In many ways, the finale of Lanterns ended exactly how I thought it would. The writing, as they say, was on the wall. It was not hard to predict most of the places this show was headed, though one exchange did take me by surprise. Spoilers follow.
The Lanterns finale finally solves the mystery of Hal Jordan’s murder while revealing the truth about Noah, Sinestro’s involvement and what John Stewart’s future as a Green Lantern will look like. Some of this I (and plenty of other fans) predicted: Who killed Hal, the fact that a Manhunter remained in Rushville and so forth. We’ll come to all that.
The episode opens by filling in more of Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and Kerry Kane’s (Kelly Macdonald) history. After the 2016 disaster in Rushville, Hal is blamed for the destruction and hung out to dry by the Guardians, who wanted him gone so they could pick a Lantern who would more readily do their bidding. They offered John (Aaron Pierre) the job but he turned them down, so they turned to Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), making him their “errand boy” as John puts it later on in the episode.
When Hal is finally released a decade later, Kerry is there waiting for him. The two begin a relationship, though most of Rushville still despises Hal for what happened. Kerry publicly defends him, arguing that while Hal may not deserve forgiveness, he deserves some peace after spending years trying to make amends.
Things go badly from there. Someone burns Hal’s house down with him inside. Hal tries to escape with Earl but is knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, he discovers that Noah (Shea Pritchard) has healed him using the same bizarre regenerative ability that saved John earlier in the season. Apparently he’s also healed Earl?
This is the moment of revelation, though it seemed so obvious that Noah was a Manhunter that it fell a little flat for me. I don’t mind that the clues were there for us so we could put it all together ahead of time, but it was just so painfully obvious that Noah was a Manhunter.
In any case, we learn that Noah exists because of Zoe’s experiments on Kerry years earlier. Kerry became pregnant when her finger was healed despite not having been with anyone, and Noah was essentially created through the alien Manhunter technology Zoe used on her – like Jesus and Mary or Jane the Virgin. Kerry has known what Noah is for years, though she believes Noah himself doesn’t know the truth (something that both she and Noah have been trying to keep from one another).
Back on the strange world John Stewart and the Halogram traveled to at the end of Episode 7, Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) explains that Noah was the person who freed him from prison. This is one thing I didn’t predict, though I think it would have been a much more satisfying revelation if Sinestro actually served as more than an exposition dump and a free Lantern for John. I think they must be saving him for a potential Season 2 and his Yellow fear-based Lanterns, but who knows.
Noah sought Sinestro out because Sinestro had managed to kill a Guardian and because Noah wanted him to create a Lantern for him. Sinestro forged one using the overwhelming fear present on the devastated planet (the same planet that Zoe destroyed). I was fully expecting this Lantern to be yellow rather than green, or to do something bad or unexpected when John eventually powered his ring, but it turned out to be just . . . a normal Green Lantern. Cool, I guess.
Sinestro believes Noah will inevitably succumb to his Manhunter programming. Hal disagrees. Before his death, Hal had discovered Noah’s secret and followed him through Zoe’s portal. Sinestro urged Hal to kill Noah before Noah became a threat, but Hal refused.
John faces essentially the same choice when he returns to Rushville, leaving Sinestro in his island prison on the dead planet, surrounded by a lake of madness. Fertile soil for a supervillain to grow in, no doubt.
The moment John returns to Earth, Noah attacks him and takes Hal’s ring. The two drive around Rushville and Noah confesses to killing Hal. He says he did it because Hal had learned what he was and Noah couldn’t risk Hal telling Noah’s mom. He also talks about how he would like to just live a normal life. Play football, which he likes, start a family and just live. But Noah also reveals how terrified he is of himself. He tells John that if he could see inside his head, he’d be terrified. John tells Noah that he killed Zoe because she wanted him to. She knew she couldn’t stop, couldn’t overcome her programming. So his killing was a mercy kill and one that she invited, though she didn’t ever say the words.
Noah says the words: “Kill me.” Just let me finish this game, he says, and don’t let me see it coming. He gives the ring and lantern back to John and a few things fall into place. This is a kid who really has overcome his programming, who really does act out of love and selflessness, who fears his programming enough to overcome it – something John can relate to. And it also means that he almost certainly didn’t kill Hal.
John confronts Kerry during Noah’s football game and reveals that he knows she has always understood what her son is, and he brings up his own mother and the “insane” ways she tried to raise him to be fearless, and how she “held her breath” with fear, every time. Fear and love can make you scared, John says (and I wish they’d written this line just a tiny bit less redundant, since “fear” and “scared” are kind of the same; maybe “Fear and love can make you do crazy things” or something along those lines).
He knows that she killed Hal – another thing I predicted last week.
The episode flashes back to Hal confronting Kerry shortly before his death. Hal tells her that Noah is a Manhunter and that he may be planning something dangerous. Rather than turn Noah over to the Guardians, Hal proposes taking Kerry and Noah somewhere safe while they figure out what to do. They argue and she panics.
She’s spent Noah’s entire life protecting him and believes Hal’s return has put everything in jeopardy. As Hal tries to calm her down and tells her he loves her, she wheels around and shoots him. Right between the eyes.
In the present, Kerry admits that part of the reason she brought John to Rushville was because she needed someone else to tell her whether her son really was a monster. John doesn’t think he is. He points out that Noah gave up the ring, protected Kerry and even asked John to kill him rather than risk hurting anyone. John believes Noah’s human upbringing may be stronger than his programming, but he also accepts that it’s a gamble and that someone needs to stick around who can stop him if he ever goes full Manhunter (because Superman is too busy or something). Noah deserves to make his own choices, but a backup contingency is still a good idea.
John tells Kerry not to turn herself in. Noah’s team wins the football game and it looks like he’s off to college on a scholarship. John goes to the Green Lantern light and summons Guy and they have a conversation in which John basically says he’s going to be an independent contractor. Guy can have the rest of the sector but John gets Earth. He tells Guy to tell the Guardians to find it in their hearts to let this happen. Emphasis on hearts. I’m not sure what the implication is here, but it sounds to me like John is implying that the Guardians themselves are Manhunters (sharing the crystalline hearts like the one he took out of Zoe’s body) but maybe I’m making a leap here. It’s not very clear. This is in response to Guy telling him that the Guardians will “send an army” to take John out once they learn he has an unsanctioned Lantern.
“You take the stars, I’ll take the dirt,” John says, which is where we get the finale’s title. They trade some barbs and Guy flies off.
Halogram pops up and they have their final conversation. Hal tells John that despite all his doubts, he thinks John is going to be a better Green Lantern than he ever was. More importantly, Hal urges him not to eliminate fear but to accept it. Stop being afraid of being afraid, he says.
Before disappearing, the Halogram asks John what Hal’s real last words were.
John tells him: “I love you.”
Halogram replies: “I love you too, Junior.”
This was the other bit I didn’t predict. Just how much I would enjoy these two getting along in the end. This season got everything backwards. It never let their relationship grow before falling out, so we pretty much only got bitterness and bickering between the two until real Hal died and Halogram popped up. No bonding occurred at all until the real Hal was gone, and only this echo of him remained. It’s a shame because I think this partnership could have been really great in a second season, and now we really don’t need a second season at all. John Stewart can just go join the DCU movies as one character among many, and Hal – easily the best part of this show thanks to the standout performance of Kyle Chandler – is dead and gone.
John finally charges the ring, which causes the Halogram to disappear for good. What follows is a loose-ends montage. He gives Maggie the $300,000, which is stupid and annoying. If he wanted to help the town, he could have donated that money to the town to be shared amongst all the victims of the Rushville disaster rather than a waitress blackmailing him. He visits his family, and everything seems all sunshine and roses there and we get to see his mom’s reaction – letting go of holding her breath – through a new lens. But I’m not sure I buy the happy family bit here, or that all is nicely resolved after years of trauma and rancor. It’s too neat and tidy.
The montage ends with John rewriting the Guardians’ oath to one that Sinestro and Hal would be proud of: “The brightest day. The darkest night. I embrace my fear. I’ll do what’s right. I choose this ring. I choose this fight. In service to this lantern’s light.”
And after spending the whole season unable to properly fly, John Stewart takes flight and leaves Rushville, Nebraska forever. Well, hopefully forever. That town is the worst.
All told, while I liked the final three episodes of this season more than the first five, the show overall was incredibly messy in terms of pacing, structure, plot, character arcs, and the stakes were always just a little bit hard to pin down. This felt less like prestige HBO and more like a show trying to be prestige HBO, but without the writing and production quality. (I described it in another review as a CW show cosplaying as an HBO show and I stand by that, in spite of some genuinely good performances).
The two timelines, the flashbacks, the way it was all pieced together, the twists and turns – none of it worked. It all fell flat. The show tried to be two things at once: a grounded detective mystery and a superhero show, and it failed on both fronts. The mystery wasn’t very good, the “buddy cop” dynamics were all over the place and the superhero elements were minimal and treated cynically. I was hoping the DCU under James Gunn would revive some of the optimism of the comic books, and the color, and the sense of fun. Grounded and cynical and largely depressing was not what I expected.
It’s a shame, too. I actually love the idea of a grounded superhero mystery, but mysteries and detective shows are tough to get right, and this one never found its rhythm. I’m not sure Green Lantern was the right vehicle for this to begin with.
The main question I’m left with is: who was this show for? Not hardcore Green Lantern fans, surely, but not casuals, either, since it did so little to help casual viewers understand the wider cosmology, the importance of characters like Sinestro and countless other details. So then who? They dabbled with racial issues but never really followed through. They toyed with the idea of consequences for superhero actions, but left that largely with a bag of money and an “I’m still sorry” note. They even had some good, heartfelt bits about how parents fail their children, and how trauma shapes us, but ultimately that ended with a fairly obvious moral: Don’t be afraid of being afraid. Not a bad line, and not a bad moment, but a little trite.
What I’d really like is a prequel about Hal Jordan in the 80s taking on bad guys all across the sector. We’ll get John in the movies, so give us Hal being funny and cracking wise as he takes down baddies in outer space. That I would watch.
What did you think of the season and the season finale, dearest readers? Should it get a second season? Would you watch a Hal Jordan prequel? Let me knowyour thoughts on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
My previous Lanterns reviews are below:
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