HBO has now shown the same three seconds of Nathan Fillion twice, and both times it has cut away before you can see his face. The promo for “Lanterns” episode 6 went up on Sunday, and the outlets that ran it led with Guy Gardner finally meeting John Stewart. We downloaded that promo, pulled the clip HBO put out on 27 August, and stacked the two frames on top of each other. They are the same shot, from the same camera, three weeks apart, and the August one cut out early behind a card reading “redacted by the Green Lantern Corps.”
“Lanterns” episode 6 is called “Bad Optics” and it airs Sunday 20 September at 9pm ET on HBO and HBO Max, the sixth of eight. The promo runs 42 seconds, is framed 2:1 inside a 1080p container, and carries 21 distinct shots. It is the first footage since episode 5 closed out the Rushville storyline. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for that promo, including its dialogue, the two bodies it puts on screen, and the scene HBO hides after the end card.
We downloaded that promo, pulled the clip HBO put out on 27 August, and stacked the two frames on top of each other. They are the same shot, from the same camera, three weeks apart, and the August one cut out early behind a card reading “redacted by the Green Lantern Corps.”
Start with what is actually in it, because nobody has written this part down. The promo opens on a dead man. Two seconds in there is an older man slumped outdoors at night beside a trailer home, grey haired, eyes shut, his face and coat furred with frost, a dark smear across the bridge of his nose. Over the top of him a voice says, “no witnesses, whoever broke his nose probably killed him.” He has been out there long enough to freeze.
Nine seconds later the promo puts a different body on a table. This one is indoors under a sheet with a blue gloved hand at the top of frame, dark haired, younger, and there is a clean round hole punched into his temple above the cheekbone. The line over that one is specific in a way trailer dialogue usually is not: “no signs of him fighting back, single shot to the head, so the shooter was looking at him head on.” A broken nose means a fight. No signs of fighting back means there was not one. These are two victims, two causes of death, and the promo never names either of them. A promo cuts its audio across its images freely, so treat the pairing as the cut HBO chose rather than as a scene, but the two descriptions cannot belong to one corpse.
Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart is in the morgue for both of the shots that follow, standing over the table in a turtleneck and dark coat while a medical examiner in a white coat works. Kelly Macdonald’s Sheriff Kerry gets one shot at six seconds, in a pale cowboy hat with the star on her chest, outdoors at night. That is the whole investigation: a sheriff, a coroner, a man who used to have a ring, and two bodies.
The second thing the promo is about is the town, and this is where the footage says something the dialogue only half admits. Rushville built a monument to its visiting Green Lanterns, an oversized lantern on a plinth in the middle of the main drag with glowing green bands around the bowl, and by episode 6 it has been tagged. There is spray paint in yellow and teal all over the base, scrawl on the white housing, and boards strapped across the lantern itself. John stands next to it at night and looks up at it, lit green by the thing the town has defaced. The line that lands across those shots is a flat, “the Green Lantern isn’t welcome here.”
One correction to the coverage while we are here, because it is being reported the wrong way round. Several write ups have pointed at the graffiti as a fresh tell that the town has soured on its Lanterns. The vandalism is not new. HBO’s 27 August clip shows the same monument already splashed with paint and already boarded, in daylight, with a sheriff’s cruiser parked behind it. What episode 6 adds is John standing underneath it at night, which is a different thing from the town turning. The town had turned three weeks ago.
At twenty seconds the promo gives you the confrontation it has been building to, and it is the part of the footage nobody has described. A local in a work jacket, moustached, somewhere in his forties, squares up to John on the street at night, and sitting on a surface between them, glowing, is the Green Lantern power battery itself. The reverse angles run three shots deep, which is a lot of screen time for a man the promo does not name. Around it people scuffle by a pickup truck under a streetlamp and somebody gets shoved across a hood. John’s own line is the only thing in the cut that sounds like a mission statement: “I’m just trying to figure out why he got killed.” Earlier, quieter, somebody says, “I just wanted someone else around who cared that he was gone.”
We are not going to tell you who the moustached man is, because no outlet has identified him and the promo never does. He is not Nathan Fillion. Fillion’s Guy Gardner has the blond bowl cut he wore in “Superman” and this man has neither the hair nor the face. If the local turns out to be Jason Ritter’s Billy Macon, the lawyer who represented Hal Jordan in the premiere and who is married to Sheriff Kerry, that would be a tidy answer, but a work jacket and a pickup is not how this show has dressed its lawyer. Flagging it rather than guessing.
Then the promo does something worth noticing. At twenty six seconds it plays its end card, the full green “LANTERNS, Sundays 9pm, HBO Max” lockup, the frame that tells a viewer the promo is over. And then, after it, for about three seconds, it plays one more shot.
John Stewart is lying on a bunk in a jail cell. Beyond the bars, deliberately thrown out of focus, a figure in a pale jacket stands watching him. The figure raises a fist and a power ring ignites, and the green floods the whole cell, the bars, the windows, John’s face. That is the shot the headlines are calling Guy Gardner meeting John Stewart. You never see who is holding the ring.
Here is the measurement in full. HBO’s August clip opens on the Rushville street in daylight, takes in the Sheridan County Sheriff’s Department and the vandalised monument, then cuts inside to that cell. Same bars, same high windows, same John on the same bunk, same camera position, and a fist with a green pinpoint on it raised toward him. Then the picture tears itself apart into video glitch and the redaction card, cutting out at the precise moment the visitor would have become visible. Put the two frames one above the other and they are indistinguishable except for grade. The episode 6 promo advances the same shot by exactly one beat, letting the ring properly fire, and still declines to show a face.
The reason the redaction gag works twice is that Fillion genuinely has not turned up yet. Five episodes into an eight episode season he has no on screen appearance in “Lanterns” at all, and episode 5 spent its ending explaining why Guy, rather than Hal Jordan or John Stewart, is the Green Lantern the world saw protecting Metropolis in “Superman”. That is a lot of table setting for a character the marketing keeps photographing from behind. Chris Mundy showruns, and he co wrote the pilot with Damon Lindelof and the comics writer Tom King.
Whether that is patience or a problem depends on what episode 6 does with him. The redaction card in August was a joke about secrecy that only lands if the payoff is worth guarding, and stretching the same withheld shot across two marketing beats raises the price. A show that has spent five hours on a murder in a Nebraska county seat does not obviously need a cameo from the Justice Gang to hold together, and the promo we have just walked through is evidence that it does not: two bodies, a defaced monument, a town that wants its space cops gone, and a man with no ring trying to work out who shot his mentor. Hal Jordan has been dead since the end of episode 1 and the season has been circling that hole ever since.
What the promo does confirm is that the show has come back to the present and back to the case. The Rushville business is finished, the 2016 material is behind it, and John is in a morgue asking a coroner about entry wounds. Whoever is standing outside that cell with a ring, they are arriving into a story that has finally started asking its original question out loud again. Two episodes after this one, we find out whether it has an answer.
What Do You Think? Is holding Guy Gardner back for six episodes good discipline or is HBO overplaying a cameo it has now teased twice without showing? Who is the man squaring up to John Stewart in the street with the power battery lit between them? And are the two bodies in this promo one case or two?
See you on the next binge!
