In the end, the withholding was the message.
Lanterns, from its beginning, refused to indulge us. By us (and I’m very much including myself), I mean comic book fans. The superhero adaptation has been so ubiquitous a cultural force for so long that the genre has itself necessarily mutated, stretched, and flown into unconventional places. Lanterns has been described as the superhero story as prestige procedural, and while that’s part of its DNA, tonight’s finale so resolutely maintains its human focus that I feel like saluting the arrival of a new superhero narrative altogether.
When John, facing down Earth’s official Green Lantern with a powerless ring, tells the blustering Guy Gardner, “No Guardians, no Corps—you take the stars, have fun. I’ll take the dirt,” his triumph comes not from a slam-bang superpowered battle, but from one person’s choice to break away from the “chain of command” and do what he knows is right for his character. (And, you know, the character.) Lanterns dives to the heart of the “what if superheroes really existed, though?” thought experiment that was Alan Moore’s Watchmen and declares that even that rightly legendary tome’s tone is too dependent on fanciful problem solving. Lanterns—power rings, alien worlds, and sentient plant-aliens and all—is a human story. There just happen to be gods in it.
The procedural aspect of Lanterns is answered in the saddest possible manner. Kerry killed Hal in a literally hairtrigger spasm of fear upon learning that Hal has discovered that Noah’s a Manhunter. Kelly Macdonald’s face is Lanterns‘ mystery heartbreakingly demystified as Kerry processes Hal’s impassioned plan to take his new family somewhere far, far away to try and contain Noah’s programmed capacity for unthinkable destruction. (As fellow A.V. Clubber Chase Hutchinson rightly noted, Macdonald is Lanterns‘ heart, and here it breaks hard enough to shatter all but the stoniest among us.) As John says gently to the sheriff while they stand in the tunnel watching Noah lead his tiny town’s football team to underdog victory, “Fear and love make people scared, and scared people can do anything.”
Hal Jordan was proud-to-boastfulness of never being afraid, and that rigidity of purpose not only concealed the cracks in entire generations of Jordan men, it broke him. The Hal Jordan we see throughout Lanterns cloaks his gnawing fear (of failure, of being replaced and forgotten) in good-old boy swagger and petulant withholding from his supposed successor. With all the answers (to Hal’s murder, to Noah’s parentage, to Kerry’s crime) and with power enough (thanks to the bootleg lantern Sinestro cobbled together on his alien planet hideaway) to stamp out every simmering crisis, John Stewart chooses humanity.
He finds some in Noah, his grandmother’s alien descendant and (in a truly surprising twist) product of Kerry’s Manhunter-tech virgin birth, who likewise places the fading but still deadly ring on the dashboard of John’s truck and asks John to kill him after he plays one last game for his teammates. He finds it in Kerry, whose promise to turn herself in for Hal’s murder John waves away as “not what Hal would have wanted.” He finds it in himself most of all, as he, now Earth’s Green Lantern—in fact if not in the Guardians’ books—returns to his family home and accepts his mother’s bottomless, tearful, silent apology with a warm and forgiving embrace. No big green fists, no protective force bubbles, not even a single flight through the Rushville sky until John, after making the last of his uncertain, potentially disastrous, but unerringly human choices finally, effortlessly lifts himself off the ground.
John Stewart is going to make one hell of Green Lantern. When the Halogram tells John, “My gut tells me you’re gonna be better at this job than I ever was,” it rings true because it comes from a version of Hal who can finally recognize what was holding him back. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool DC partisan,, but Hal Jordan’s comic-book tenure as Green Lantern has always bored me. Later stories attempted to expose the cracks in Hal’s stiff, space cop code and character, but even then, the hero’s stolid starting place never made me care all that much. Lanterns doesn’t “disrespect Hal Jordan’s legacy” or whatever entitled complaints emanate from the most regrettably retrograde of my fellow comics nerds’ keyboards. Lanterns exposes the weaknesses that were already there, and embraces them as the key to something greater.
John and Halogram’s goodbye (Hal will disappear for good once John fully charges his ring) got to me not just because of the actors. (Man, to have any Kyle Chandler character tell me, “You’re ready” would carry me a long, long way.) But because it’s the passing of a legacy improved by the recognition that there’s no weakness in being afraid. Sinestro, sputtering after John chains him to an old mining cart for information about Noah, knew at least that much. “Show me a species who’s fearless and I’ll show you a creature on the extinction list,” is true as far as it goes, but John grounds his climactic plan in the faith that love and fear can, indeed, make you do anything.
Even allow Noah—an alien shapeshifter with unparalleled manipulation skills and a fast, all-American track to political power—to try and win against the worst part of his nature. Even allow Kerry—guilty of the murder of John’s mentor and complicity in Zoe’s reign—to continue her role mentoring her potentially world-destroying child to be the good person she raised him to be. Guy doesn’t get an epic power ring beatdown in the town square but a calm (if emasculating) chance to fly off and tattle to the Guardians to save face. (Armed with John’s subtle blackmail about the Guardians’ role in the Manhunters’ creation.) People (not least myself) have questioned whether Lanterns‘ somber, human, decidedly gray-area ethos could fit alongside Superman in James Gunn’s DCU. Well, John gives us the answer in his altered Green Lantern pledge, following Halogram’s advice, “Write your own fuckin’ oath.”
In brightest day in darkest night/ I’ll embrace my fear, I’ll do what’s right/ I choose this ring, I choose this fight/ In service to this lantern’s light.
A few episodes back, we heard Hal rush through his comics-accurate oath as if ashamed, or disillusioned. Its black-and-white, good vs. evil mission to root out and destroy spoke of the carceral state and the bureaucratic whim of (blue, alien) judges on high. It’s enough to turn a good man bitter and cynical and… afraid. John Stewart will appear in next summer’s Man Of Tomorrow toting a hard-learned sense of the maddening but hopeful complexity of things, and I think the big blue boy scout and the green-suited Lantern will get along exceptionally well.
Stray observations
Such a lot to cover in this truly rewarding and satisfying finale. I’ll kick off by saying my pre-air “B” grade was dead wrong. This finale gets an A, and the show a solid B-plus. I underestimated how true to its mission this show would hold.
Hal, on the message “Leave, asshole” left in manure on his lawn. “Their own manure. That takes time.”
Kerry’s eventual reprieve from John is predicted by her glass-clinking speech to the angry diners, “I lost as much as any of you 10 years ago and I forgive him. Hal Jordan may have fucked up and maybe the doesn’t deserve grace, but he deserves peace.”
I don’t mean to harp on viewers who’ve been entertainingly combing through Lanterns for a conventional comics deus ex machina. Yes, I saw the conspicuous hole on Hal’s arm after Noah regenerates him with Manhunter tech. And yes, I heard Sinestro boast how he could make Hal live again for real. And hey, if Kyle Chandler’s Hal somehow gets a retcon, I won’t buck (too much) about having him back on my screen. But Lanterns was never that show.
Ulrich Thomsen may not have had much room to channel Sinestro’s legendary villainy, but—as much as I relish the actor’s delicious brand of lizard-like malign charisma—I appreciate how Lanterns‘ Sinestro never gets to break free from his diminished state. Getting dunked for info in a terror-lake only fuels the Lanterns’ nemesis in his ever-thwarted rage.
The lantern Sinestro made is run through with yellow. Fans know about that.
The way John lies about Hal’s last words to Kerry only for Halogram to respond, “…and I love you too, Junior” before fading away forever is buddy cop sentimentality done very right.
Shea Pritchard as Noah has a hell of an episode. Not to be too smug, but I was onto that glad-handing little future GOP congressman from the moment the teen Noah showed up. And if the law of economy of characters did point me toward Noah as murderer, I just knew that wouldn’t be quite devastating enough for Lanterns. If Noah did it, it would only destroy Kerry, but if Kerry did it… pain all around.
Aaron Pierre’s work on Lanterns is low-key brilliant. In the scene with Noah, John is gambling everything on being able to defuse a bomb set in motion years ago, and Pierre never blinks while reaching out to the terrified 17-year-old kid beside him.
Breaking the tension, John and Noah hear the Rushville band’s off-key performance in the distance. Noah: “It’s tough to field a good marching band in a small town.” John: “Yeah I bet tryouts for third trombone get a little dark.”
Is John’s hope and faith in Noah and Kerry going to backfire? Well, Noah does choose to play for Nebraska and not the Naval Academy, as he’d hinted was part of his Manhunter half’s plan to reach the presidency.
The sight of the first lonely snowflakes drifting over Hal and Kerry in the bleachers where he’ll eventually be found covered in snow is achingly sad.
Kerry tells John she fled to Rushville “to escape a monster.” Considering Gotham City, she could be speaking very literally.
One last bit of Kelly Macdonald love: the smile on Kerry’s face shifting from conflicted to pure mom pride as Noah leads the team to its inevitable Friday Night Lights last-second victory.
John even pays off the dumb blackmail subplot, leaving Maggie her money with a simple note indicating that he knew who she was all along. The teen stares off after him, having just met a real hero for the first time.