A man sits in a cell and another man stands on the other side of the bars, and the show keeps coming back to that arrangement. HBO Max released a new “Lanterns” trailer on Wednesday, filed it, without apparent irony, as a midseason trailer, and then dropped a title card into the middle of it reading “ON THE FINAL 3 EPISODES.” Those two descriptions do not sit comfortably together, because the season is eight hours long, and a trailer for the last three of them is not a midseason anything. It is, on any reading, an endgame trailer with a softer label on the tin.
The cut runs one minute fifty-nine and it is the biggest thing HBO has put out since the premiere, which is worth saying plainly given what that premiere did. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Lanterns” through the first half of its season, including who died in the pilot, where the show has put its surviving lead, and what the new trailer says about fear.
It is, on any reading, an endgame trailer with a softer label on the tin.”
The premiere killed Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) in its last ninety seconds, put a bullet hole in the biggest name on the poster, and left his ring missing. We asked at the time where that ring had gone, and the honest answer after watching this trailer four times is that HBO is still not telling. What it is telling us is considerably stranger, because Chandler is all over this cut anyway, lit in warm interiors and fur collars, which means the show intends to keep using him after putting him in the ground.
The recurring image is incarceration. John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) appears behind bars repeatedly across the ninety seconds of actual footage, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing at the glass, always with an older man on the free side of it. There is a desert facility, ringed by a perimeter fence and watched from a guard post, and figures in orange walking toward it. A show that spent its first hours as a murder investigation in a small town now appears to have put its investigator inside the system he was working for.
The dialogue is built almost entirely around blame. “I took the fall,” one voice says, “for what we did.” The answer comes back flat: “You didn’t take the fall. You fell. And people got killed.” Then, over a table, the line the trailer clearly considers its best: “There’s more than one killer at this table.” Somewhere else a voice says the whole town wanted the victim dead, and a third refuses to help with the investigation at all because it would be, in the trailer’s words, bad optics. The trailer also finds room for one joke, and it is a good one. A character recalls asking a man for wisdom, being told to go climb a rope, and assuming the insult was about his job, and when somebody guesses that is because he was a gym teacher the correction comes back immediate, unprintable, and weirdly precise: he was, in fact, an athletic director.
Then there is the line that will travel furthest with anyone who knows the comics. “Fear can be the most powerful force in the universe.” That is not a throwaway in a Green Lantern property, it is the whole architecture of the mythology, and the trailer places it over a shot of a horizon gone entirely yellow with two figures standing against it. The show has not said Sinestro and it has not needed to. It simply put fear in the dialogue and yellow on the screen in the same beat.
The other side of the ledger gets its moment too. A man stands bathed in green light with his head tilted back, which is as close as this series has come to a power-ring image since the pilot, and it is notable, given how much green this show has withheld, that the trailer holds it for barely a second. “Hal didn’t have to die in vain,” somebody says, which is the first confirmation from inside the show that Hal’s death is being treated as a problem to be solved rather than a shock to be absorbed.
Two title cards carry the back half, and they are doing something sly. The first reads “IN BLACKEST NIGHT.” The second reads “THEIR SIGHT.” Anybody who has read a Green Lantern comic can complete that on their own, because the oath runs in brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. The trailer has swapped the possessive. The oath belongs to a Corps in the comics and to one man on Earth in the show, and changing my to their is either a promise that more rings are coming or an admission that the one we had is now somebody else’s problem. There is a reason that swap matters beyond wordplay, and it is sitting in another DC property already. Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner is out there in “Superman,” set in 2025, wearing a ring, leading the Justice Gang, and getting on with it, which means Earth has arguably never been the one-Lantern planet this show has been playing it as. Hal died in 2026 with his ring gone, and if the oath now belongs to more than one person, the series might be about to say so out loud.
Around those cards the trailer cycles through fire and small-town Americana. A motel burns under its own vacancy sign, still advertising rooms. A farmhouse burns at night, windows lit orange, with figures moving in front of it. There is a cemetery on flat empty ground, a car running hard across desert, a bar full of people who look like they know each other, and Sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald) in a white hat looking at something off screen with no patience for it at all.
There is also a shot of a high school football game in full swing, and that one carries weight the others do not. The premiere opened with four bodies laid out on the Rushville high school football field, which is also the ground where Abin Sur crashed and handed Hal his ring in the first place. Putting a functioning Friday night game on that same field, late in a trailer for the final three episodes, is not set dressing. It is the show returning to its own crime scene with the lights on.
It is worth noting what the trailer withholds, because this production has form. Three days earlier HBO put out an episode six preview whose Guy Gardner reveal turned out to be the same shot it had already released in August, a thing we measured ourselves, by stacking the frames, rather than taking the marketing at its word. This cut is more generous than that, but it still declines to show a ring on anybody’s hand, and it still will not say who is wearing green by the finale.
What it does give away is tone. Damon Lindelof and Tom King built this season around a hole where its lead used to be, and three episodes out the show looks committed to that rather than embarrassed by it. There is a body on a table, an industrial corridor, a hand reaching toward a child, and, at the very end, a closing beat where one man tells another they are a long way from being square. “Lanterns” airs Sundays at nine, and it has three hours left to explain where the ring went.
What Do You Think? Does swapping the oath from my sight to their sight promise a second ring bearer, or something worse? Is putting John Stewart behind bars a bold move or a way to stall a murder plot for an hour? And after killing Hal in the pilot, does keeping Kyle Chandler on screen strengthen the gamble or soften it?
See you on the next binge!
