By 
Complaining or confused about what happened at the end of the series premiere of HBO Max’s “Lanterns”? That’s kind of the point, according to the showrunners.
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE PREMIERE OF “LANTERNS”
The series primarily jumps between two time periods 2016 and 2026. In the 2016 period, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) is training John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), who was chosen by the Guardians of the Universe to replace him as Green Lantern.
The episode ends with a cut to the present day where John sees a dead and frozen Hal who is also missing his ring. Some fans are up in arms about Hal being killed off, even as the bifurcated narrative structure means Kyle Chandler’s Hal will still be around in subsequent episodes.
Others are genuinely confused as to what it means. Speaking with Collider, co-creator Damon Lindelof says James Gunn had already written the “Superman” script by the time the show was being conceived – and in that script, Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) was Green Lantern.
So the show was built around the premise of what happened to Hal. Even he and Tom King were concerned about killing off Hal: “we were like, ‘We can’t do that. Everyone’s going to hate us. It feels gimmicky’”, but he says showrunner Chris Mundy with pushing them to make the decision:
“On Sunday night, are we willing to acknowledge that a lot of people are going to be angry, that if we were watching this and not making it, that we would be saying, ‘I waited this long for another live-action version of Hal, having not gotten him since the Ryan Reynolds film, and then basically 50 minutes after getting me to fall in love with Kyle Chandler, you’re killing him off? F— you.
I guess our feeling is, let’s see how you feel at the end of Episode 8, and if you still feel like it was exploitative or unnecessary, or that it wasn’t exactly what had to happen in order for this story to get told, then we deserve it. But I think we’re willing to absorb the boos from the audience in the first inning, as long as we still have a shot at winning the game.”
This has already led to speculation that Hal is alive, especially as the premiere establishes that there are aliens on Earth who can disguise themselves as humans. Either way we’ll find out by the time the season finale rolls around on October 4th.
The post Lindelof On That “Lanterns” Premiere Ending appeared first on Dark Horizons.
