‘Lanterns’ Episode 3 review: “OutKast”

Lanterns Episode 3, “OutKast,” traces John Stewart’s unusual path toward Green Lantern through a lifetime of training to be chosen.

In last week’s episode, “Trust Fall,” Lanterns left John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) with 48 hours to find a Manhunter before a group of vengeful aliens potentially wipes half of Nebraska off the map. Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), meanwhile, had just walked into an intergalactic prison looking for answers from Sinestro. Only for his former mentor to redirect the conversation toward a more immediate concern. “Why don’t you tell me about John Stewart?” he asked.

Lanterns Episode 3, “OutKast,” answers that question by leaving the Manhunter investigation behind for nearly an entire episode. And that makes for a strange bit of timing with so much plot already hanging in the air. Yet John’s origin story earns the detour because it changes the meaning of almost everything we’ve seen him do across the first two episodes. His military discipline, his strained relationship with Hal, his insistence on following orders. And even that little green bird he keeps pretending means nothing all trace back to a childhood of preparing for a job before he could possibly comprehend what having the job truly meant.

The result gives Lanterns its richest character work so far, even as the episode risks testing the patience of viewers waiting to see what happens next in Rushville. More importantly, “OutKast” expands the show’s ongoing questions about fear and trust into something thornier. John’s been trying to become worthy of being chosen for his entire life, and nobody ever really asked what all that preparation might cost him until the interview.

“Are you afraid?”

Years before John meets Hal, his father John Stewart Sr. (J. Alphonse Nicholson) wakes to a Green Lantern ring pulling him from his bed and asking the question we already know well. “Are you afraid?” John Sr. answers honestly that he is. At which point the ring abandons him without explanation and leaves him traumatized by an experience nobody believes actually happened.

Recall that in the first episode, Hal appears on television describing the same encounter. He proudly explains that the ring asked whether he felt afraid and celebrates his own ability to answer no, transforming John Sr.’s worst night into somebody else’s superhero origin story. Suddenly John Sr. knows he was right about everything except the part his family most needed him to be right about. That the experience hadn’t broken something inside him.

His wife Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones) eventually gets confirmation when Lianna (Laura Linney), one of the Guardians of the Universe, arrives to apologize for the “emotional turmoil” their selection process caused. That wonderfully bureaucratic description tells us plenty about the Guardians, who apparently tested prospective Lanterns without consent and returned unsuccessful candidates home without any explanation for what had just happened to them.

Bernadette immediately spots the larger flaw in their supposedly objective test. Asking whether someone feels fear assumes that everyone receives roughly equal reasons to feel it. And she challenges Lianna to consider what that question means for a Black man living in America. The Guardian has obviously never considered it. Which pushes the argument from the premiere considerably further. Hal built his identity around the idea that fearlessness qualified him for the ring, while “OutKast” wonders whether the people designing that test truly know fear well enough to judge anyone by it.

How do you make a Green Lantern?

Bernadette, for her part, acknowledges that the Guardians built a system around qualities her husband never had the privilege of performing. But her solution creates the episode’s great tragedy. Lianna tells her that whatever the ring detected in John Sr. may also exist in his infant son. So Bernadette decides she can prepare John to succeed where his father failed.

John Sr., when told about all this, points out the cost plainly. “He’s gonna hate us,” he warns her. And Bernadette accepts that possibility because she sees something larger at stake. She and her husband have long been trying to overcome assumptions about what their family can become. And she refuses to raise three sons believing excellence still won’t make the people in charge see them.

This is the conviction that turns John’s childhood into the universe’s most deranged travel-ball program. His parents give him a Green Lantern costume for his fifth birthday instead of the crayons he wanted. They teach him to shoot, isolate him from his brothers, deliberately expose him to danger, and tell him that birds report his progress to the Guardians. Their love drives every terrible decision, because Bernadette sees the unfairness of the Guardians’ selection process and decides her child will become too exceptional for anyone to overlook.

It’s a sad contradiction. And it gives Lanterns Episode 3 considerably more bite than a simple story about overbearing parents. Bernadette recognizes how meritocracy cheats her family, then devotes herself to producing the perfect candidate for that same system. John grows up learning that every fear represents another obstacle between him and the future his parents sacrificed so much to create.

The OutKast in the family.

The title of Lanterns Episode 3, “OutKast,” signals considerably more than an excellent soundtrack. John grows up as the outcast inside his own home, separated from brothers Aaron and Marcus by the very preparation supposedly meant to give him a better life. They share rooms, music, jokes, and an ordinary childhood that John mostly experiences from the other side of a wall. Meanwhile, his brothers label all the extra attention he receives for favoritism.

Lanterns Episode 3 captures that divide beautifully during a car ride scored to OutKast’s “ATLiens.” Aaron and Marcus assume John doesn’t know the lyrics because their sheltered little brother listens to piano music and talks, as they put it, “like a White boy named Henry.” John surprises them by rapping along, and for a few seconds the three finally get to behave like brothers who enjoy each other’s company.

Then Bernadette stops the car because John has training to complete. His brothers even protest that he can’t handle the neighborhood where their parents plan to leave him. But John Sr. shuts them down and orders John outside. The interruption tells us more about John’s loneliness than any grand speech could, because his family never fully abandons him. They keep him close enough to watch the life he could have shared with them while repeatedly pulling him away from it. Over and over and over again.

Adult John eventually explains the feeling to Lianna with devastating simplicity. “We all lived in the same house for 18 years. I grew up missing them.” The attention that supposedly made him special also taught him how to exist around people without ever expecting to belong among them.

The birds are always watching.

Last week, John accidentally created a tiny green bird when Hal told him to imagine himself flying. The construct somehow remained alive after John removed the ring, traveled across the country, got kidnapped, and endured a psychic vision of genocide, leaving Hal visibly unsettled by an ability he couldn’t explain.

Lanterns Episode 3 finally tells us why John reacts so defensively whenever anyone asks what the bird means. Bernadette invented the idea that birds worked for the Guardians, watching John train and reporting whether he had become fearless enough to earn their attention. When young John realizes the Guardians never answer his family’s attempts to contact them, he concludes that “the birds are liars,” and his mother challenges him to prove them wrong.

That challenge becomes the engine of his personality. Whenever someone establishes a standard, John exceeds it. Whenever someone doubts him, he proves them wrong. And whenever someone asks him to wait, he waits longer than any reasonable person should. Adult John therefore spends an entire night sitting in Lianna’s waiting room because she told him to “have a seat.” Then he greets her confusion the next morning with an answer that sums up his whole upbringing: “I was told to wait.”

In other words, John learned early that endurance could force authority to notice him. What looked like admirable patience in the first two episodes now carries the weight of a kid who believed the universe itself was evaluating his every move.

“I was trained to be sure.”

Lianna keeps trying to get John to describe himself during their interview, while John repeatedly responds with qualifications. When she asks why he became a sniper, he tells her he’s a good shot. She pushes him about enjoying the distance, he points out that he can hit a target from more than a mile away. Questions about resentment lead to declarations of gratitude, but questions about failure barely register as possibilities worth considering.

Lianna finally asks how he can feel so certain that he’ll get the job, and John gives her the answer that unlocks Pierre’s performance across the season: “I was trained to be sure.” John transforms these emotional questions into performance metrics because performance gives him something he can control. And his parents taught him for years that the wrong emotional response could jeopardize his entire future and consequently their happiness.

Pierre has played John with that tension from the beginning of the series. Every polite “sir,” clipped response, and swallowed irritation with Hal comes from a man who seems perpetually aware that somebody might be grading him. “OutKast” gives that reserve a history without turning it into an excuse, showing how effectively John learned to present the version of himself that everyone wants to see.

Nine months with nowhere to go.

John’s military career takes that conditioning to its logical extreme. He accepts an assassination mission in Kamchatka and refuses the panic button that would allow him to request extraction. “I don’t do panic,” he tells his superior. Then he spends nine months alone in the wilderness waiting for a target. All because completing the assignment matters more to him than any reasonable concern for his own survival.

The mission ends through an intervention so perfectly Hal Jordan that it almost plays like a cosmic practical joke. A government official gets drunk with Hal at a strip club and happens to mention the target. This inspires Hal to fly into Russian territory, torch 300 acres, kidnap the guy, and drop him off at Guantanamo. John sacrificed nine months to follow procedure perfectly. Only for Hal to destroy the mission during a drunken afternoon because his power lets him move through rules as if they were mere suggestions.

Also, the government needs someone to absorb the international fallout. So John suffers the dishonorable discharge rather than expose the operation. Lianna later reveals that the Guardians had repeatedly ordered Hal to stop intervening in terrestrial conflicts. Which means Hal’s recklessness cost John his career before the two men had even met.

Still, John insists he holds no grudge. “I don’t think about him,” he tells Lianna. After an episode that has allotted an extraordinary amount of time to demonstrating why Hal Jordan might occupy quite a lot of real estate in John Stewart’s head.

Crayons beat bullets.

Losing the Marines sends John home. From there, Bernadette finally nudges him toward the part of himself their training kept pushing aside. She applies to art school on his behalf, returning him to the passion he first expressed as a five-year-old asking for crayons on the birthday. Back when his parents handed him a Green Lantern costume instead.

Wildly enough, art ultimately provides the clearest evidence that John belongs in the Corps. A Guardian recruiter asks him to sketch objects from memory before handing him a ring and instructing him to construct his father’s watch. Down to its internal mechanics. John creates the entire thing with enough precision to make it tick. He demonstrates an imaginative capacity that all those years of shooting and survival training never could.

The irony gives his origin story its strongest turn. John’s parents diligently, even maliciously prepared him to satisfy what they believed the Guardians valued. Yet the ability that finally distinguishes him grows from the part of himself they treated as unnecessary. The crayons matter more than the bullets because Green Lantern power requires imagination as much as discipline.

The revelation also gives last week’s bird an even deeper resonance. John subconsciously creates something tied to childhood surveillance, freedom, family, and the creative life he rarely got to explore. Then he somehow keeps it alive without wearing the ring. As a child, he believed the Guardians created birds to watch him. As an adult, John finally creates one for himself.

Choose yourself.

Bernadette eventually admits that she invented the birds. And the confession gives her one of the episode’s most revealing moments. She tells John that the Guardians’ attention doesn’t determine his worth. That people like him sometimes have to raise their own hands when institutions fail to see them. “Choose yourself,” she tells him. Offering a healthier philosophy than anything their years of training managed to produce.

John seems to absorb a harsher lesson, though. Choosing himself means working harder until the Guardians finally choose him too. And this follows him all the way into Lianna’s interview. He describes earning the ring as repayment for everything his parents sacrificed. He treats the job as the final proof that their path for him worked.

Lianna then reveals what the Guardians actually want. John will eventually replace Hal rather than serve as his backup. All while Hal will remain unaware of the plan. When Lianna asks whether John feels comfortable deceiving his future mentor, he asks whether those are his orders. Then he calmly concludes that his comfort therefore doesn’t matter.

That kind of answer should concern everyone involved. Especially after the previous episode revealed what happened when the Guardians created agents devoted to carrying out their idea of justice. The Manhunters followed a mission until certainty twisted itself into atrocity. John remains profoundly human, of course. But his willingness to subordinate every personal feeling to an order suggests that the Guardians may still misunderstand the qualities their agents actually need.

Humans aren’t programmed.

This all makes Lanterns Episode 3 feel more relevant to the season’s central mystery than its flashback structure initially suggests. Episode 2 left Rushville facing destruction, introduced a hidden Manhunter, and ended with Sinestro hinting at some larger truth about John. So spending the next hour away from all three developments naturally tests the show’s momentum.

Yet Lanterns Episode 3 keeps the Manhunters in view through the institution that created them. Lianna looks at John’s lonely upbringing and observes that his isolation seems “in direct opposition to your programming.” John corrects her. “Humans aren’t programmed, we’re raised,” he says. Lianna admits that she doesn’t get the distinction.

Their exchange may explain the Guardians’ larger failure better than any lore dump could. They understand behavior through traits, inputs, functions, and outcomes, which leads them to identify promising candidates while overlooking the complicated human consequences of shaping people around those expectations. They created the Manhunters to enact justice and eventually replaced that failed system with Green Lanterns. But “OutKast” gives us plenty of reason to wonder how much their underlying philosophy actually changed.

Even Lianna’s attempt to compensate Bernadette reveals the blind spot. She gives the family an enormous alien diamond, only for police to question Bernadette when she tries to cash it because they don’t believe it belongs to her. The Guardians appraise the object’s value perfectly while failing to understand the human world in which that value has to operate.

“Over my dead body.”

John finally earns the job and rushes home to tell his parents. Only to discover Hal sitting in their living room. After everything John endured to reach this moment, Hal casually takes the announcement away from him without realizing how much it meant. Or maybe he did. Maybe.

John politely admits that he hoped to tell his parents himself. And Hal briefly acts apologetic before revealing how little he actually cares about John’s hopes. He has no interest in a protégé, backup, or eventual successor. And he promises John that the only way he’ll ever get the ring is “over my dead fucking body.”

We already saw Hal’s corpse in Episode 1. So Hal’s threat sounds more like an ominous bit of dramatic irony. The Guardians secretly want John to replace him, after all. And Hal resents the succession plan before training even begins. Ten years later, John returns to Rushville and finds his mentor dead without the ring that defined both of their lives. What happened in between? Another dishonorable discharge?

Regardless, John responds to Hal’s hostility the same way he’s responded to pain since childhood. He tells a nearby bird, “I think he likes me.” As if in conversation with the Guardians themselves.

The bottom line.

Lanterns Episode 3 risks frustrating viewers eager to return to the Manhunter countdown. But Lanterns Episode 3 earns its patience by changing our understanding of John Stewart rather than simply filling in his biography. His discipline now exhibits the history of a childhood built around evaluation. His loneliness began inside a crowded family home. The unusual constructs that keep surprising Hal emerge from an imagination everyone around John treated as contrary to his supposed destiny.

The OutKast motif gives all this history an especially sharp edge. As a child, John listened through the wall to a life his brothers got to share. And his brief chance to join them disappears whenever training resumes. His parents single him out because they believe he can become exceptional, only for that exceptionalism to push him farther from everyone he loves.

Lanterns Episode 3’s most compelling contradiction comes from Bernadette telling John to “choose yourself.” All after years of preparing him for somebody else’s approval. John pushes the first half of that lesson forward while struggling with the second. Repeatedly making himself exceptional enough that institutions have no choice but to recognize him.

So far this season, Lanterns has been asking what qualifies someone to wield extraordinary power. Lanterns Episode 3 finally suggests that John Stewart’s greatest challenge may have little to do with convincing the Guardians that he deserves power. He’s become the person they wanted to choose. And sooner or later he’ll have to decide who he wants to be once their approval stops mattering.

Lanterns airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

---

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.