Writers working in nerd franchises who want to process their daddy issues on screen: please stop. Seriously. How many times has Damon Lindelof, co-creator of HBO’s Lanterns and co-writer of this episode alongside fellow co-creator Tom King, returned to this particular well? Lost did it. The Leftovers did it. Didn’t he saddle Captain Kirk with father issues in Star Trek, too? Star Wars, Superman, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are foundational texts in this tradition, which has spread across film, television, and comics. Superhero stories are especially vulnerable: This 90-year-old genre keeps generating new material partly by obsessing over LEGACY and the passing of heroism from one generation to the next.
In other words, men would apparently rather write lifeless cold-open flashbacks about intimidating, emotionally distant mustache dads who brawl with Little League coaches and inspire a desperate need for approval than go to therapy.
And even apart from the father-son material, the sequence is painfully obvious. Hal is thrown off his baseball team after refusing to give up the ball during a no-hitter, apparently holding on to it even as the entire team fights him for it. After his father, the rough-edged test pilot Martin Jordan (Jake B. Miller), dies, young Hal (Henry Samiri) searches through the field where Martin made him throw the ball and retrieves it. Adult Hal and the power ring: Do you see the connection? Do you???
Then Martin delivers a speech about a failsafe he has prepared in case something goes wrong, entrusting the key to young Hal. It is the same idea as adult Hal’s cosmic-cube vault in the storage shed. Do you see that one, too? Do you???
This sort of writing may have seemed fresh and inventive 20 years ago, when Lost helped bring it into the mainstream. But in a series like Lanterns, whose appeal depends so heavily on its likable leads and their lived-in, naturalistic performances, piling on a blunt, overdetermined origin story feels like cutting those characters off at the knees.
Lanterns is therefore 0 for 2 with its flashbacks about the hidden histories of Hal Jordan and John Stewart. Fortunately, the show’s present-day storyline remains largely untouched by that problem. Once it moves away from the past, it focuses on exactly what it should: Aaron Pierre’s John, Kyle Chandler’s Hal, and Kelly Macdonald’s Sheriff Kerry trying to establish an uneasy new relationship.
The complication is that this Hal is neither Kerry’s Hal nor John’s Hal. He is the version preserved by the ring — the Hal last backed up around 2006. The show’s constantly shifting timelines, combined with its limited use of distinctive costumes or aging makeup beyond John’s 2026 goatee, can make it difficult to know when any given character is meant to be from. This Hal is kinder and more cooperative, but he is also understandably devastated to discover that he has been murdered. Learning how badly he damaged his reputation hits him just as hard.
He can also sincerely praise John’s accomplishments, something the original Hal never literally did. That praise disarms John. Though the two continue to argue, John calls the construct “Hal” by the episode’s end — a name he never used while Jordan was alive. Pierre and Chandler make these exchanges land by keeping their reactions understated while making it clear that John and Hal, rather than the actors Aaron and Kyle, are the ones trying not to show how deeply affected they are. Their reluctance to reveal their emotions becomes emotional in itself.
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The same is true of Hal’s meeting with Kerry, whom he catches off guard with the brashness that has always defined him. It is a remarkable little scene. This version of Hal seems never to have been in love and wants to meet the woman he eventually trusted enough to open up to, including about his father. Kerry, meanwhile, is looking at a dead man while also encountering a side of him she never knew. It feels almost like magic unfolding in front of her. In less capable hands, this would be a mildly confusing time-travel story from a forgettable comic. With Chandler, Macdonald, and Pierre guiding it, the scene rises above its familiar science-fiction machinery and finds the human — or, in Hal’s case, human-adjacent — emotion at its center.
Sheriff Kerry is occupied with a party for her son Noah, whose major decision about which college will get him as a quarterback is to wait until after he wins the season’s final high school game. That leaves her on the sidelines while John and Hal enter the vault. Inside, they discover a gun, a poncho, and a huge mass of black goo that proves to be a wormhole or portal connected directly to another location somewhere in the universe.
When the two heroes pass through, they arrive on the planet Zoe the Manhunter devastated, prompting survivor Antaan to pursue revenge. The muted color palette is a letdown — this is superhero space opera, so why not make it as vivid as possible? Still, the drained look fits the devastation. A ruined city hangs in the sky above them, while the baked desert is strewn with the bodies of people who leaped to their deaths after the Manhunter released a fear gas that drove them mad. The gas remains in the atmosphere, becoming especially dangerous when it rains. At one point, John nearly kills himself while hallucinating his father and his younger self. Hal’s duplicate grumbles that this is precisely why the older Hal insisted they bring the damn poncho.
The pair discover a boat abandoned by older Hal and use it to cross a lake toward a distant island made of debris, where a blue-green light flickers above the wreckage. Along the way, Hal finally discusses his family. His father’s fatal crash was actually a suicide, something Hal knows because the failsafe Martin mentioned contained a suicide note — a secret Hal spent his life concealing. Martin’s own father also died by suicide, creating a legacy of lethal depression that reaches far enough back to earn the name Jordan Boys Legacy. See what I mean? See??? This raises the possibility that Hal himself died by suicide, with Kerry hiding the truth to preserve his legacy.
But the biggest discovery on the garbage island is Sinestro. The escaped convict attempts to ambush the two quasi-Lanterns, only for John to drop him with a single punch and expose who he is.
“Great arm, kid,” Hal tells John, echoing the words his own father once said to him. Come on. Come on!!!
Put the flashbacks and the Father’s Day Hallmark-card material aside, and I’ll sound like a broken record: Lanterns thrives because of its leads. All three are attractive and charismatic, yet all three — even the genuinely godlike John — feel like people who would be interesting to have a beer with. Not necessarily fun, but memorable, and the kind of company you would be glad to keep. They are appealing despite being, let’s be honest, three deeply strange and compromised people. They are the gold amid all that green.
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.