Spoilers ahead for Lanterns episode four.
Episode three sent us back in time, and while that flashback earned its place, it pulled the show out of its own format for a week. Episode four puts us right back in Rushville with Hal Jordan and John Stewart in the same frame, and for about fifty minutes, this is the version of these two I’ve been waiting for.
The setup is a clock. Antaan’s crew gives them thirty-six hours to hand over the Manhunter, or Rushville gets leveled with everyone in it. That’s the deal. Find the shapeshifter or the town becomes an acceptable loss. John, meanwhile, is dodging calls from his father and buying a scope from a shop owner who wants nothing to do with anybody connected to Green Lantern, which remains one of my favorite running details in this show. Nobody in this town likes Hal, and the show keeps quietly reminding you of it.
John takes the scope up the water tower and starts watching the Macon ranch, tracking a helicopter’s daily routine until he clocks a structure that shouldn’t be there. He calls it a weenie, which sends Hal into exactly the response you’d expect from Hal. The term is real, an old Walt Disney architectural idea about building something tall and eye-catching to pull guests in a direction without them realizing they’re being pulled. John’s read is that the structure is either where the Manhunter is hiding, or it’s bait. He’s right about one of those.
What follows is the best stretch of the episode. They loop in Sheriff Kerry Kane, and John works out a way in from underneath. He uses Hal’s ring to build a tunneling machine, and the show finally gets to show off the thing the comics have always understood about John Stewart. His constructs are architectural. Precise, engineered, built by somebody who thinks in blueprints. Hal throws up whatever gets him through the next ten seconds. Watching John design his way into a problem instead of punching it is the clearest argument the show has made yet for why these two belong on screen together.
Then it falls apart on them. Inside, they find a room stocked with alien weapons. Hal trips a pressure alarm while asking for his ring back, the compound’s blackout tech shuts the ring down completely, and Macon’s people haul them out in front of Macon himself, who makes a very direct threat against John before Kane turns up to pull them out. The weenie was a decoy. The lure worked exactly as designed.
Between all of this, the episode does its real damage in quiet rooms. Laura Linney’s Guardian turns up in John’s motel because he skipped a check in, and she goes to work on him. She tells him Hal violated his oath by visiting Sinestro. She tells him Hal called him uncreative, too weak to carry the ring. Then she cuts at his father, and that’s the one that lands. John bites. By the end of the conversation, he’s telling her Hal never earned the ring and was only keeping it warm.
The Sinestro material is where I’ll admit my bias. As a comics guy, I love it. Hal sitting across from the mentor he had to take down, being told he’ll have to kill John Stewart, is rich stuff, and the show is smart enough to let Hal carry it around without announcing it. He’s watching his own history run again with him in the other chair. If you came to Lanterns for the grounded Nebraska crime story, I understand the complaint that the prison scenes pull you out of the world. It doesn’t bother me. The mentor line is the spine of this thing.
Zoe’s death is a good fake-out. She visits John, tells him to get out of town, and her truck goes up in a beam from the sky as she drives off. In the moment, I bought it as an Atrocitus hit. The show doesn’t sit on it long enough to tip its hand, which is why it works. What makes it better is what Hal notices. John barely reacts to Zoe dying. He reacted far more when his parents were nearly killed. That gap is the tell, and it makes you want to go back and rewatch how John played that whole scene.
Which brings us to the car. Hal runs a test, talking about how Manhunters always find a path to power and manipulate whatever threatens it, and asks John who that sounds like. John says Macon. Hal knows better, because Macon is a blunt instrument who leans on money and guns and never once tried to get inside anybody’s head. Zoe attached herself to John his first night in town. John knows. Hal knows he knows.
Honestly, that ending is a little heartbreaking. The whole episode was building these two into a functioning team, and the last three minutes hand it all back. As for the reveal itself, Zoe was one of the more obvious candidates, and I’d guess most people saw it coming. That doesn’t hurt it. It made sense, it was set up fairly, and it isn’t trying to be a shock.
This show is not wobbling. It’s good, and episode four is another strong entry in it, with a glimpse of the partnership we know these two eventually become. There’s a mountain of mistrust between them still, and now most of the major cards are face up on the table.
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