Spoiler warning: this breaks down all of Lanterns season 1, episode 1, including the final scene. If you have not watched yet, bookmark this and come back.
I knew the shape of this show about fifteen minutes in. Two mismatched investigators, a body in a part of America the camera treats like a foreign country, a case that keeps getting bigger every time somebody asks one more question. If you have watched True Detective, you have watched this structure before, and Lanterns is not shy about it. Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King built a Green Lantern series on the bones of HBO’s most reliable crime formula, and for most of the premiere I could not decide whether that was confidence or a hedge. By the last ninety seconds I stopped caring, because the show did something I did not see coming.
The Cold Open Is the Whole Thesis
We start in 1996 with a young John Stewart parked in front of a 60 Minutes segment, watching Hal Jordan explain the Green Lantern Corps. Hal calls himself a regular person. He describes Lanterns as beat cops scattered across the galaxy. He mentions the test for the job is one question: are you afraid?
Then John’s father catches him watching, sends him out into the yard, and balances an apple on his head. He asks his son the same question Hal just asked the country. The advice he gives John afterward is to breathe in, button down, and bottle up.
That is a tremendous piece of setup, and it does more character work in four minutes than most superhero pilots manage in an hour. John Stewart’s defining trait in the comics is discipline. Here we watch discipline get installed in him at gunpoint, essentially, by a father who confused control with survival. Everything Aaron Pierre does for the rest of the episode traces back to that yard.
Two Timelines, One Slow Burn
The bulk of the premiere lives in 2016. The Guardians have picked John as backup for Earth’s sector, and Hal has been assigned to train him, a job he clearly does not want. They end up in Rushville, Nebraska, working a murder that has cosmic fingerprints on it whether Hal wants to say so out loud or not.
This is where I had to do the most trusting of the process. The pacing is deliberate to the point of being sleepy in stretches, and more than that, the setup keeps bumping against the Green Lantern lore I walked in with. Hal Jordan is a test pilot with a chip on his shoulder and a massive. Kyle Chandler plays him as a burned-out guy who has been doing this job so long he has stopped explaining himself, and who would rather drink than teach. The mythology is there, but it is handed to us in fragments, out of order, and often through people who are lying. If you came in wanting the Corps, the Guardians, and the emerald light, you are going to spend a lot of this hour looking at Nebraska.
The crime scene sequence is the best argument for the approach. Hal reads it as alien immediately because his experience tells him it is alien. John works it like a former Marine turned rookie detective, from the ground up, refusing to leap. Two competent people looking at identical evidence and arriving in different places is exactly the kind of scene this format exists to deliver, and it tells you more about both men than any power ring construct would.
Kelly Macdonald’s sheriff is the other thing keeping the middle stretch alive. There is history between her and Hal that the episode declines to spell out, and she pushes back on him in a way nobody else in the hour does. When John inserts himself into her investigation, the show finally picks up speed, and the chase that follows is the first time the premiere feels genuinely awake.
The other standout is small and strange in a good way. John puts on Hal’s ring and activates its AI, which presents as a hologram of Hal himself, except this version is loose, funny, and engaged in a way the flesh-and-blood Hal is not.
Then They Kill Him
The final scene jumps ten years forward to 2026. John Stewart, older and goateed, gets called in to examine a frozen body. It is Hal Jordan.
I sat up. Killing your recognizable movie star lead in the first episode is a Lindelof move through and through, and it reframes everything that came before it as a countdown rather than an origin story. The hologram version of Hal is now the closest thing we have to the real one, which turns a clever scene into a load-bearing one. And nothing about the way the show stages it feels final. Hal Jordan has died before in the comics, and he has come back from worse than a freezer.
Where This Sits in the DCU
This is the part I keep chewing on. The 2026 thread lands roughly a year after Superman and Peacemaker season two, which means John Stewart is operating in a world that already knows what a Justice League looks like. If Hal is gone, or compromised, or something worse, then the DCU’s Green Lantern going forward is John, and James Gunn has quietly used a prestige detective show to install him as the version that matters. Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner is already established elsewhere in this universe. Sinestro is coming. Laura Linney is playing a Guardian.
For a franchise that has been wobbling since Supergirl, handing the keys to an eight-episode HBO murder mystery is a genuinely odd bet. On the evidence of one episode, it might work.
I came out of the premiere impressed rather than thrilled, and then that last shot moved me from watching to invested. Episode two has my full attention, which is more than the hour before it earned.
Leave a comment