‘Lanterns’ Episode 2 review: “Trust Fall”

Lanterns Episode 2, “Trust Fall,” turns John Stewart’s first real test into a larger question about who deserves his faith.

Last week, Lanterns introduced Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) as a man who mistakes having nothing to lose for fearlessness. Lanterns Episode 2, “Trust Fall,” picks at the next obvious problem. If Hal’s whole identity depends on believing himself uniquely qualified to wield the ring, what happens when his trainee starts doing things he can’t?

John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) still hasn’t learned how to fly. Hal’s method of instruction amounts to telling him to “just fly.” Which works about as well as expected. John indeed concentrates on the idea of flight and somehow produces a tiny green bird instead. Hal laughs it off at first. Then John removes the ring and the bird keeps chirping.

That changes the “lesson” completely. The bird should disappear once John loses contact with the ring. It doesn’t. Even after John travels across the country, gets kidnapped, beaten, and psychologically overwhelmed, he keeps the construct alive. Hal notices the anomaly long before John understands it himself. His blank stare of a response says more than a compliment would.

The bird is the word.

John does ask what Hal would’ve done if the flying lesson had actually worked. Hal avoids the question, though. He desperately needs his lantern battery, after all, which gives him a convenient reason to separate himself from the trainee who just did something impossible.

So yeah. Maybe Hal doesn’t consciously understand why that unsettles him yet. But Sinestro certainly does. There’s a good reason for why the episode begins with Hal staring at John’s bird and ends with his former mentor identifying John as a greater immediate concern than a surviving Manhunter. That structure makes the construct feel less like a cute training mishap and more like the first evidence that John may already possess the thing Hal fears most.

That John could become better at this than him. Even the form of the construct tells us something. Hal explains that flight comes naturally because he spent his life as a fighter pilot. He imagines himself flying and simply does it. John thinks about flight and creates something else that can fly for him.

That fits the John we met last week. His father taught him to “breathe in, button down, and bottle up.” John approaches emotion, authority, and now imagination by placing a degree of distance between himself and the thing he wants. Asked to fly, he doesn’t imagine his own body in the air. He builds an intermediary. And for someone with supposedly limitless willpower, John still has trouble imagining himself as the person capable of using it.

Hal Jordan has everything except a life.

John’s trip to Coast City gives Lanterns its most interesting character detail so far. Hal owns an enormous house and has apparently lived there for eight years. Yet it barely contains furniture.

John asks when Hal plans to move in. Hal insists he already has. There’s a bed, a carnivorous alien plant named Earl, a closet full of Lantern equipment, and little else that suggests another human being has spent meaningful time there.

Last week, Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) explained Hal in one sentence. “He’s not f—ing fearless. He’s lonely.” Episode 2 proves out that diagnosis with some great production design. Hal has fame, money, cosmic authority, and access to other worlds. He’s also created almost no domestic life around any of it. Even the story of how he got the house becomes another masculinity joke. A wealthy father wanted to thank Hal for saving his son, and Hal says he accepted the gift so the man wouldn’t feel “emasculated.”

As usual, Hal converts everything into swagger before he has a chance to become sincere. That includes the Green Lantern uniform. John finds it in Hal’s closet and brings it back despite being told not to. He can’t “bring myself to just disrespect it,” he says.

Hal complains, of course about how difficult the suit makes it to take a piss. Something real-life Hollywood actors joke about quite regularly on press tours. Regardless, the difference between these two men is clearer than ever. John still reveres the costume. Hal has worn it long enough to become cynical about its symbols while remaining deeply attached to what they mean.

When he finally recharges the ring and recites the oath, the joke falls away. Sure, he still believes. He just hates admitting how much.

Jurisdiction keeps getting more interesting.

Hal spends much of Lanterns Episode 2 doing what Hal does best. He ignores instructions, steals alien corpses, drags them through stadium security, irritates Kerry, and marches onto William Macon’s property despite being explicitly warned not to. Then someone shoots him.

The gag works because Hal begins the sentence convinced the ring will protect him and doesn’t get to finish it. His power runs out at exactly the moment he assumes it will make him untouchable.

The larger point, of course, shows up in the hospital. Kerry explains that Hal’s refusal to respect her authority does more than annoy her. Every time he storms into a situation and ignores the elected sheriff, he helps reinforce the idea that Macon represents the town’s real seat of power.

That gets at something Lanterns continues to handle better than its “space cops in Nebraska” premise might suggest. Power doesn’t only depend on who possesses the strongest weapon in the room. It also depends on whether people recognize the legitimacy of the person holding it.

Hal obviously believes his ring settles that question. Macon believes his resources do. Kerry understands that authority has to be maintained socially, especially in a place already drifting toward paranoia. So no wonder the episode then shifts to the Manhunters and twists that concern into the history of the Green Lantern Corps itself.

“What they called justice.”

The aliens who abduct John reveal that the Manhunters came even before the Green Lanterns. They’re synthetic beings capable of infiltrating societies, advancing their technology, and imposing order. They eventually annihilated entire species.

The telling phrase comes in the explanation. That they carried out what they called “justice.” That line links nearly every conflict in the episode. Macon believes his private militia protects Rushville. Hal believes his status gives him the right to push past local authority. And the aliens believe the genocide committed against their people gives them the right to threaten an entire town. Even the Guardians created a policing system so certain of its mission that it became monstrous.

Everyone has a justification. But doesn’t make everyone right. Everyone can’t be right. The aliens, for example, make their case to John by forcing him to experience their collective trauma. It’s brutal, and the scene smartly avoids reducing them to simple villains. They don’t want to destroy Rushville. They want John to identify the Manhunter so they won’t have to.

Their mercy still comes with a deadline, however, and the threat of mass death. Trauma has given them a reason to act. But trauma didn’t give them the moral clarity to act responsibly.

Can John trust anyone?

Whether or not John can trust anyone is the question runs through almost every scene of Lanterns Episode 2. The aliens warn John not to tell Hal what happened. Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan) tells him that if he has to ask whether he can trust his mentor, “you already know the answer.”

And yet John tells Hal what happened anyway. “I report to you,” he says. It’s a fascinating choice. John spends the hour gathering evidence that Hal may not deserve his trust, then chooses to extend it before he has any certainty. That’s the actual trust fall of the episode.

Kerry does the same when she lets Hal remain involved after he repeatedly undermines her. Hal eventually does it too. Faced with a threat he doesn’t understand, he goes to the one person he clearly wishes he never had to rely on again. His former mentor.

Sinestro knows exactly where to aim.

Hal enters the Green Lantern prison demanding information about the Manhunters. But Sinestro barely entertains the question. If one still exists, he says, it would be the second greatest threat Hal currently faces. And that’s when he asks about John Stewart.

It’s a great ending because it completes the episode’s generational structure. Sinestro trained Hal. Hal trains John. Last week, Hal made clear that he considers the Lantern role his for as long as he lives. Now we meet the mentor who knows exactly what that possessiveness looks like from the outside.

The obvious implication is that John’s unusual power may pose some larger cosmic danger. But the more interesting one is personal. John threatens Hal because he makes succession real. John’s tiny bird can survive without the ring. Hal can’t explain it. The aliens recognize its significance instantly. Sinestro somehow knows enough to ask about John without being prompted.

Over the last two episodes, Hal has constantly expressed how convinced he is that his trainee isn’t ready. “Trust Fall” aptly suggests he may really fear the opposite.

The bottom line.

Lanterns Episode 2 moves more slowly than the premiere, but it deepens the show’s central argument in ways that matter. Lanterns keeps treating Green Lantern mythology as a way to investigate character rather than decorate it in spectacle.

The ring reveals imagination. Hal’s uniform reveals reverence. The Manhunters reveal what happens when authority mistakes certainty for justice. And John’s bird reveals something Hal isn’t ready to accept.

Last week, Lanterns asked what kind of person could honestly claim to feel no fear. “Trust Fall” asks the harder follow-up. Once you know everyone is afraid of something, who do you trust with power anyway?

John still doesn’t know. For now, he keeps choosing Hal. And that may turn out to be his first real mistake.

Lanternsairs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

---

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.