‘Lanterns’ Season 1 Finale review: “Dirt and Stars”

The Lanterns Season 1 finale ends with John Stewart solving Hal Jordan’s mysterious fate and finally deciding what kind of Green Lantern he’ll become.

After eight episodes of murder, alien genocide, parental trauma, cosmic police misconduct, one spectacularly toxic mentorship, and an alarming amount of Nebraska high school football, Lanterns finally answers the question that has hung over the season since its premiere: Who killed Hal Jordan? But the better question is what John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) does once he knows the answer.

“Dirt and Stars” makes an admirably stubborn choice for a superhero finale by staging its biggest conflict inside a truck parked near a football field. John has a barely charged power ring. Noah Macon (Shea Pritchard) holds a lantern that can kill a Guardian. And Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) has already delivered the obligatory speech about how nature inevitably wins or whatever.

Everything points toward the giant CGI showdown that Lanterns has mostly withheld for eight episodes. But instead of a brawl, John merely listens. This odd choice defines a series far more interested in moral judgment than spectacle. The Lanterns Season 1 finale has its share of awkward revelations, and explaining Hal’s death requires Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) to make one hell of an impulsive decision. Still, it ties the season’s arguments about fear, inheritance, authority, and free will together with surprising precision. John becomes Green Lantern because he finally understands that nobody else gets to decide what that means for him.

Sinestro believes nature always wins.

John opens the finale by interrogating Sinestro on the ruined planet where Noah forced him to forge a new lantern. The water there carries the psychic residue of the fear a dying civilization left behind, so Sinestro has accidentally built a power source with a little yellow mixed into the usual green. Surely nothing historically significant will come from Sinestro discovering that fear can power a Lantern.

While John examines said lantern, Sinestro lays out his philosophy. Fear represents “evolutionary intelligence,” he argues, and any species without it belongs on the extinction list. After a season in which Hal insisted that fearlessness made him worthy, the man who will eventually build his entire supervillain brand around fear gets to make the more sensible argument.

Then he takes it too far. He insists Noah will eventually surrender to his Manhunter programming because “nature always wins.” To Sinestro, identity works like gravity. Noah can play football, love his mother, save Hal’s life, and dream about college. But sooner or later the machine underneath will decide what he becomes.

John has heard versions of that argument his entire life. His parents tried to program fearlessness into him throughout most of his childhood. The military programmed obedience. And the Guardians saw that obedience and chose him as Hal’s replacement. For years, John has wondered where the conditioning ends and his actual personality begins. Here, Noah gives him the chance to answer.

Programming makes a lousy alibi.

Noah abducts John, takes Hal’s ring, and confesses to killing him. He then returns the ring and Sinestro’s lantern and asks John to kill him after one final football game. There’s your terrifying supervillain Manhunter.

Noah explains that one part of him wants Nebraska football, marriage, children, and an ordinary life. While another part fills his head with fantasies about the Pentagon, political office, nuclear weapons, and the absurd amount of power he could wield with a ring that can kill Guardians. “If you could see the inside of my head,” he tells John, “you’d never stop screaming.”

John’s response completes the argument Lanterns started in “OutKast.” Back then, Lianna described human behavior as programming, and John corrected her by saying humans get raised. Now he admits he’s been obsessing over essentially the same distinction for years. And he decides the distinction only gets him so far. John can ask himself who he wants to become, which means he can answer the question too. Training, biology, trauma, parents, Guardians, and murderous robot DNA can all influence a person plenty. But choice still (rather fittingly) gets a vote.

That’s why Noah’s request becomes a reason to spare him. A creature that murderous programming completely governs wouldn’t hand over the most powerful weapon in reach and ask for his own execution to protect everyone else. Sinestro says nature always wins, and Noah just chose to lose.

Hal Jordan gets one last chance at happiness.

The finale makes Hal’s murder hurt by finally showing the life he had built before someone ended it. After serving time for the Rushville disaster, Hal returns to the town that hates him and starts repairing whatever he can. Locals slash his tires and decorate his lawn with manure, including the helpful clarification “asshole,” because Nebraskans apparently respect specificity.

Kerry publicly stands beside him anyway. Her restaurant speech finally shows us the Hal she knew after prison. He’s humbled, ashamed, and trying to live with consequences he once would’ve shrugged off. This Hal has learned what his younger self denied for a long time, that he can feel afraid, admit fault, love somebody, and survive all three.

For a brief moment, he even gets a future. Kerry invites him to Noah’s football game, and Hal says he’d like that “very, very, very much” (perhaps channeling his Friday Night Lights persona a little cheekily). And Kyle Chandler plays the moment with enough boyish excitement to make the impending corpse especially sad.

Kerry Kane held her breath too.

The Lanterns Season 1. finale initially leads us to believe Noah killed Hal after the older Lantern discovered his secret. John eventually realizes that Noah’s confession serves the same purpose as his request for death. In that he’s protecting his mother because Kerry killed Hal.

The mechanics of that revelation will probably become the finale’s most divisive choice. Hal confronts Kerry after discovering Noah’s Manhunter identity and the secret portal, but he arrives looking for a way to protect them. He suggests Guadalajara, he suggests another planet, and he tells Kerry he loves her. Then she shoots him. It happens fast because her terror outruns her ability to hear what Hal actually says. That explanation makes psychological sense, perhaps. Though the scene leans hard enough on impulsivity that some viewers will understandably wonder whether the mystery required Kerry to panic precisely when the screenplay needed her to.

John makes the scene around that reveal considerably stronger. He tells Kerry how Bernadette dropped him in dangerous neighborhoods as a child to teach him fearlessness. For years, John understood those exercises through his own terror, but now he finally considers what his mother felt while she waited for him to come home. “My mother held her breath for my entire childhood.” That realization connects Bernadette and Kerry beautifully, since both mothers love their sons fiercely enough to make catastrophic decisions while they convince themselves those decisions amount to protection.

Kerry finally admits the truth.

“I wasn’t scared. I was terrified,” Kerry says. Love beats programming, and apparently it also beats murder charges.

She also explains why she called John to Rushville after she killed Hal. She wanted the one person capable of uncovering the truth to tell her whether she had spent eighteen years raising a monster. That’s an extraordinary gamble, and it reveals that Kerry’s been asking the same question John asks about his own upbringing. John tells her Noah already supplied the answer. The kid held Hal’s ring and a fear-infused lantern powerful enough to threaten the Guardians, and he surrendered both. He falsely confessed to murder to protect his mother, then asked John to kill him because he feared what he might someday do. “That is not programming,” John says. “That is love.”

John therefore spares Noah and effectively spares Kerry too, letting her watch her son finish the football game instead of hauling Rushville’s sheriff away for murdering a superhero. The legal system may have some follow-up questions about that arrangement. Morally, though, the decision establishes John’s version of justice. He accepts uncertainty. Noah could become dangerous, John understands that possibility perfectly well, and he promises to stop Noah if that day arrives. He simply refuses to execute a kid today for the person he might become tomorrow. That’s where John finally surpasses the institutions that trained him.

“You take the stars. I’ll take the dirt.”

John’s confrontation with Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) turns the season’s title into a mission statement. Guy shows up in Rushville expecting the usual chain of command, and John informs him that Earth now has an independent contractor. The arrangement makes approximately zero bureaucratic sense, as Guy helpfully points out. Earth belongs to Sector 2814, the Guardians control the Corps, and John now carries an unsanctioned lantern that Sinestro forged on a fear-soaked death planet. OA’s HR should have a fantastic Monday.

John doesn’t care. Guy can patrol the stars, and John wants the dirt. This would retroactively explain why this deeply earthbound Green Lantern series has spent so much time in diners, motels, football fields, ranches, family homes, and Nebraska roads. John’s version of heroism comes from proximity, in that he wants responsibility for people he can know. Not abstract jurisdiction that cosmic administrators hand down to him.

More importantly, John has finally broken the chain of command that defined his entire life. His parents gave him orders, the Marines gave him orders, the Guardians gave him orders, and Hal gave him orders. Now Guy invokes the chain of command, and John tells him to lose the gold tooth. Character development comes in many forms (or colors?)

The yellow in the green.

John’s independence goes deeper than jurisdiction because his lantern carries traces of fear. This detail beautifully literalizes the season’s central argument. That Green Lantern mythology traditionally associates green with will and yellow with fear and treats them as opposing forces. But John ends Season 1 carrying both in equal measure.

The creators have described his lantern as an unsanctioned hybrid, which feels exactly right for the character Lanterns constructed over eight episodes. John’s courage comes from acknowledging fear and acting through it. That’s the kind of Green Lanterns he wants to be and probably will be.

Bernadette already gave us this thesis back in “OutKast.” Courage is fear that’s said its prayers. Hal eventually reaches the same conclusion, and his final advice to John strips away everything his younger self believed about fearlessness. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid,” he says. And that may be the most important thing Hal ever teaches him. Aside from flying, which John naturally learns on his own right before the closing credits.

Hal finally calls him Junior.

The Lanterns Season 1 finale saves its strongest emotional payoff for John’s last conversation with the Halogram. John has more or less been seeking Hal’s approval this whole season while pretending he couldn’t care less. Hal, for his part, treated John like an unwanted replacement while he slowly discovered that his trainee is his perfect replacement.

Now John asks the question he can’t answer alone. What would Hal do about Noah? The Halogram refuses to make the decision for him, of course. Instead, he tells John that his gut says John’ll become better at this job than Hal ever was. “You’re ready.” Those words, that blessing, comes right after John stops needing Hal to tell him that.

The Halogram also asks about the real Hal’s final words. John tells him Hal said, “I love you.” “And I love you too, Junior.” It’s a shamelessly emotional line, maybe even sappy. And it works anyway. Probably because it’s shameless.

Write your own fucking oath.

John hesitates before charging the ring because the traditional Green Lantern oath doesn’t quite fit him. So Hal offers one final piece of excellent professional advice. “Write your own fucking oath.”

John does. And his version changes the philosophy underneath the Corps. He embraces fear, commits himself to doing right, and, most importantly, chooses the ring and the fight himself. Keep in mind that Episode 3 built John’s entire childhood around getting chosen. His parents wanted the Guardians to choose him, so John shaped himself into someone they couldn’t overlook. And yes, the Guardians eventually selected him precisely because his obedience made him useful. Then Episode 5 gave him the ring, only for him to walk away.

Now he returns after deciding what the job actually means to him. The ring doesn’t choose John Stewart. John Stewart chooses the ring. For a series that is so far all about investigating who deserves power, that reversal makes for a pretty satisfying answer.

The bottom line.

“Dirt and Stars” will probably frustrate viewers who’ve been waiting for Lanterns to unleash the full visual imagination of Green Lantern. John gets his ring, his lantern, his oath, and finally his ability to fly. Yet the show still keeps the costume and giant constructs somewhere behind the HBO expense reports. Sinestro never leaves his planet, and the climactic confrontation involves considerably more football than space combat. It’s a restraint that occasionally feels principled but also suspiciously economical.

Still, the Lanterns Season 1 finale takes full advantage of the character story it’s been telling all along. John began Lanterns believing discipline could eliminate uncertainty. His parents trained him to suppress fear, the Marines taught him to follow orders, and the Guardians valued that obedience.

Hal initially treated fearlessness as proof of worthiness. While Sinestro ends the season preaching the opposite form of determinism. John rejects the entire argument and lets Noah decide who Noah becomes. He acknowledges Kerry through the fear that drove his own mother, and he takes Hal’s wisdom without repeating Hal’s mistakes. Finally, he accepts a lantern laced with fear and rejects the Guardians’ authority, claiming responsibility for Earth as he rewrites the oath around personal choice.

Even the title finally clicks into place. Guy can have the stars, with all their cosmic jurisdictions, ancient institutions, immortal Guardians, and intergalactic drama. John chooses the dirt. The messy people making frightening choices without knowing whether they’ll turn out right. That’s where Lanterns has lived all season anyway. John Stewart looked toward the stars his whole life, waiting for someone up there to decide he was worthy. It only took him eight episodes to realize the ground was where he really belonged.

The Lanterns Season 1 finale is available to stream on HBO and HBO Max.

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Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.