I just finished the season finale of Lanterns, so I thought I'd put down some thoughts on the show, including where it fits with my knowledge of Green Lantern from the comics and where it fits with James Gunn's vision for the DCU. There will likely be some spoilers, but I'm not really talking about who killed Hal in the first episode or anything like that - still, proceed with caution.
The first thing to mention is, in fact, the death of Hal Jordan. When I saw the first trailers, featuring Kyle Chandler as Hal and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, I was excited but also apprehensive about how they'd remove Hal to make room for John. The show looked good, and I liked that it focused on the Manhunters, and most importantly, I have a lot of time for Kyle Chandler, ever since I watched the first few seasons of Friday Night Lights. I also have a lot of time for John Stewart, since I loved GL: Mosaic, back in the 90s, and more recently, the Justice League/Justice League Unlimited cartoon.
My concern was that they'd kill of Hal to make room for John, because that's kind of how these stories go: the grizzled mentor dies so that the younger protagonist can have a cause for revenge spurring him to greatness. My concerns were amplified as the first episode went on, because they seemed to be establishing that there could only be one Green Lantern on Earth.
So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, although they did indeed kill Hal off, it was done in an interesting way: after spending much of the first episode following the characters when they'd just met in 2016, it flashes forward to John finding Hal's body in 2026 - long after the meat of the story we're being promised, of John learning how to be a Lantern. It felt like an elegant way around it, by showing that Hal's death wasn't related to the 2016 action we'd just seen, and it provided a big, central mystery that would hang over the show for the next few episodes... and crucially, that the writers wouldn't need to come back to until the 2016 business was sorted out.
That's also important because the trailer for upcoming episodes that went with Episode 1 showed that John would meet Guy Gardner, who'd been established as GL in the Superman movie. Going by the show's own rules, they needed to figure out a way to bypass Guy, and to the writers' credit, they came up with a good answer to that (here's the SPOILER): they essentially gave John his own custom lantern, meaning he's not tied into the succession for Hal's ring the way Guy was, but has the same powers.
Some of the reviews and discussions I read about the show likened it to True Detective, which is probably fair, since it's a two-hander focused on John's relationship with Hal, and there's a lot more sex, violence and swearing than in the original comics. Though I wouldn't necessarily put it up there with True Detective's best seasons (the first and third) - where those were meticulously crafted 10-hour films, where everything was put in place with a craftsman's care, this had some bits that didn't entirely add to the show, specifically the classic GL villain Sinestro.
The show has him already established as Hal's greatest foe, a GL who dared to kill a Guardian and was imprisoned. He later shows up to nudge John in the right direction, but I found that a little underwhelming. In the comics, Sinestro eventually takes on a yellow power ring, which gives him an advantage over Hal, whose ring was then powerless against yellow - here Sinestro is built up as a big villain but doesn't necessarily live up to the billing.
My other concern is the "Surf Dracula" aspect, which I was talking about with a friend last week. For those not as online as me, go look up the original Surf Dracula meme, but for brevity, it refers to shows that unnecessarily drag out the main character's origin story. One example is Netflix's Daredevil, in which the code name and costume don't appear until the very end. There are others, but the point is that you're not getting the stuff you tuned in to see.
And so it is here: we get a lot of setup of John's upbringing, like how he learns art and design because his parents have been grooming him to be GL after Hal, but we don't get much of John showing off that design knowledge. For the last two episodes or so, he can't even use the damn ring because its charge is too low.
Now, I don't want to give the wrong impression. These aren't tiny concerns about the show, but they're also not fatal. The final episode, if not a tour de force that leaves you in a heap in front of the TV, is a satisfying ending to the mysteries posed in the first episode. We've learned about the chain of events that led Hal to his death on those high school bleachers, and the fraught relationship between him and John because of John's father being passed over for the ring. We've also, most crucially, seen John's understanding of his lifelong quest to be GL evolve over the course of the season.
I remain a little suspicious of these streaming shows that feed into the movie universe - there are a lot of good MCU shows, but I find the edges don't always join up perfectly with the films - and this also feels a little like those. But taken as its own story, without referring to how audiences will react to John the next time he shows up in a DCU movie, it's a satisfying one - the acting is great, the effects and the design are good, and it wraps most stuff up really well.
Now that John's on the loose with his own ring, I'm eager to see what he does with it - to reference the MCU again, please don't let there be another four-year gap between this and his next appearance, the way we got with Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson taking over as Captain America. That may not have been fully intended, because of the writers' and actors' strikes of 2023, but Brave New World wouldn't have been a great movie even if they'd released it a year or two earlier.
Anyway, here's hoping that James Gunn gives John a good next appearance, preferably in the next Superman movie. We're owed a good GL film, and a better GL than Guy Gardner (though I can speak at length about him too, if you're ever foolish enough to ask me about it).
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