‘Lanterns’ Episode 1 review: Bringing Green Lantern down to Earth

Starring Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre, Lanterns finds its strongest material in exploring what it means to inherit someone else’s power.

Green Lantern has always been one of DC’s harder superheroes to capture in live action. In part because the character’s whole appeal lies in escaping real life. A ring powered by will can conjure anything its wearer imagines, while the mythology stretches across planets, alien civilizations, and an entire corps of intergalactic peacekeepers. Lanterns responds to all that possibility by opening in Nebraska, where Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and newly recruited John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) investigate a mass shooting that Hal insists has extraterrestrial origins.

Partly that’s because the series has been conceived as a detective story, with all the familiar prestige-TV furniture that implies. The pilot covers rural secrets, damaged investigators, old grudges, hostile local authorities, and ominous stretches of open country.

But Lanterns is less interested in turning Green Lantern into True Detective than in using the procedural framework to pull apart one of the mythology’s defining ideas. That a Green Lantern is supposedly chosen for being without fear. Lanterns immediately wants to know what kind of person could actually believe that about himself.

A mythology with “nothing to fear anymore.”

Hal’s been telling that story for years. In an old television interview watched by John as a child, he remembers being asked whether he was afraid when the ring chose him. His father had already died, Hal explains. And once a child’s worst fear comes true, there’s “nothing to fear anymore.” Moments later, John’s father takes him outside, points a gun at him, and asks the same. John says no. The parallel establishes two men who’ve learned to deny fear in different ways. Hal turns loss into overconfidence. While John learned to “breathe in, button down, and bottle up.”

Chandler and Pierre make that contrast the main attraction. Hal is hungover, reckless, territorial about his job, and perversely committed to making John earn a position that the Guardians already chose him for. Pierre plays John as his opposite. He’s outwardly disciplined enough that every increasingly polite “sir” sounds like an insult. Their exchanges have the loose irritation of a buddy-cop pairing. It reminds of Marvel’s wonderful Wonder Man series from earlier this year (revive it for Season 2, you cowards). But there’s something uglier underneath their dynamic. Hal’s training a successor he plainly doesn’t want to succeed him.

That tension comes into focus when, in 2016 during their training, Hal hands John his ring during another irresponsible test and leaves him to survive on his own. John’s first construct is bubble wrap. A joke Hal predictably mocks. Yet the choice says more about John than a giant fist would’ve. Given limitless power in a lethal situation, John instinctively creates something protective. Later, when teaching a boy how to throw a football, John tells him not to aim but to “just imagine it going through.” Lanterns is already treating the ring less as an effects machine than as a personality test.

An arrogant outsider in search of outsiders.

The show’s cleverest use of Green Lantern mythology is even smaller. When John puts on Hal’s ring, he encounters a backup copy of Hal’s consciousness from ten years earlier, uploaded as part of Lantern protocol. This younger “Halogram” is warmer, funnier, and confused to discover that his older self has apparently spent months failing to train John. “You were a lot nicer ten years ago,” John tells him. The device gives the season two mysteries at once. Not only who or what eventually kills Hal Jordan, but what happened to the man before he died.

The alien case gradually becomes inseparable from that question. Hal has secretly monitored Rushville, Nebraska for years because Abin Sur, the dying Lantern who gave him the ring, crashed nearby under circumstances he never believed were accidental. His only clue from the old backup is the cryptic phrase “There’s hail in Rushville, Nebraska.” It’s enough to send him racing toward the crime scene while refusing to explain himself to John or Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), who’s considerably less patient for his mystique.

That friction lets Lanterns have some fun with the absurdity of cosmic jurisdiction. Hal can only intervene if the crime is extraterrestrial. So Kerry repeatedly reminds him that, until he proves otherwise, he’s simply an arrogant outsider trampling through her investigation. A judge later asks which law-enforcement agency Hal actually represents, leaving the legendary superhero to stumble through the answer. “I’m Green Lantern, and I’m an agent of… the Green Lanterns.” For all its genre trappings, the episode keeps circling the same question John asks about the ring. Who gave this person so much power? And why should anyone accept that choice as legitimate?

“He’s lonely.”

The answer gets more complicated during the premiere’s best scene, when Hal identifies an alien suspect by exposing their cultural ignorance. The “man” in disguise has memorized Nebraska football trivia yet doesn’t know where Harry Potter went to school. Hal realizes that someone pretending to be human would study the specific facts he believes humans are supposed to know while missing the useless information everybody absorbs without trying. It’s a neat detective trick precisely because it requires Hal to understand humanity better than the alien does.

Whether Hal understands himself is another matter. Kerry offers the episode’s most transparently thematic diagnosis when John calls his mentor fearless. “He’s not f—ing fearless,” she says. “He’s lonely.” Exactly. Hal’s spent his life treating the absence of attachments as evidence of courage.

So the show presents it as damage. His swagger, drinking, cruelty toward John, and refusal to relinquish the Lantern role all begin to look like different expressions of the same terror. It’s refreshing to see this take on Hal Jordan, a comic book mainstay who for years fans have wished would receive a minting in live-action cinema, Ryan Reynolds aside.

The bottom line.

Lanterns has the right of it in exploring the darker side of a mythic character, while constantly gesturing at the meta-worship of him as the most “iconic” Green Lantern. Especially in the wake of Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner portrayal in the Superman movie from last year. Which more or less serves as our entry point in this TV saga.

The premiere ends with a final jump forward to present day. John returns to Rushville and finds Hal dead in the bleachers of a football stadium. Earlier, Hal warned his trainee that the job would remain his “as long as I’m alive.” Lanterns spends its premiere showing John the difference between admiring a hero and knowing one. Then it ends by confronting him with the inevitable consequence of succession.

The series may still need to prove that grounding one of DC’s most visually expansive concepts won’t eventually become a limitation. For now, though, its confidence comes from understanding that Green Lantern’s most interesting power was never the ability to make glowing objects. It was the idea that fearlessness and willpower could qualify someone to wield power in the first place. Lanterns has enough sense to suspect that anybody who claims not to be afraid is probably hiding the thing worth investigating.

Lanterns airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

---

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.