future so uncertain this early may be the boldest move co-creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King have made during Lanterns’ uneven but increasingly promising run. In one sense, the show is borrowing from the structure of, yes, True Detective Season 1, which shifted midway from a largely flashback-driven story to one rooted in the present, while also transforming the personalities and circumstances of its central characters. But a major midseason turning point only carries a series so far. The writers still need to give every character something worthwhile to do afterward.
So far, Lanterns has managed that challenge.
The episode begins shortly before the flash-forward that closed the series premiere, when John and Kerry discover Hal Jordan’s frozen corpse inside the Rushville, Nebraska, football stadium. Only hours earlier, John had been drawn to town by his mother, Bernadette, who remains the absolute dirt worst person in his life. She told him Hal wanted to apologize. That turns out to be a lie, though Hal does reveal that his friendship with John’s mother is genuine—which may be the most painful outcome John could have imagined.
The two men argue. John breaks Hal’s nose and walks away. Hours later, Hal is dead from a point-blank 9mm gunshot in the stadium. To borrow Robert Pattinson quoting Chris Hansen: you see how this looks, right? We know John had already left town by the time Hal was killed, but Kerry would understandably view him with suspicion if she discovered that he had been the last person to assault Hal.
John creates even more trouble when he gets into a brawl with Kerry’s now ex-husband, Billy Macon, and several other men after activating a Lantern Signal left behind by Hal and John’s replacement. That replacement is Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion, clearly having a terrific time), a blond, bowl-cut gym teacher—sorry, athletic director—selected to serve as the sector’s Green Lantern after Hal burned out and John rejected the position. Nobody in Rushville wants the signal there, and the locals are even less pleased to see a former Green Lantern—even one who held the job for only five minutes—activate it.
Naturally, picking a fight with John Stewart is a poor strategy if you’re attached to your teeth. John keeps his composure over dinner with Kerry and her now-teenage son, Noah (Shea Pritchard), at her house that evening. But news of the fight eventually reaches her, and John spends the night in jail until his brother Marcus (Jared Grimes) comes to bail him out.
Marcus has ample reason to help his brother—and even more reason to resent being forced to do it. At this point in John’s life, two changes immediately stand out. First, he has grown a full goatee, which is a bold decision. Second, he is now an architect who designs panic rooms for private clients and entire municipalities through a firm he founded with Marcus. The money also helps support the recording career of their other brother, Andre (Romeo Brown). Both brothers call John “Chosen,” a reference to his Green Lantern past and their parents’ favoritism toward him. By now, however, that favoritism hardly matters: His mother is still deeply strange, while his father is firing guns inside his retirement home to get John’s attention.
John is meant to pitch Midway City—a fictional DC Universe location—on an underground bunker system designed to shelter tens of thousands of people. Instead, he remains trapped in Rushville, and not simply because he has been jailed. He feels responsible for giving Hal a proper burial and funeral, complete with a uniform and a ring that Guy must retrieve from outer space. John even reads the eulogy Hal wrote and gave to his former girlfriend, Carol Ferris (Amie Mackenzie). The speech combines Hal’s grandiose assumption that his funeral would become a global event with a sad awareness of his own mortality. “I hope I mattered,” it ends.
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John is also determined to learn who murdered his predecessor, even if investigating means staying in a town that despises him and damaging his relationship with Kerry—the only person in Rushville who genuinely cared about Hal. They were, in fact, romantically involved, a detail I’m still struggling to process. John exhumes Hal’s body, removes his decommissioned ring, and brings his digitized double back online. The duplicate reacts to news of the original Hal’s death with the sort of profane outrage one might expect.
Several other storylines deserve attention. While searching through Hal’s belongings, Kerry and John discover a key to a storage locker containing what appears to be a cosmic-cube vault. They cannot open it without Hal himself. Perhaps the digital decoy will succeed where a voice recording could not.
Then there’s Maggie (Hannah Christine Shetler), a teenager demanding compensation from John for the destruction caused by the Lantern, alien, and Manhunter battle. The language feels especially pointed after she dismisses his concerns about racism in their rural Nebraska town. Unless John pays up, she says, she’ll tell the sheriff she saw him with Hal on the night he died. John has nothing to hide, so—of all people—he should have nothing to fear, right?
John must also care for Hal’s sentient, carnivorous plant, Earl. Honestly, Earl is pretty adorable.
Still, parts of the episode don’t quite add up. Rushville is populated by heavily armed, highly trained civilians who have been taught to attack Green Lanterns on sight. Yet Hal Jordan—the Green Lantern blamed for killing a substantial portion of the town—was apparently able to walk around unarmed. No one shot him before he ended up frozen inside that football stadium? And Kerry Kane, Rushville’s sheriff, has dated this man without facing more than occasional insults from the townspeople? The pieces don’t fit.
The series’ ongoing reliance on Harry Potter references is equally baffling. “Spazkaban,” the name of a space prison? Read another goddamn book, Green Lanterns—preferably one that doesn’t enrich the world’s wealthiest transphobe. Unless the show is deliberately suggesting that only idiots and jerks like Hal and Guy remain Harry Potter adults, in which case, by all means, continue.
Despite those flaws, Lanterns has answered Now what? with a convincing response: This. This is what. Hal Jordan may not be the show’s Laura Palmer, but I’m invested in the mystery of who killed him. I’m equally interested in the series’ continuing investigation into what makes someone suited to become a space cop. So far, the candidates have been three distinct varieties of egomaniacal asshole. John, at least, has finally escaped his parents’ programming and chosen for himself that the job is not worth having. What do the personalities and occupations of these three Lanterns reveal about the Guardians’ ideas of justice—especially now that we know the Manhunters were their creation as well? Is any of it good?
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.