John Stewart has a problem, and it is a corpse. The sixth episode of HBO’s Lanterns drops Hal Jordan’s dead body in the middle of Rushville, Nebraska, and refuses to explain who put it there. It is a bold move for a show that has spent its first season juggling aliens, lanterns, and a Manhunter called Zoe, but it is also a bet: the audience will keep asking questions even when the show stops answering them.
The episode picks up just before the flash forward that ended the series premiere, where John and Sheriff Kerry Kane discover Hal Jordan’s dead body frozen in the Rushville football stadium. Hal is dead of a 9mm gunshot at point-blank range. John was not anywhere near town when Hal died, but that fact does not stop the townspeople from suspecting him anyway. The episode is a slow burn of suspicion, a dead body, and a plant that eats meat, all tied together by a mother who is the absolute worst.
John’s Argument With His Mother
John arrives in Rushville because his mother, Bernadette, lures him there. She claims Hal told her he wanted to apologize. The apology is a lie, but Hal tells John that his friendship with Bernadette is real. That is a problem for John, because it means he has just spent the evening fighting his ex-husband Billy Macon and a gang of goons after activating a Lantern-Signal left behind by Hal and his replacement, Guy Gardner.
Hal is dead of a 9mm gunshot at point-blank range, and the episode quotes Robert Pattinson quoting Chris Hansen: “You see how this looks?” The joke is that everyone in town does see how it looks, even if John was nowhere near Hal when he died.
The Town’s Anger
No one in Rushville is happy about the Lantern-Signal. Guy Gardner, the blonde, bowl-cut athletic director who was chosen as this sector’s Green Lantern after Hal burned out, is an ex-GL, and the townspeople are already mad at him. When John gets into a fistfight with Billy Macon, he spends the night in jail before his brother Marcus bails him out.
John’s brother Marcus has reason to be angry. He co-founded the architecture firm that designs panic rooms for individuals and entire municipalities, and he uses the proceeds to fund his other brother Andre’s recording career. Both brothers call John “Chosen,” a reference to his green past and his parents’ preferential treatment of him. But the brothers’ affection does not extend to their mother, who remains a weirdo, or their father, who is shooting up his retirement home to get John’s attention.
The Funeral and the Plant
John feels obligated to give Hal a proper burial. He asks Guy to travel to outer space to retrieve Hal’s uniform and ring, and he delivers Hal’s eulogy, which Hal wrote and gave to his ex-girlfriend Carol Ferris. The speech is a mixture of delusions of grandeur and sad grappling with mortality. “I hope I mattered,” it concludes.
John digs up the body, pries off Hal’s decommissioned ring, and unlocks his digitized doppelganger. The doppelganger reacts to the news with profane dismay, and the episode leaves the audience with the question: who killed Hal?
The Locker and the Teenager
There are other threads to follow. Kerry and John find a key to a storage locker containing a cosmic-cube vault that they cannot access without Hal himself. It is a plot point that feels unfinished, but it is there.
There is also a teenager named Maggie who is shaking John down for Lantern/alien/Manhunter battle reparations. She dismisses his fears that their rural Nebraska town is racist, which makes the demand feel pointed. She threatens to tell Sheriff Kane she saw John with Hal the night of his death, and he has nothing to hide so he, of all people, should have nothing to fear.
Finally, John has to feed Hal’s sentient, carnivorous plant, Earl. It is pretty cute, actually.
The Authors of This Chaos
The show’s co-creators are Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King. Together, they have delivered a season that is shaky but promising, and the mid-season structure is a deliberate echo of True Detective Season 1. That show shifted from flashbacks to present-day material mid-season, and Lanterns is doing something similar, with its own time jump and its own shift in the fortunes of its two main characters.
The big mid-season climax only gets you so far, and Lanterns has to come up with something interesting for everyone to do afterwards. So far, it has done it.
The Mother Problem
Bernadette is the worst person in John’s life. She lured him to Rushville under false pretenses, and her friendship with Hal is real, which makes John’s life harder. The episode does not spend much time with her, but it makes its point: she is the problem.
The Sheriff’s Betrayal
Sheriff Kerry Kane is the only person in town who gave a shit about Hal. The two were an item, which is hard to wrap one’s mind around. She calls off a mob of angry villagers when they surround John, but the town’s anger is not directed at her.
The Ring’s New Holder
Lianna the Guardian is the new holder of the Green Lantern power ring, after John pried it from Hal’s still living hand and delivered it straight to her, refusing to take the job himself. The refusal is a character choice, not a plot device, and it shows that John is still processing the weight of being chosen.
What Lanterns Has Done So Far
Lanterns has done something unusual. It has left the fate of its show wide open so early in the proceedings, and it has done so with a boldness that sets it apart from its creators’ earlier work. The mid-season structure is a deliberate echo of True Detective Season 1, but Lanterns has come up with something interesting for everyone to do afterwards.
The episode is a slow burn of suspicion, a dead body, and a plant that eats meat, all tied together by a mother who is the absolute worst. It is a bold move, and it is working.
The Verdict on Episode 6
The episode is a masterclass in how to end on a question. It is not a cliffhanger in the traditional sense, but it is a cliffhanger in spirit: who killed Hal? The audience is asking that question, and the show has given them no answer yet.
“You see how this looks?”
The answer is not in the episode. It is in the next one.
Key Facts Box
- Episode: Lanterns Episode 6, titled “Who Killed Green Lantern?”
- Network: HBO
- Stars: John Stewart, Sheriff Kerry Kane, Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner
- Creators: Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, Tom King
- Plot Threads: Lantern-Signal, cosmic-cube locker, Maggie the teenager, Earl the plant
Source material: “‘Lanterns’ Episode 6 Recap: Who Killed Green Lantern?,” Decider.
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