The “Lanterns” season finale, “Dirt and Stars,” ended the way the whole season felt: slow, muted, and exactly as predictable as the show’s marketing. Eight episodes built around the question of who killed Hal Jordan end with an answer that changes nothing, and John Stewart takes the ring in the finale just as everyone knew he would from the first trailer.
The episode jumps around the timeline as the entire show has, but by this point it’s a tired tirck. It opens in Rushville in 2016, visits Hal’s release from prison in 2026, and then picks up right where episode seven left off, with John and the Hal-ogram interrogating Sinestro on that desolate, toxic planet. Sinestro insists that Noah Macon, the teenage football player John has been circling all season, killed Hal. John doesn’t buy it and dunks Sinestro in the fear-infused water, which finally gets the truth out of him. Noah is a Manhunter. Noah is the one who broke Sinestro out of prison. And Sinestro forged Noah a lantern, powered in part by yellow fear energy, because Noah wants revenge on the Guardians and Sinestro is the only person who has ever killed one. Sinestro also lets slip that John could use that same fear-powered lantern to charge Hal’s ring.
John goes after Noah, and the episode loops back to the actual murder. After Rushville was destroyed in 2016, Hal returned to town and grew close to Sheriff Kerry Kane. When he learned her son was a Manhunter, he went to her at the football stadium and told her they needed to run before something terrible happened. Kerry refused to give up her life in Rushville, panicked, drew her gun, and shot him in the head. Noah, who had once been saved by Hal, lied to everyone and claimed the killing as his own to protect his mother. When John confronts Noah, the kid hands the ring back and asks John to put him down the way John once did for his grandmother Zoe. John refuses. He tells Kerry that Noah made the right choice because she raised him well, and he does not arrest her for the murder. Then he charges Hal’s ring, writes a Green Lantern oath of his own, and calls Guy Gardner, played by Nathan Fillion, through the Lantern signal to send an encoded message to the Guardians telling them to let him operate on his own terms. Hal’s ghostly last scene with John is the emotional sendoff, and Sinestro gets left behind on his dead planet.
That is the entire season’s payoff, and it is a letdown. Every episode told us to care about who pulled the trigger, and it turns out nearly every suspect was a decoy. The finale lands on the least surprising person possible, the woman who loved Hal, for a reason that comes down to “she panicked.” Hal did not threaten her son. He did not threaten to turn Noah in. He begged her to run away with him. The writers handled Kerry’s motive so thinly that it barely survives contact with the rest of her character. She is a veteran sheriff with firearms training and a sharp mind, yet the moment she learns the truth, she shoots the man trying to protect her. Then John walks under those same bleachers years later, tells her he knows who Noah is, and implies he may have to deal with the boy, and she does not reach for her gun. She stands there and considers whether her son might be a problem. A woman who kills out of terror in 2016 does not respond with calm contemplation when a second Lantern makes a far more direct threat to her child.
The moral stakes are even harder to swallow. A woman shoots a man in the back of the head, and the hero lets her walk because she is a good mother. A teenager who broke a genocidal alien out of prison and lied about a murder gets mercy because the show decides his humanity can outrun his programming. Maybe that works as a theme about nature and nurture. As a conclusion to a murder mystery, it means nobody answers for anything, and the only consequence for Hal’s death is that it clears the road for John.
That is the other half of the problem. The show promised us from the beginning that John Stewart would replace Hal Jordan, and the finale delivers precisely that, with no twist and no real drama attached. Hal was written as the reckless, unlikable washout for most of the season so the transition would feel earned, and when it finally arrives, it plays as a formality. Even the show’s biggest swerve, the Hal-ogram and the suggestion that Sinestro might bring Hal back, gets quietly shelved so John can ride off alone.
The finale also leaves a pile of loose threads that the series promised but delivered pretty much nothing on. Sinestro, the series’ marquee villain, ends up abandoned on a poisoned planet like an afterthought. The Guardian from episode three, whose entire scene was a lecture about race, never shows up again, which makes that hour look even more like filler. And the season spent an entire episode flirting with the idea that Hal might take his own life, a red herring that goes nowhere once the real answer arrives.
“Lanterns” spent eight episodes asking who killed Hal Jordan, and by the end, nobody involved seems to care about the answer. If the point was always John Stewart’s rise, why build the entire season around a murder the show was willing to excuse?
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