TL;DR – I feel that this episode is a good encapsulation of the style of story that we will be getting for the rest of the season, and if that is the case, I will be very happy.

Disclosure – I paid for the HBO Max service used to view this series.

End Credit Scene – There is a trailer after the end credits.

Lanterns Review Introduction

Well, the Pilot of Lanterns certainly landed a whole whack of mystery on us, intriguing at every turn. It is the kind of episode that says, “trust us, we know what we are doing”, and given the creator’s past work, you kind of believe them. But today we start getting into the weeds and seeing if that does start to pay dividends.  

So, to set the scene, at the end of Pilot we were hit with a flash forward to 2026 with a very dead Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) sitting on the high school stadium at Rushville, Nebraska. We start today back in 2016, with Hal berating John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and sending him on busywork back to Coast City to get his Lantern. Meanwhile, Hal starts exploring the town, wondering why William Macon (Garret Dillahunt) knew to kill those four aliens, because that is not something you do on a hunch when he discovers the whole town in a meeting. This meeting is probably very much about him. Now, from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be [SPOILERS] ahead.

Character Moments

One of the things that I loved about this episode was how it stops to allow characters to have these moments that shine. A good example of this is the opening town meeting. The way that Kyle Chandler, Jason Ritter & Kelly MacDonald get to interplay was delightful to watch. There was a moment when Kelly MacDonald was so absolutely done with the lot of them, and I felt that derision in my soul. That was just the first of many such character moments throughout the episode, including an incident in a morgue. Having those character moments is so important in both building a world and in centring your characters. You need that for connection, and that is a step that so many shows skip.  

Side Quest Time

While Hal is off antagonising just about every member of the town, John has been sent off on a side quest, mostly to get him out of the way. This is for both in-universe and narrative reasons. The in-universe reason is that Hal is a bit of a prick and is getting him out of his way for a bit by making him run errands. The narrative reason is so he can be kidnapped, interrogated, and used as an exposition dump to catch the audience up who may not have already known about manhunters. I’m normally not a fan of forced exposition sections, but here the episode pays its dues, with some high-quality derision between Hal and John. Also, the episode decided to gift their stunt team an Emmy nomination with that car/foot/truck-to-face chase sequence.

Recommendation

In the end, do we recommend Lanterns? Yes, we do. I feel that this episode is a good encapsulation of the style of story that we will be getting for the rest of the season, and if that is the case, I will be very happy. Have you seen Lanterns yet? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Bluesky at @Tldrmovrev, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Lanterns
Directed by – James Hawes
Written by – Vanessa Baden Kelly & Chris Mundy
Created by – Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, & Tom King
Based On – Green Lantern created by John Broome & Gil Kane
Production/Distribution Companies – DC Studios, Man Woman & Child Productions, Warner Bros Television & HBO Max
Starring – Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, Kelly MacDonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, & Ulrich Thomsen
With – Jason Ritter, & Paul Ben-Victor
And – Jim Charmatz, Victor Broadley, & Rodrick Khachatoorian