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This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.
The first episode of Lanterns begins the way any show with knotty lore should: with a flashback to 1996, where a young John Stewart watches the Green Lantern interviewed on 60 Minutes. Through the interview, we learn about Hal Jordan, the first human member of the intergalactic space cops known as the Green Lantern Corps, who were granted power rings by immortal blue beings known as the Guardians of the Universe. When John’s father sees what his son is watching, he orders John to go outside and places an apple on the boy’s head. “Are you afraid?” the elder Stewart barks to the younger, and draws his revolver. When John Jr. answers, “No,” his father fires, shooting the apple from his son’s head. Satisfied with the boy’s fearless performance, the family goes to lunch to celebrate.
By the time the credits on the episode roll, it’s clear that DC Studios co-heads James Gunn and Peter Safran flinched a bit while making Lanterns, but it’s hard to blame them. Green Lantern may be one of the most enduring and popular superhero franchises, with a character by that name appearing in print and other media consistently for more than 80 years. But it’s also one of the more convoluted and strangerDC properties, and a 2011 big screen bomb starring Ryan Reynolds didn’t help that perception. For the most part, Lanterns creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King face their fears admirably in the pilot, relying on a structure cribbed from HBO‘s True Detective, but keeping a surprising amount of comic book absurdity.
The debt that Lanterns owes to True Detective is immediately apparent. Split mostly across 2016 and 2026, the series follows two squabbling sleuths as they uncover something evil in heartland America. In the earlier timeline, which takes up most of the premiere episode’s runtime, Hal (Kyle Chandler) must reluctantly train John (Aaron Pierre), who has been chosen by the Guardians as his backup. Hal doesn’t trust his trainee, and he takes John’s cool, professional demeanor as something of a personal challenge. But when the two get word of a strange shooting in Rushville, Nebraska, the same small town where Hal’s alien successor Abin Sur crash-landed, they decide to stay and investigate further.
Their point of contact in Rushville is Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald, with an accent that sounds more like she was in Fargo instead of No Country for Old Men). But it’s her father-in-law Will Macon (Garret Dillahunt) who takes particular interest in the Lanterns and the shooting. A sort of Earth-first xenophobe, Will tries to win Hal and John’s sympathies by deploying his impressive resources, which includes a ranch filled with armed militia, his lawyer son Billy (Jason Ritter), and his alluring wife Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan).
The first episode of Lanterns works best when it leans into this mixture of the mundane and the sci-fi. As Hal and John drive onto the ranch, past armed guards and rednecks with machine guns doing training exercises, we think we know what to expect (“If it looks like a duck, shoots AR-15s like a duck, quack, quack, duck,” jokes Jordan). That feeling only increases when we meet Will, whose swagger matches Hal’s energy, but who seems vaguely hostile toward John. Will makes a show of chopping meat in front of the vegan John, and even when Will compliments John for his service as a Marine sniper, one gets the sense that the rich white Midwesterner doesn’t care for the Black man in his home.
Yet, as soon as Will gets the chance to explain his motivations, he uses language familiar to any reader of DC Comics. For Will, Abin Sur’s arrival in Rushville signals an inevitable alien invasion, one he has been preparing to stave off for decades. The climax of the episode sees Hal interrogate what appears to be some bumpkin passing through (Chris Coy), but who confirms that he is an alien on a reconnaissance mission. And, perhaps most delightful of all to this long-time Green Lantern reader, the Hal-o-Gram that John accidentally activates is an Energy Twin, a double that ring wielders make for emergencies.
The show’s frank acknowledgment of weird stuff should satisfy most nerds wanting space opera, without scaring away people who think “Green Lantern” is a dumb name for a superhero. And those still on the fence will surely be won over by Chandler’s incredible performance as Jordan.
Most of the Lanterns pilot serves as a celebration of Jordan as the most incredible jerk in superhero history. He’s arrogant and reckless, he bullies John and Kerry when they get in his way, and he’s completely over the whole superhero thing. And yet, Chandler delivers all of his lines with an aw-shucks drawl and an irresistible twinkle in his eye. Even better, the episode presents Hal as undeniably competent. He assesses the situation before anyone else, knows exactly the right buttons to press to navigate Macon and the alien invaders. The interrogation sequence at the episode’s end proves that Hal has earned every big of his arrogance.
Good as Chandler is, Pierre may be even better in the less showy part of John. A military man raised under a demanding father, forced to learn from Hal Jordan, and stuck in an almost exclusively white Nebraska town, John must keep his head down and stay the course. But Pierre finds ways to register John’s frustration in subtle ways, whether that be the anger he initially expresses in a phone call with his dad or the grimace he lets out upon realizing that the woman he had a one-night-stand with is Macon’s wife.
If Lanterns can continue to give space for Chandler and Pierre to show off their skills and let Hal and John play off one another, keeping the sci-fi stuff present but not overwhelming, then the show can shine brighter than any other adaptation of the comic. But if the showrunners show fear and lean too hard into True Detective grittiness or comic book wackiness, well, it’s going to be just one more superhero show that crashes and burns.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
Green Lantern Illuminations:
The actual show has a lot more Green Lantern stuff than initial advertising suggested, but I suspect some comic book fans will still be disappointed. In particular, those who only know Green Lantern from the Geoff Johns run onward will be confused, as it lacks anything involving the other Lantern Corps. However, the wandering, plainclothes Hal is consistent with his characterization from the mid-60s through the ’80s, when he would travel around the country, driving a truck, selling toys, peddling insurance, and generally staying out of outer space.
It’s interesting that Hal goes public with his identity in the 1990s in the DCU. Canonically, Hal more or less keeps his secret identity, even through today. Conversely, John was the first to stop wearing a mask and make his identity public, soon followed by Guy.
Given how they’re modeled after isolationist extremists, Macon and his crew aren’t representative of most Earthlings. But one wonders how the rest of the DCU Earth feels about aliens, given that Hal unmasks almost 25 years before Superman reveals himself, three years before the events of that movie. None of the characters in the Hall of Justice mural shown in Superman are alien (although Gunfire canonically got his powers in an alien invasion). Did Hal pave the way for Earthlings to be more accepting of extraterretials?
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