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This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 2.
At the start of Green Lantern #192 (1985), by Steve Englehart and Joe Staton, the supervillain Star Sapphire carries Hal Jordan into the air and drops him. Despite the fact that Hal no longer wears a power ring, having rescinded his membership in the Green Lantern Corps months earlier, he remains unafraid. He looks around as he plummets, searching for a way to continue his mission, despite the fact that he no longer has superpowers.
Nothing from that issue appears in the second episode of Lanterns, “Trust Fall,” but it’s hard not to recall that scene of a powerless Hal. The episode strips Hal of his power almost immediately, having his ring run out of charge in the first 10 minutes and sending John on a mission back to Coast City, California, to retrieve his battery to recharge. And yet, it still finds ways to be a compelling sci-fi mystery, even if Green Lantern can’t be Green Lantern.
Now that introductions are out of the way—including, it should be said, the death of Hal Jordan in 2026, something that episode two doesn’t even mention—”Trust Fall” can spend more time doing what Lanterns really wants to do, probing an alien mystery. Directed by James Hawes and written by Vanessa Baden Kelly and showrunner Chris Mundy, the episode spends most of its time sending Hal and John on separate missions before building to a trip off-planet to visit Sinestro, the big bad of the Green Lantern franchise.
Before flying to the Green Lantern Corps headquarters on the planet Oa, Hal plays the gumshoe in Rushville. That means breaking into the morgue and dragging the (very naked) victims of last week’s shootings through the metal-detectors around town, which reveal themselves to be alien detectors. These sequences also give Hal more time alone with Sheriff Kerry, a pairing that’s good for plot purposes, but even better for letting viewers enjoy the chemistry between the two. Even thirty years after Trainspotting, it’s easy to underestimate Kelly Macdonald, who seemed like a shy bumpkin out of her depth in the pilot, only to reveal herself as more than capable in “Trust Fall.” When she dresses down Hal for treating the fruit of his labor as a big revelation about aliens in the town, telling him, “Congratulations, you’re now caught up to me,” the viewer feels as if she’s talking to us too.
For his part, John gets sent across the country to retrieve Hal’s power battery. Although Hal calls it another training mission, John correctly realizes that Hal wants him out of the way. Annoying as that may be for Hal, it’s good news for us, because this segment indulges in a lot of deep Green Lantern lore, including name dropping a classic Alan Moore story, showing Hal’s battery hidden in a pocket dimension, and a look at Earl, Hal’s alien plant and a nod to Itty, the pet sidekick Hal had in comics from the late ’70s.
As with the pilot episode, those nods to nerdy stuff help fans accept the moments when the show veers away from comic book stuff. In particular, that comes when John gets abducted by Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor), leader of the aliens who have come to Rushville. Antaan reveals his group’s mission to find and execute a Manhunter, the last surviving member of a race of brutal enforcers responsible for wiping out several species, including his. Antaan gives John an ultimatum, to find and deliver the Manhunter to him in 48 hours, or he and his people will self-destruct like Waylon did in the pilot to kill the Manhunter, destroying much of Rushville in the process.
To convince John of the importance of their mission, Anton injects him with a liquid that allows him to live out his people’s genocide. And it’s at this point that viewers will either totally fall in love with Lanterns, or start to drop off. Because as much as Antaan demands that John “see” what the Manhunters did to his people, Lanterns doesn’t show us anything. All we get to see is a bunch of humans holding down another human, who makes a sad, suffering face.
To be clear, it’s an incredible piece of acting by Aaron Pierre. Once again, he gives a complex performance as John, constantly finding new ways of letting his character’s emotions seep through the calm exterior he’s been forced to adopt. And when he’s crying and writhing at the pain of what Antaan makes him witness, we believe that he’s seeing something horrific. Likewise, veteran character actor Ben-Victor feels like an alien in disguise, properly menacing but also not particularly bloodthirsty, even when talking about killing innocents.
But is that enough for people who want to see aliens and superheroes in a Green Lantern show? For some, a bunch of normal people pretending to be aliens and fight sequences that involve kicking and punching, but no constructs, may answer, “No,” even after we get our first look at Ulrich Thomsen as a properly diabolical Sinestro. But for this long-time Green Lantern reader, Lanterns‘s desire to be both human and superheroic works, if only because a falling Hal Jordan, unpowered but unfearful, showed me that the human part of a Green Lantern story is just as important as the weird aliens.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
Green Lantern Illuminations:
Given the rivalry between Hal and Batman in the past 20 years of DC Comics, it’s somewhat satisfying to see Hal do more detective work than Batman ever has on screen.
As cool as it is to see Sinestro in a Sciencecell on Oa, they couldn’t give us a peak at one other Lantern while he was there? Salaak’s not running things? Kilowog’s not on patrol? Heck, we’d even take Deeter or Kreon at this point.
Let’s talk about Antaan. In the comics, the Manhunters greatest sin was committing genocide in Sector 666, leaving only a small group of survivors. One of those survivors was Atros, who became Atrocitus, leader of the rage-filled Red Lantern Corps. Great as Ben-Victor is, he doesn’t exactly have Atrocitus energy. And, as a long-time comic reader who is very, very tired of Corps War stories, I’m personally hoping Lanterns doesn’t get into the other Corps. But if Antaan isn’t Atrocitus, who is he?
We get confirmation this episode that Coast City is in California. I always understood Coast City to be DC’s San Diego, so why does Hal have a Texan accent? The real answer is that Chandler modeled his performance on Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff, but it is distracting.
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