The first five minutes of Lanterns are built around a single question, asked twice, in two very different rooms. In 1996, a young John Stewart and his two brothers watch a late-night special covering the reveal of Hal Jordan’s identity as Green Lantern. Hal, an Air Force test pilot, says he got the assignment because he has no fear, that after losing a parent as a child there is nothing left that scares him. He explains that Lanterns work like beat cops spread across the galaxy, and that the entry test comes down to one question. Are you afraid?
Minutes later, John’s father asks his son the same thing while pointing a pistol at an apple balanced on the boy’s head. John answers “No, sir,” and does not flinch as his father shoots the apple off.
Most of the coverage has treated that pairing as a tone-setter, a way to establish the rules of the ring before the murder mystery starts. There is a more interesting read available, and it reframes the entire relationship between these two men.
The Interview Sounds Rehearsed Because It Is
Watch Hal in that broadcast again and pay attention to how smoothly the answer arrives. He has a line ready about his father dying young and fear dying with him. It plays less like a man reporting his interior life and more like a man who has told this story at bars, at signings, to kids in shopping malls, and has landed on the version that gets the best reaction.
Now notice what the show never actually shows. Nobody in that interview asks Hal whether he was afraid when the ring found him. He volunteers the fearlessness. He decided at some point that fearlessness was the cool answer, and he has been repeating it ever since.
If that is what the premiere is quietly setting up, then Hal Jordan has spent a decade selling the public a version of himself he does not believe. He was scared. He probably still is. And the thing he is most scared of is that he was never the right man for the ring in the first place.
John Stewart Might Be the Genuine Article
The apple scene reads as abuse on first watch, and the show does not soften it. John gets punished for having the television on when his father had forbidden it, and the punishment is a loaded firearm and a game of William Tell. That is not a healthy household.
But look at who is afraid in that house. The brothers are. One of them is pressed against a wall, another hovers near the front door, and both of them look terrified. They tell John to shut the TV off because their father is coming home. John turns it back on. He posts a brother at the door and keeps watching.
What John shows toward his father is not fear. It is respect, the boot camp kind, and it holds even when the gun comes out. He stands there like he is waiting for a bus. Whatever his father did to him, the kid genuinely does not appear to feel the thing Hal has been performing on television.
That flips the power dynamic between the two leads before either of them shares a scene. The Guardians chose John. Hal is quick to remind him he is still a rookie. In the comics, Hal’s selection came down to being the closest qualified human to a dying alien’s crash site. He was found. John was picked.
So the veteran with the ring is the one who happened to be in the right place, and the trainee without one is the one who was actually wanted. No wonder Hal spends the premiere dropping his ring on the dashboard and jumping out of a moving car to prove a point. A man secure in his own selection does not need to keep staging tests.
Both of Them Have the Wrong Definition of a Hero
The strongest version of this theory is that Hal and John are running on the same broken premise from opposite directions. Hal built a public identity on a fearlessness he faked. John built a private one on a fearlessness his father drilled into him with live ammunition. Neither man has been given room to consider that courage might involve being afraid and moving anyway, which is the actual engine of the Green Lantern mythos.
That gives the season somewhere to go beyond the murder in Rushville. Showrunner Chris Mundy has described the show as being about replacement, about when someone should step aside and when it is time for the next person to take over. Replacement stories usually turn on competence. This one looks like it turns on honesty. Hal cannot hand anything off until he admits what he has been hiding, and John cannot receive it until he learns that his father taught him the wrong lesson with the right words.
The episode, titled “Pilot,” was written by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King and directed by James Hawes. The eight-episode season stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre alongside Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Jason Ritter, Ulrich Thomsen as Sinestro, and Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner. New episodes air Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
The premiere gets accused of being slow, and the criticism is fair on a scene-by-scene basis. But an opening that asks the same question in two rooms and gets two different kinds of lie in response is doing a lot of work in very little time.
Sources: Den of Geek | TVLine | Comic Book Club | Gizmodo | The Review Geek | Reactor
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