Lanterns hit its highest point for spectacle with episode five, “Lights Out,” an hour that finally cashes in the mystery the first four episodes built and blows up half of Rushville doing it. It is also the episode where the show’s worst habits, the same ones that turned a nude sketching scene into a slog in episode four, stop being an occasional distraction and start driving the plot.

The hour opens on a flashback to 2007, showing a younger Sheriff Kerry Kane arriving in Rushville with a past she is running from, before jumping back to the immediate aftermath of Hal rolling out of the moving car and leaving John trapped inside. John escapes the wreck and the hospital, calls his parents, and tells them to get him in touch with the Guardians because he intends to take the ring off Hal’s finger himself. Hal, meanwhile, strikes a deal with Antaan, the alien hunting the Manhunter, and lies to him that William Macon is the creature they are after. The lie buys Hal time to grab Zoe himself and deliver her to the Guardians, restoring his standing and locking John out for good.

That deal produces the scene generating the most attention: Antaan explains that Manhunters infiltrate a town by embedding with its most powerful resident and forming an intimate relationship with them to cement loyalty. He asks Hal whether Macon slept with John. Hal, unwilling to admit John was the more likely target, claims he was the one who slept with Macon instead. Antaan tells him, “You’ve always presented as heterosexual,” and Hal answers that after enough time among the pleasures of the galaxy, it stops being about preference and starts being about opportunity. Antaan’s men nod along. It is played entirely as a punchline, delivered with the same “this is simply how enlightened people talk” tone the show has used for its other lectures, and it lands as one more writer treating audience discomfort as the joke rather than the dialogue itself.

Antaan’s crew storms the Macon ranch, tortures Macon, and cuts out his heart to check whether it crystallizes the way a Manhunter’s does. It doesn’t. Realizing he backed the wrong target, Antaan turns his hit squad on Hal. While that manhunt unfolds, Zoe is healing John from his car injuries, and the two have another conversation about race, the second or third time this season the show has stopped to frame Hal and John’s dynamic through that lens. Zoe also gets a sympathetic backstory here: she and Antaan were once a couple who tried and failed to start a family, which is presented as the real root of his vendetta against her. The show goes further and roots the entire Manhunter threat in the Guardians of Oa themselves, the alien council that created the Manhunters in the first place and then covered up the fallout. Zoe is a mass murderer who blows up her own adopted town to cover her tracks, and the episode still spends its runtime asking the audience to understand her.

Hal burns through his ring’s charge saving civilians from Zoe’s forces and finally kills Antaan by flinging him skyward with a construct right before the bomb wired into his own body goes off. Running low on power, Hal heads back to the motel to recharge, only for John to interrupt him mid-ritual. What follows is the season’s ugliest scene: Hal traps John and lays out his real plan, using Antaan’s men to grind down Macon’s militia so he can slip away with Zoe uncontested. “You are never gonna replace me, Junior,” he tells John, the same line in one form or another that the show has had Hal repeat all season. The two come to blows, and John beats Hal down and pulls the ring off his finger while Hal, buried in the wreckage of the room, asks him, “Was it worth it?”

That “replace me” refrain has carried an uncomfortable subtext since episode one: an older white lead openly worried about being pushed out by his younger black successor, delivered by a show that treats Hal’s resentment as a character flaw to be diagnosed rather than a grievance with any basis. Hal is not imagining it. He is being taken off the job through no failure of his own, against his will, by an institution that has already decided who they want in the seat. The show frames that as Hal’s problem to get over instead of a real injustice done to him, which is a strange thing to keep repeating episode after episode if the point isn’t to make a broader argument about who gets pushed aside and why.

John takes the ring, tracks Zoe down, and puts her on the ground with a sniper shot rather than bringing her in, closing out the season’s central mystery in one clean, brutal image. He then walks through a Rushville left in ruins and, in the episode’s final turn, hands the ring back to the Guardian Lianna, rejecting the job he spent his whole life preparing for. Back in the 2026 timeline the show keeps cutting to, Hal is confirmed dead and frozen, ringless, while John wanders with a goatee and empty hands of his own.

None of that plot is small. The action in “Lights Out” is the best the show has staged, and John finally earning the ring only to hand it back gives the hour a real ending instead of a cliffhanger for its own sake. But Lanterns keeps doing what HBO’s other prestige genre shows do: build a solid hour of story, then insert the one scene that exists to make a point rather than serve the plot. Every episode gets its moment, whether that’s the full-frontal walk in one HBO fantasy series or the naked sketching session in Lanterns episode four. This week it was Hal’s sexuality played for a laugh and a Manhunter’s psychological profile built to excuse mass murder.

Is Lanterns building toward something worth the eight-episode investment, or is every strong hour going to keep getting undercut by the same handful of writers reaching for the same buttons?

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