“Lanterns” premiered on HBO Max this week, and the verdict on the first episode comes down to one pattern that has now defined nearly everything to come out of James Gunn’s DC Universe. The premise works. The execution carries just enough poison in it to ruin the whole thing. “Lanterns” follows that formula exactly.
The episode, titled “Pilot” and written by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, opens in 1996 with a young John Stewart watching Hal Jordan give a televised interview as Earth’s newly assigned Green Lantern. John’s father sets an apple on the boy’s head and shoots it off without the child flinching, a scene meant to establish the “are you afraid” test that decides who gets to wear the ring. Twenty years later, in 2016, John (Aaron Pierre) is training under Hal (Kyle Chandler) without a ring of his own, chasing what looks like a mass shooting at a high school football game in Rushville, Nebraska. Four people turn up dead in matching sweatshirts, a suspect named Waylon Sanders turns out to be something other than human, and the case pulls both Lanterns into a militia compound run by a family convinced aliens are colonizing the planet. The episode closes on a jump to 2026, where John finds Hal’s body frozen in the stadium bleachers, a bullet in his forehead and his ring missing.
Taken as a pitch, that holds together. A small-town mystery, a sheriff who does not trust either Lantern, a militia stockpiling weapons against an invasion nobody else believes in: the bones of a strong hour of television sit right there. It even calls back a little to the Green Lantern/Green Arrow “Hard Traveling Heroes” run from the 1970s, minus the road trip.
But “Lanterns” is not interested in the cosmic side of Green Lantern. John spends the whole episode without a ring, and Hal treats his like a party trick, popping a beer cap off with it at a barbecue. The whole show gets pitched as space cops walking around a Nebraska ranch rather than intergalactic peacekeepers, which reads less like a deliberate creative choice and more like a budgetary one. A show about a man with a magic ring who can build anything his mind conjures should not feel this grounded this fast.
The bigger issue is how the show writes its two leads. Hal Jordan comes across as arrogant, reckless, and frequently useless, a guy who gets himself thrown in a holding cell the night before his own hearing. John Stewart comes across as calmer, sharper, and more disciplined at every turn, the guy the Guardians actually wanted for the job. That is the “subvert expectations” instinct that keeps showing up in this era of franchise writing: take the character the audience is supposed to know and like, make him insufferable, then hand his job to the replacement everyone is supposed to prefer instead. It was obvious from the trailers and the press interviews before the premiere ever aired, and the finished episode confirms it. John is set up from the opening scene as the better Lantern. Hal exists to be replaced, and by the end of the hour, he is dead.
The dialogue does not help the case. The f-word gets used dozens of times across a single hour on top of a steady stream of other profanity, none of which does any real work for character or stakes. Hal gets a line trashing Earth as a “shithole” at one point, phrasing that tracks close to a comment associated with President Trump, which lands as a wink rather than a coincidence given how relentlessly the show frames Hal as the angry, past-his-prime figure the audience is supposed to root against. Add a sheriff character who spends her scenes needling both Lanterns, and John sleeping with the wife of the militia leader hosting him for the night, a detail the show treats as a minor complication rather than something worth examining, and the episode adds up to a lot of noise that a tighter script would not have needed.
Visually, “Lanterns” leans into the same underlit, desaturated look that has become the default for prestige television. Browns, grays, and near-black dominate scene after scene, which drains the color out of a character who is supposed to be a guy in a green suit fighting cosmic threats across the galaxy. Instead of scale and spectacle, the show plays a muddy, grounded buddy-cop drama for nearly its entire runtime: the older cop written as bad at his job, the younger cop written as better at everything, race clearly factoring into which one the show wants the audience behind.
The pacing suffers the same way most streaming dramas do now. An hour built around one mystery with a killer twist ending would have made for a complete episode of “The X-Files,” aliens discovered and consequences underway before the credits rolled. “Lanterns” barely gets past the setup stage in sixty minutes, the standard move for a streaming show stretching one season’s worth of story across ten episodes.
None of this means the concept is dead. An alien threat that cannot be detected, a militia sitting on something bigger than it realizes, and a training arc for a new Lantern could all have made for a genuinely interesting premiere. It needed a Hal Jordan the audience could actually like and a script willing to let the mystery breathe instead of loading every scene with profanity and score-settling. Instead, “Lanterns” spends its first hour making sure viewers dislike the character everyone already knew was walking toward a bullet, and it never quite explains why a show built around one Green Lantern who never wears green earned the plural title in the first place.
Does killing off Hal Jordan in the first episode of a show carrying his character’s legacy set up a genuine twist, or does it confirm “Lanterns” was never really about him to begin with?
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"Does killing off Hal Jordan in the first episode of a show carrying his character’s legacy set up a genuine twist, or does it confirm “Lanterns” was never really about him to begin with?"
It means the show does want me, my money, attention or time.
Woke black fatigue is real.
This review doesn’t surprise me. Glad I already canceled my max subscription