‘Lanterns’ Episode 5 review: “Lights Out”

Lanterns Episode 5 blows up Rushville as Hal Jordan and John Stewart discover how much they’re willing to sacrifice for one ring.

Five episodes into Lanterns, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) finally gets the ring he’s prepared himself to wear for almost his entire life. He acquires it by beating Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) half to death in a motel room while an alien shoots Rushville from orbit. Which probably isn’t how his parents pictured the ceremony.

Lanterns Episode 5, “Lights Out,” plays like a season finale arriving three episodes early. Complete with exploding buildings, alien invaders, betrayals, several deaths, and enough emotional damage to keep a therapist employed through 2040. The hour also delivers the logical endpoint of everything Lanterns has built around Hal and John. In that Hal clings to the ring because he thinks it defines him. While John takes it because he thinks it will finally define him.

That payoff carries the episode through some messy action plotting and a Green Lantern power battery that apparently holds a charge about as well as a Nintendo Switch. The spectacle occasionally feels smaller than the ideas surrounding it, but those ideas rank among the season’s strongest.

Everybody owes somebody.

Lanterns Episode 5 opens years earlier with Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), stranded and fleeing men who plan to murder her over her father’s cooperation with law enforcement. Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan) intervenes, snaps one attacker’s neck, threatens another into submission, and offers Kerry something she desperately needs. A new life.

Zoe also names her price, because apparently intergalactic salvation still comes with terms and conditions. Someday, she’ll need Kerry to protect her in return. And the exchange reveals how Zoe conquered Rushville in the first place. She created an economy around gratitude, using miracles where another villain might use intimidation. Kerry gets safety and a regenerated finger. Will Macon gets “extra time.” And Rushville receives technology years ahead of anything humanity could hope to dream of.

Everybody receives something valuable enough that paying the bill later starts to feel reasonable. Despite being a brutal “Manhunter,” Zoe decides that gratitude can bind people more tightly than fear ever could.

Hal Jordan moves John off the game board.

Hal reaches his ugliest point yet in the season in Lanterns Episode 5 when he traps John inside a wrecked car and explains his grand plan. He’ll use Antaan’s alien strike team against Macon’s militia, let the two sides tear through each other, then capture Zoe and deliver her to the Guardians.

Everybody else becomes a chess piece while Hal races toward the only outcome he still cares about. He wants to keep his ring and restore his standing with the Guardians. Preferably while everyone lines up to tell him how clever he was.

“You are never gonna replace me, Junior,” he tells John, once again giving a name to the fear that’s driven his hostility all season. So much for fearless.

In Episode 1, Hal explained that his father’s death left him with nothing left to fear. “Lights Out” exposes the loophole in that mythology, because Hal fears irrelevance with every fiber of his increasingly battered body.

John represents a world where Green Lantern continues without him. And that possibility terrifies Hal enough to justify abandoning his trainee in a burning car. His plan also makes him look increasingly like Zoe, since both manipulate competing factions, conceal information from allies, and treat people as instruments toward an outcome they’ve already decided everyone needs.

Hal even calls John a piece on the “game board.” Which tells us exactly how far his obsession has carried him.

Kerry Kane owes a miracle.

Kerry’s confrontation with Hal in Lanterns Episode 5 gives Zoe’s influence its emotional foundation. Hal assumes fear keeps Kerry loyal, while Kerry finally tells him the truth. “I fucking owe her!”

Her actions make sense. For the most part. Zoe saved Kerry when human beings wanted her dead. Zoe gave her a home, a husband (?), and helped create the life she treasures in Rushville. Kerry’s debt has soured into complicity, though it began with genuine gratitude toward someone who showed her mercy.

Hal responds by reminding Kerry that Zoe represents a genocidal alien weapon. Kerry responds with the more immediate problem. Hal’s crusade will get people killed, and Zoe will attack the town to drain his ring if he keeps pushing.

Then Kerry asks whether he’s willing to accept those consequences. Hal says yes through his actions, and later he asks John almost the same question.

“Was it worth it?” becomes the moral refrain of the episode. Kerry asks Hal to own the cost of pursuing Zoe. And Hal asks John to own the cost of taking the ring. Finally, John walks into a bar to meet Lianna carrying a bag full of the Guardians’ “sins and consequences.”

Everybody wants justice. And everybody would really prefer somebody else pay for it.

Zoe understands adversity a little too well.

Zoe saves John from the car Hal left him in and offers him a remarkably seductive deal. She’ll heal his body, kill Hal, restore peace, and leave John with the ring the Guardians already intended him to inherit. John can accomplish his lifelong dream while telling himself the whole thing served a greater good. Convenient, right?

While repairing his skin, Zoe also explains why she chose her current appearance. “Power,” she says, arguing that entering a society as an outsider gives her a better view of its structures. That adversity, prejudice, injustice, and fear create a “crucible” that produces a stronger person.

The philosophy sounds suspiciously familiar after “OutKast.” Bernadette Stewart spent John’s childhood exposing him to fear because hardship would prepare him for greatness. While Zoe chooses hardship because she believes suffering produces insight.

Both women turn adversity into an instrument. John knows the bill that philosophy produces because his parents forged him into someone extraordinarily capable and profoundly lonely.

Zoe can change bodies whenever she wants. John has lived his entire life inside the identity and history she treats as strategic positioning. The scene works best as evidence of Zoe’s worldview, especially because she’s intellectualized suffering into something useful enough to justify almost any of her actions.

“I couldn’t help it.”

John eventually deduces that Zoe killed Abin Sur, the Lantern who spared her when the Guardians exterminated the other Manhunters. Abin Sur represented the only person who knew she survived, so Zoe eliminated the possibility that he might eventually expose her.

“I had to. I couldn’t help it,” she says, reducing murder to another expression of the nature she believes she can never escape.

John knows that feeling intimately. His parents shaped him for a destiny he never asked for. And much of his adult life has involved sorting his own desires from the ones other people planted inside him.

He knows what programming feels like, even after insisting to Lianna that humans get “raised” rather than programmed. Zoe’s fatalism therefore lands with someone uniquely equipped to recognize it.

And that also explains her attraction to him. “You really see me,” she says, echoing their conversation earlier in the season. John does see the frightened survivor. The manipulator, the murderer. The woman who built real relationships in Rushville. It’s a nuanced complexity that makes what he eventually does to her far heavier than a routine villain takedown.

One drunk superhero meets one pissed-off trainee.

John, freshly healed, calls his parents and announces his new objective with admirable clarity He plans to take the ring “clean off that motherfucker’s finger.” After twenty years of destiny talk, he’s finally reduced the Green Lantern succession process to something refreshingly straightforward.

Meanwhile, Hal burns through his remaining charge rescuing civilians and battling Zoe’s defenses. The depletion serves an important dramatic purpose. Hal arrives at the motel desperate to recharge, and John interrupts the ritual before he can finish.

The Green Lantern mythology falls away as two angry men start punching each other senseless. John tells Hal he doesn’t deserve the ring, and Hal gives perhaps his most revealing answer of the series. “I don’t deserve it. It fucking chose me.”

That line completes Hal’s philosophical collapse. In the premiere, he justified his selection through fearlessness. Well, in Lanterns Episode 5, selection itself has become the justification.

The ring chose him, so the ring belongs to him. Possession proves legitimacy because Hal has run out of deeper reasons. Still, John eventually beats him and takes it.

“I see you, Zoe.”

John uses Hal as bait, correctly predicting that Zoe will come looking for him. Hal figures out the plan before she does and even offers John the compliment he’s withheld all season. “If there’s one thing I know about that kid, he ain’t no coward.”

Zoe approaches while John waits with a rifle. He tells her, “I see you, Zoe,” then pulls the trigger. It’s an interesting choice of weapon. John has the Green Lantern ring on his finger. He still resolves the conflict with the skill his parents engineered into him long before he ever touched that ring. (And it works for comic reasons. The ring wouldn’t let him kill her outright).

It reads as a tragic moment. He sees Zoe clearly enough to understand her humanity, kills her anyway, and apologizes afterward. The victory feels awful. But that’s what gives the scene exactly the heft it needs.

Was any of this worth it?

After John rescues Hal from the rubble, Hal asks the question hanging over the entire episode: “Was it worth it?” It’s a question that ties back to the most personal thing John’s created with Green Lantern power. The bird.

The bird construct represented childhood surveillance, imagination, family, art, and John’s desire for freedom since Episode 2. Hence the bird emerged from somewhere deeper than his ambition to join the Corps. And unlike the ring, it belongs entirely to him.

Hal’s next warning gets even closer to the point. “They replaced me. They’ll replace you!” he shouts, revealing that he experiences succession as a form of annihilation because he can’t imagine an identity beyond Green Lantern.

But John finally can. The two men have essentially switched positions. Hal began the season with the ring and fought desperately to keep it. John began without one and built his life around getting it.

Now Hal has lost the thing he believes makes him whole, and John can finally wear it without feeling whole at all. That reversal gives Lanterns Episode 5 its real climax long after Rushville stops exploding.

Things behind things.

John walks through the wreckage of Rushville as Bon Iver’s “Things Behind Things Behind Things” plays, an almost hilariously appropriate song for a series obsessed with rings inside systems inside institutions. Every answer John has found this season has revealed another mechanism underneath it. Hal leads to the Guardians, the Guardians lead to the Manhunters, Zoe’s protection leads to debt And becoming Green Lantern leads to somebody else deciding how he should use the power.

When John finally reaches Lianna, she describes the day as a “shitstorm.” He drops the bag with Zoe’s crystallized heart in front of her and calls it “sins and consequences.” Which feels considerably more accurate.

The Guardians regard catastrophe with a peculiar confidence. They seem to think every failed system simply needs another correction. Manhunters go wrong, so they create Lanterns. Hal goes wrong, so they recruit John.

The bottom line.

But John finally interrupts that cycle by handing back the ring. He tells Lianna that he’s been  imagining how wearing it would feel for his entire life. Pride, gratitude, and power all seemed possible. But the actual experience left him empty.

In other words, John loaded the ring with enough meaning to justify his parents’ abuse and restore his childhood. To vindicate his career and maybe even earn Hal’s respect. To somehow prove that all those years of sacrifice led somewhere worth the sacrifice.

Turns out jewelry has limits. Hal would know. He sacrificed his code, oath, relationships, and eventually himself because he confused the ring with an identity. Fittingly, John finally becomes capable of wearing it because he realizes the ring can’t tell him who he really is. And as a result, John Stewart chooses himself for the first time in his life.

Lanterns airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

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Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.