Rushville’s quarterback lines up for the final snap of the Nebraska state championship having spent most of a season finding out he might be the most dangerous thing on either side of the ball. That image, Noah Macon (Shea Pritchard) throwing a football under the lights while his mother watches from the bleachers, not sure whether she is about to lose him to a trophy or to what he actually is, anchors “Lanterns” season 1, episode 8, “Dirt and Stars.” HBO aired the finale Sunday, October 4th, closing out the Green Lantern drama’s eight-episode first run.
This review is written from the recaps of the broadcast rather than a screener, and every beat below is checked against at least two of them. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Lanterns” season 1 finale and the identity of the killer at its center.
Rushville’s quarterback lines up for the final snap of the Nebraska state championship having spent most of a season finding out he might be the most dangerous thing on either side of the ball.”
The mystery the season spent seven hours building, who put a bullet in Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) on a Nebraska football field with no ring left on his finger, gets answered almost gently. That gentleness, not a twist or a conspiracy, is the more interesting choice the finale makes. It was Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), not a Manhunter and not a conspiracy, who shot him. Hal had just worked out that Noah was a Manhunter, and he told Kerry he wanted to get her and her son out of Rushville before anyone else figured it out. Somewhere between his confession and his offer to run, fear got ahead of her, and she fired. The AV Club called it, in critic Dennis Perkins’s phrase, “a literally hairtrigger spasm of fear,” and that line does more work than a dozen plot explainers. The finale clearly is not interested in Kerry as a villain. It is interested in what a mother does when the person she loves most in the world is also the single greatest threat to her son staying her son.
Noah’s existence turns out to be stranger than a simple alien-baby twist, and the show clearly wants the mechanics sat with rather than skimmed. Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan), tied into the same Macon family, is the one who regrew Kerry’s severed finger years earlier. That regeneration left behind more than a working hand. Kerry got pregnant with no father in the picture, according to TVLine’s recap and at least one other outlet’s account of the same scene. Noah has spent his whole life being raised as Billy Macon’s (Jason Ritter) son, a Rushville quarterback with Manhunter wiring where his conscience ought to get the final say. It is a genuinely strange piece of science-fiction plumbing to drop into a show that otherwise plays like a crime procedural. The finale is betting an audience will swallow it, because by episode eight it has already asked for so much more.
Noah knows what he is before John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) does, and that gap is where the episode’s saddest material lives. He hands over the ring and asks John to kill him rather than let whatever is wired into him eventually win out. He warns him, in a line two separate recaps quote identically, that “if you could see the inside of my head, you’d never stop screaming.” It is a mercy-killing request from a teenager who still wants to play one more football game before he dies, and the show lets that sit uncomfortably instead of resolving it with a speech. Shea Pritchard, mostly a newcomer, carries the scene on restraint rather than hysterics. That restraint, more than anything else in the hour, is the harder and the better choice for a kid asking an adult to end him.
He gets his game first, though, and the recaps describe Noah leading Rushville to a win at the state championship, and Gizmodo reports the exact shape of it: a touchdown pass as the clock runs out. It is, in shape at least, the ending a football movie stages on purpose, except here the quarterback spent the fourth quarter deciding whether he deserved to live past it. Kerry watches from the stands, and the show lets the crowd noise and the floodlights do work a lesser finale would hand to a monologue.
John, in the end, does not kill him. The recaps describe the same choice from several angles: John looks at a kid raised with love, even if that love came with a Manhunter’s instincts folded in, and decides nurture gets one more chance to win the argument nature started. He extends, notably, the same mercy to Kerry. When she offers, in close to identical language across outlets, to turn herself in for killing Hal, John tells her that is not what Hal would have wanted. He lets her go on raising her son instead of losing her to a cell for a crime nobody but Kerry, Noah and John will ever know happened. Then he does the thing the whole season has been walking toward, charging an unsanctioned lantern lit with fear instead of willpower and reciting an oath he wrote for himself rather than the one Hal taught him. “In brightest day, in darkest night, I’ll embrace my fear, I’ll do what’s right,” is the version at least three separate recaps quote almost word for word. The show has him fly for the first time, right after he says it, closing the hour in midair.
The finale spends its last few minutes pointing past Rushville. Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) resurfaces long enough to work out, in general terms, who covers Earth and who covers the rest of the sector. The recaps mostly read that exchange as table-setting for John showing up in 2027’s “Man of Tomorrow,” rather than anything this show plans to resolve itself. Thaal Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) stays locked up but gets shown forging a lantern out of pure fear rather than will. More than one outlet, reading the scene the same way, flagged that detail as the clearest season 2 hook the episode plants. A Sinestro with his own power source, and nothing left to lose, is not a storyline a show sets up by accident.
Director Alik Sakharov, working from a script credited to showrunner Chris Mundy alongside Damon Lindelof and Tom King, keeps the finale’s biggest emotional beats on human faces rather than visual effects. That restraint is probably the clearest authorial fingerprint on the whole season. Where a typical superhero finale spends its budget on a last-act battle, “Dirt and Stars” spends its time on a truck parked outside a football field and a sheriff who cannot look at the man she shot. That might not be the ending a Green Lantern fan who wanted a cosmic battle was hoping for, and that is a fair disappointment. It is a coherent one, though, and coherence has not always been this genre’s strongest suit lately.
The season closes with real critical goodwill behind it. Rotten Tomatoes has season 1 sitting at a 91 percent Tomatometer from 148 reviews, and Metacritic’s aggregate lands at 72, labeled generally favorable, from 38 critic reviews. Those numbers put “Lanterns” comfortably ahead of most of the DC Universe’s television output so far. HBO has not formally renewed the show for a second season as of this writing. DC Studios co-chief James Gunn has already confirmed on social media that episode 8 is a season finale rather than a series finale, and Damon Lindelof has said writers are developing ideas for where the story goes next. The hedge here, in other words, is procedural rather than creative. Whatever gets greenlit inherits a John Stewart who chose humanity over the rulebook, a Noah who gets to keep being a teenager a little longer, and a Sinestro with a lantern nobody sanctioned.
Eight episodes in, “Lanterns” never quite became the murder mystery it was marketed as or the superhero show its title promised, and the finale does not pretend otherwise. It ends on a kid who nearly died twice in one season, a mother who got away with killing Hal, and a Lantern who decided mercy was worth more than the rulebook. That is an unusual note for a Green Lantern show to end on, and it is also, on the evidence of eight hours, exactly the note this version of the story was always built to hit.
What Do You Think? Does John Stewart sparing both Noah and Kerry feel like mercy, or a mistake he will regret in season 2? Is Sinestro’s fear-powered lantern the villain turn you wanted out of “Lanterns”? And should HBO have closed this season on a real superhero fight instead of a football game?
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