Fans are dying to know if Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan, a DCU fan-favorite, will be brought back in season 2 of Lanterns. Now we have an update.
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Sunday’s Lanterns season finale has divided audiences sharply, based on what you expected from the finale, or your knowledge of character and comic lore and how the show might be diverging from it.
But there is one thing that was made clear. Hal Jordan, the real Hal Jordan, is actually dead, shot impulsively like Kerry when it was revealed he knew her son Noah was a manhunter. No tricks, but not a total lack of hope either.
In a new interview with Collider, departing Lanterns co-creator and writer Damon Lindelof spoke about Hal’s return in season 2, where, despite being coy, he almost confirms it.
“I can only tell you that everybody in the Season 1 room, inclusive of the writers who are working on ideating on Season 2, felt like even though we knew that it was going to be emotionally devastating and/or disappointing and maybe even frustrating, that the worst possible schmuck-baity thing that we could do is show you a pilot where Hal Jordan was definitively dead, and then try to walk it back and say, ‘Oh, he was a clone’ or ‘He’s only mostly dead’ in the Princess Bride vernacular. In terms of like moving forward into subsequent seasons of the show, I swear to you, as I look at you in the eye on Wednesday this 30th of September, I do not know anything about the creative, and I wouldn’t want to hamstring those writers in any way for what future storytelling mechanisms they could indulge in. Knowing what the comics have done with Parallax — and Hal, I think, has died at least 3 or 4 times over the course of the comics, and celebrating everything that Kyle did in his performance to get the audience to fall in love with Hal.”
The Lanterns finale shot down those clone theories, or the idea that Noah might be able to bring him back to life with his manhunter tech. Nope, that Hal is really dead. Emphasis on that Hal.
The hope here is based on an exceedingly obvious tease from Sinestro where he tells the Halogram, “But there is a way. If we have your ring, I could bring you back to life for real.”
While that is not expanded on at all, John did in fact take Hal’s ring and charge it in Sinestro’s lantern, so that possibility remains open. Open and likely to occur, of course. While Lindelof isn’t involved in season 2, he cites the fact that Hal has been killed and resurrected more than a few times in the comic, the most famous of which being a storyline where Hal was infected by Parallax to become a villain, then died and returned as a hero.
As far as I can tell, there is no comic-based lore about a Lantern being brought back with their ring, though Lanterns spent half the season having John haul around a carbon copy of Hal, which wasn’t even a hologram and could physically touch things. Though of course if Sinestro wants to do this, you can guess his motives are far from pure. We could get some version of Parallax after all down the road.
All of this is happening when season 2 of Lanterns has not even been greenlit or announced yet, but no one is really bothering to pretend it isn’t happening. Perhaps there’s some sort of hiccup with the Paramount merger, but James Gunn already said that David Ellison told them to “keep doing what they’re doing” in regard to the DCU, and Lanterns has performed exceedingly well on HBO Max.
There are far more questions than Hal’s return, namely what happens when you charge a Green Lantern ring in a lantern infected by yellow fear cracks, but there is plenty of time to figure that out. But Hal? Hal’s coming back, even if no one dares say that outright yet.
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