'Lanterns' Premieres with Mystery, Death, and a Strong Start

You certainly can’t accuse Lanterns of false advertising. DC Studios’ Green Lantern series has been pitched for months as “True Detective” in the world of Superman and Batman. We still don’t know whether the production’s quality — led by the trio of Damon Lindelof (Watchmen), Chris Mundy (Ozark), and Tom King (DC comics writer) — will reach the level of that historic first season of the detective anthology, but the story starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson unquestionably hangs over this new production.

The main similarity — and this is not something True Detective invented — lies in the idea of mismatched partners working the same case, but the biggest influence from that detective story here seems to be the investigation into the hidden side of small-town America. After a flashback to John Stewart’s childhood, where we see the future hero’s father taking bold measures so his son won’t grow up afraid, Lanterns jumps to 2016, with Stewart — now played by an excellent Aaron Pierre — being trained by veteran Hal Jordan (and his childhood idol) (Kyle Chandler). The younger man has been chosen by the Guardians of the Universe to be trained by the older one so that one day he can take over the ring. That’s a break from tradition*. Normally, when a Lantern dies, the ring automatically chooses a new bearer, but for some reason Stewart is receiving unprecedented treatment.

*According to Hal, John can’t receive the ring yet because there can only be one Lantern per planet. Over the course of the episode, however, we see that Hal keeps certain information from John. Since we know Guy Gardner is going to appear in the series, this may be another detail the mentor is hiding from his trainee. We’ll see.

We get a bit of that “training” in the first episode when Hal leaves John trapped inside a runaway car (with the ring inside) headed toward a cliff. What this scene emphasizes, like so many other lines of dialogue, is the good old “good cop, bad cop” dynamic — but within the partnership itself. The difference here is that the sloppy rebel is Hal Jordan, while his student is a disciplined, respectful former soldier.

In fact, much of the humor in this first episode comes from watching Hal have fun while trying to get under Stewart’s skin. These moments further highlight the excellent casting choices. On their own, Chandler and Pierre are very good. Together, they recreate the kind of comic chemistry that flavors much of the buddy-cop genre, where partners’ differences actually seem to complete each other. Think 48 Hrs., Lethal Weapon, and others. It doesn’t quite reach that level, but that’s clearly the territory Mundy, Lindelof, and King want to explore.

All of this dynamic comes to the surface as the two fly (Hal with powers, John in coach) to Rushville, a town in Nebraska, where a shooting at a high school football game has just taken place. For some reason, Hal believes the dead — and the only suspect taken into custody — are aliens, an idea initially dismissed by both John and the sharp local sheriff, Kerry (the always excellent Kelly Macdonald, a veteran of Boardwalk Empire). That seemingly absurd idea, however, draws the attention of the man who runs the town, who is revealed to be the sheriff’s father-in-law, William Macon (an instantly striking Garret Dillahunt), a militia leader whose mansion has essentially been turned into a military training center. Hal and John also cross paths with two more members of the family. William’s son, Billy (Jason Ritter), is the one who gets Hal out of jail after he’s arrested following a bar fight, while his wife, Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), takes John out for a steamy night on the town without the Lantern recruit knowing who she is.

This first hour in Rushville works more as scene-setting, laying out all the pieces involved in the mystery and culminating in confirmation of Hal’s suspicion about alien involvement in the shooting. After a lot of back-and-forth with Kerry — and it’s impossible to overstate how fun it is to watch Chandler and Macdonald needle each other — Hal gets authorization to interrogate the suspect apprehended at the scene. Over the course of the interrogation, which at first seems to be backfiring, it becomes clear that the suspect is an extraterrestrial, but instead of giving up information, he kills himself in an explosion, taking much of the sheriff’s station with him. The use of the ring saves Hal, John, and Kerry — and, if we believe the alien’s threat about the size of the blast he was capable of causing, the rest of the town as well — but leaves many questions hanging in the air. The biggest of them, however, comes in the episode’s epilogue, when we jump to 2026.

The episode’s final scene jumps 10 years ahead. On a winter night, John returns to the town of Rushville and reunites with Kerry at the stadium where the original massacre took place. Kerry leads John up the bleachers, where he comes face-to-face with a ringless Hal Jordan, covered in snow and apparently dead.

There has been plenty of speculation about Hal Jordan’s possible death in this series, and the character’s fate is hinted at in several moments. There’s a sense that the Green Lantern is living dangerously on purpose, and no longer sees much reason to keep going. So what happened to him? And if he really is dead, what does that mean for the series? It’s a decision that will no doubt frustrate some fans (though we’ll still get plenty of episodes featuring the hero in the 2016 scenes), but one that can only be properly judged once we have the full story in front of us.