Anyone who has ever questioned the phrase “tough as a mother” may find a convincing answer in Lanterns Episode 3, where Jasmine Cephas Jones brings fierce resolve and emotional weight to the role of John Stewart’s mother.
**Spoiler alert: This article contains details from Lanterns Episode 3 (“OutKast”) now streaming on HBO Max**
The opening moments of Episode 1 seemed to suggest that John Stewart’s father, played by J. Alphonse Nicholson, was the driving force behind raising young John without fear — most memorably by shooting an apple off the head of child John (Cairo Cash Lee) and asking whether he was afraid. But Episode 3 reframes that origin story in a major way. The new chapter reveals that the decision actually came from John’s mother, Bernadette (Cephas Jones), who believed her son needed to be prepared for the destiny ahead of him. For Cephas Jones, making Bernadette the spark behind John’s Green Lantern training is not just dramatically satisfying — it is, in her words, deeply “badass.” With someone destined to follow in the path of Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), the episode makes a compelling case for a mother recognizing her son’s potential and refusing to hold back.
“I was really, really shocked, and I thought it was a beautiful love letter to mothers who I think can be the unsung heroes, the heroes without capes, the women who make possible happen from the impossible,” Cephas Jones tells DECIDER. “I just thought it was a really beautiful and like badass take on starting John’s training and that it’s her idea and she’s really, really heavy on it. It’s it’s really cool to see women in this way and kind of like drive the force. I think sometimes we see a lot of women take the back seat in TV or films, and here we see her take the front seat and she puts her foot on the gas pretty, pretty hard.”
Bernadette keeps that pressure on throughout John’s childhood, shaping him with an intensity meant to prepare him for the moment the Guardians may call. That upbringing comes full circle when John finally embraces the harsh logic behind his parents’ choices. In a striking nighttime scene, he brings his mother into the backyard, asks her to balance an apple on her own head, and shoots it off. The moment echoes an earlier scene in the episode, when Bernadette tells John Sr. to do the same to their son, insisting it is the only way to ensure John grows up ready for what awaits him.
“My first day was actually the decision that I make to John Sr. to shoot the apple off of Cairo’s head and my second scene was me in the white night dress getting shot at by Cairo so that day was really… it I felt a lot of pressure, nobody put pressure on me, but I felt lot of a pressure just as an actor to have everything together,” she adds. “It was just really important that I that I had it together but I think we pulled it off.”
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As for the fans of the show who will undoubtedly have thoughts about the horror of seeing how John Sr. and Bernadetter bring up their youngest son — including buying him a Green Lantern suit and a rifle for his fifth birthday instead of the simple crayons he so desperately wanted — the actress says that while it certainly isn’t what she would do, personally, this is a character who saw her family falling apart and had to make tough choices on how to try and fix it.
At the beginning of the episode, John Sr. is visited (i.e. dramatically lifted out of bed) by a Guardian who asks if he is afraid, to which he, of course, responds “Yes.” That is the same question the Guardians would later ask Hal Jordan, who was then selected as the Green Lantern. Bernadette later explains to a Guardian (Laura Linney) that asking a Black man in America if he’s afraid has levels of racial implications that the Guardians had never considered. It’s only as the Guardians attempt to make things right with the Stewarts by offering them a fat diamond that Bernadette and Linney’s character come to a sort-of arrangement about her youngest son. So while it may be tough on him, it’s all for the greater good of his fate and humanity.
“The setup for that made sense to me for a lot of her decisions. And I think it was a way to get her power back for her and her family, as well. And in a weird way, [it’s] even like some type of healing because of what John Sr. went through,” Cephas Jones explains of the difficult childhood John endures.
She adds, “I don’t know if I would do that personally, but also at the end of the day, Bernadette is Bernadette and she is such a force and she’s so determined and she did a great job. I mean, she’s raised a superhero. And I think the most important thing is we all believed in his destiny. As a family, the Stewarts believed that he is the chosen one, but we had to make him believe it. So by the time he is getting interviewed, he knows, ‘I know exactly why I’m here and I’m supposed to be here.’ And that was the ultimate goal, I think.”
Maybe, just maybe, the ends justify the means in this single case. After all, it worked out pretty well for John.
The first three episodes of Lanterns are now streaming on HBO Max. New episodes premiere Sundays.