HBO spent the better part of two years selling “Lanterns” as the grown-up DC show, the one where two space cops work a murder in the middle of nowhere and nobody flies through a portal for at least an hour. Fine. What nobody was selling was the last ninety seconds, which take the biggest name on the poster and put a bullet hole in his forehead. The premiere aired Sunday night on HBO and HBO Max, it runs eight episodes, and it spends most of its length behaving like a patient, dusty character piece before it detonates its own premise on the way out the door.
The credits explain a lot of that. Chris Mundy runs the show, with Damon Lindelof and comics writer Tom King alongside him, which is three people with a documented history of building a season around a hole in the middle of it. Kyle Chandler is Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre is John Stewart, and the pairing works better than the marketing suggested it would, because Chandler plays Hal as a burnout rather than a legend and Pierre plays John as someone who has already decided he is not going to be impressed. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Lanterns” season 1 episode 1 and the identity of the body in the bleachers.
What nobody was selling was the last ninety seconds, which take the biggest name on the poster and put a bullet hole in his forehead.”
It opens in 1996 on a television set, which is a confident way to start a superhero show. Hal Jordan is being interviewed on “60 Minutes” in full Green Lantern regalia, explaining that Lanterns are basically “beat cops spread throughout the galaxy” and that the entry exam is one question: are you afraid? He mentions that his father died when he was a kid, and that he has not been frightened of much since. Watching it is a boy in a living room in Nebraska. Then the boy’s father comes home from the service, stands him against a wall, balances an apple on his head, and shoots it off. Afterwards he hugs him. That is the whole thesis of the show delivered in about four minutes, and it is the best sequence in the episode.
Twenty years on, that boy is John Stewart and his training is about to begin badly. Hal turns up hungover and late in a car that should not be on a road, muttering about a civil war he broke up on Feron 4, and John points out that he has been waiting two months and has not been allowed to wear the ring once. So Hal solves it his way. He takes the ring off, puts it on the dashboard, and throws himself out of the moving car. John grabs the ring and survives, which is the test, and also an assault. It is a very funny scene and a genuinely alarming one, and the show knows it is both.
What John finds inside the ring is the episode’s cleverest bit of engineering. There is a backup consciousness stored in it, a recorded hologram of a younger, warmer, considerably more together Hal that has not been updated since 2006. That version is pleasant company and it is also a running indictment of the man sitting next to him, because you can hear exactly what got lost in the twenty years between them. The hologram points them at Rushville, Nebraska. The real Hal stops joking the second he hears the name and goes straight up into the air, which tells you the name means something long before the show explains why.
Rushville is where four people are lying dead on the high school football field, and it is also where Abin Sur crashed and handed Hal the ring in the first place. Sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald) is unimpressed by all of it and tells them plainly that Earth crimes are hers, which is the correct instinct and does not survive contact with the facts. Macdonald is doing a lot of work here with very little dialogue, and her read on Hal late in the hour, that he is not fearless so much as extremely lonely, is the single sharpest line anyone gets. The town itself is drawn with more care than the genre usually bothers with, right down to a water tower with the name half worn off it.
Then there are the Macons, who are going to be the season’s real problem. Will Macon (Garret Dillahunt) is a rancher with a militia’s worth of friends and an unshakeable conviction that aliens are already walking around in human skin, and the episode is careful not to make him a fool about it, because on the evidence in front of him he is right. His son Billy (Jason Ritter) is a lawyer who cheerfully volunteers to represent Hal after the sheriff sticks him in a broom closet overnight. And Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), the woman John spent the previous night with, turns out to be Will’s wife, a piece of information the show delivers over dinner at the ranch while Will smiles at John across the table.
The case cracks in an interrogation room, and it cracks on trivia rather than on a punch. Hal sits across from a nondescript trucker (Chris Coy) who knows an implausible amount about Nebraska, asks him about football, asks him about Harry Potter, and works out that the man has no opinions at all about anything a real person would have opinions about. He is an alien doing reconnaissance. He also has a biometric explosive built into his skeleton, and he mentions, almost politely, that Hal’s ring is running low. Then he starts beeping. Hal throws up a construct around him and holds the blast in with his own body, and the show finally gives you the green light it has been rationing all hour.
And then it jumps to 2026. John drives back into Rushville through snow, older, bearded, in a suit rather than a jacket. Kerry meets him at the same football field. Hal Jordan is sitting in the bleachers with a broken nose and a single gunshot wound in his forehead, and he is not wearing a ring. Neither is John. That is the last image of the premiere, and it reframes everything you just watched as the first half of a flashback. The show did not tease a death. It committed one, in the pilot, to the character the entire marketing campaign was built around.
The people who made it know exactly what they have done. Lindelof told Collider the team is “willing to absorb the boos from the audience in the first inning, as long as we still have a shot at winning the game,” which is a very Lindelof way of saying buckle up. Mundy argued the choice “will actually infuse the entire story with a lot of emotionality, especially if the audience understands that John and Hal were not in a good place.” Tom King was the most honest of the three: “I was the guy who turned off the show after the Red Wedding and was like, never again.” Chandler, for his part, has declined to say anything useful about it, which in this genre is not nothing.
Which brings us to the trailer HBO ran the second the credits rolled, because the weeks-ahead cut is not a teaser, it is practically a season outline. It opens quiet, with Hal in the bleachers saying “something is off here, I can feel it,” before John lays out the case in one line: four dead aliens on a football field, another one that just blew up half the sheriff’s station. From there it turns into the Rushville siege. There is a packed town hall in a quonset barn, Will Macon riding out across the plains with men behind him, a blast of white light tearing through the ranch gate, and a wide aerial shot of the main street burning with red beams coming down through the smoke. Whatever the show is being coy about now, it is not staying small.
The plot beats land in the middle of it. A Guardian the captions name as Antaan warns that “one of the most dangerous beings to ever exist knows it has been found” and gives them a clock: “you have 48 hours to identify the Manhunter.” That is the season’s villain said out loud, and for anyone who has not read the comics, the Manhunters were the Guardians’ first attempt at a police force before the rings, and they went wrong in the way private armies always go wrong. There is a sterile white chamber with dark ovoid drones hanging in it, three of those pods firing red beams between them, and a pale armoured figure sitting calmly in a Nebraska jail cell that the trailer very deliberately does not identify. We are not going to guess at who that is.
The last third is where it gets nasty, and it is all about the ring. There is a Guardian interview loop that keeps circling one question, asked to John’s face: “would you be comfortable replacing Hal Jordan?” John’s answer is “it doesn’t matter if I’m comfortable with it.” Somebody notes that “killing a Lantern would trigger a large response,” in the tone of a man who has already done the maths. Hal says the only way anyone is getting his ring is over his dead body, phrased considerably less politely than that. And a voice tells him that if he wants the job, “I’m gonna have to move you off the game board.” Given where the premiere leaves his body, that is not foreshadowing, it is a confession.
Here is the part the DCU has to answer eventually, and it is the reason the missing ring matters more than the corpse. Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner is already out there in “Superman,” set in 2025, leading the Justice Gang with a ring on his finger. Hal dies in 2026 with his gone. Earth has run on a one-Lantern-at-a-time model since Abin Sur went down outside Rushville, and the premiere has just quietly created a vacancy and a stolen weapon at the same time. Whether the show is building toward John taking the ring, or toward explaining how somebody else already has it, is now the actual mystery, and it is a better one than “who shot Hal Jordan.”
So does it work? Mostly, and more than we expected. The hour is slow in the way “True Detective” was slow rather than the way bad prestige television is slow, the two leads have real friction rather than banter, and the decision to spend a superhero pilot on an interrogation about Harry Potter is the most confident thing DC has done on television in years. The risk is obvious and the BR team is not going to pretend otherwise: a show that kills its most bankable actor in episode one has to make the other seven worth the trade, and it has given itself eight hours to do it. On the evidence of the first, it might. Ask us again when we find out where that ring went.
What Do You Think? Is Hal Jordan actually dead, or is a ringless body in the bleachers exactly the kind of thing a show with Damon Lindelof on it wants you to assume too early? Does killing your biggest star in the pilot buy the season real stakes, or does it just spend the goodwill before the show has earned any? And when the ring turns up, whose hand is it on — John Stewart’s, Guy Gardner’s, or somebody the trailer has already shown us and refused to name?
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