Lanterns Episode 5 Quietly Rewrites Hal Jordan's Origin, and I'm Not Ready to Call It a Finale

This hour of Lanterns opens with a man on a roof with a rifle, scoping a woman he had dinner with hours earlier, a woman who pulled him out of a burning car and grew his skin back with her own blood. She is standing over the man who put him in that car, about to finish him, when he says her name and puts a bullet in her head. He climbs down, walks across a burning town, kneels beside her, and cuts her heart out of her chest, because a Manhunter's heart turns to crystal when it dies, and he needs that crystal to prove to somebody that he did it.

That scene got a standing ovation before midnight, and I get it. Refusing the hero ending, the ring, the training, the music swelling and then getting cut off, is a move that's hard to argue with in public. But I've been around long enough to know the difference between a show that subverts something because the subversion is truer and a show that subverts something because it knows you'll clap. So I went back through the episode twice, and the second time I stopped watching the guy on the roof and started watching a kid standing in two scenes tonight that nobody's talking about.

A 2007 Flashback Breaks the Show's Own Ten Year Clock

The title card says 2007, and that stopped me, because this show runs on a clean ten year clock. 1986 is when Hal takes the ring off a dying man. 1996 he goes public. 2006 he makes his last backup. 2016 is where we've been living all season. 2026 is where somebody finds his body. Every anchor ten years apart. 2007 is the only thing in the series that breaks that pattern.

What's in it is a teenager whose car broke down in the wrong town. Her father talked to somebody he shouldn't have, and two men followed her across state lines, trouble spilling out of a bigger city into Nebraska. Zoe walks in, kills one of the men, takes the other completely apart, and the diner owner doesn't even look up at the corpse sitting at his counter. The men want proof, so a finger comes off and goes back with them, and somebody far away is told the girl is dead. Then Zoe tells her, "Let's go grow you a new finger," and later says, "I'm going to need you." What she handed that girl was a loan, and the interest on her is her whole life. Look at Rushville with that in mind: a whole town armed in the streets, ready to shoot a Green Lantern out of the sky for her, because she spent thirty years building that place one debt at a time.

Zoe's Hospital Confession Rewrites How Hal Jordan Got His Ring

Ninety seconds after the loan speech, in a hospital room, Zoe says the biggest thing out loud like it's nothing: "I killed Abin Sur." In 1986 Abin Sur caught her, told her she'd be executed, and she put him down before he crashed his ship near town. A dying lantern coming down and the ring searching for the nearest man without fear is the first thing in every version of this story anyone has ever told. If Zoe is the one who put Abin Sur in the dirt, Hal Jordan doesn't get that ring by accident. He has it because of her. The show has made the Manhunter the origin of its own Green Lantern.

In the comics, whoever killed Abin Sur has changed hands before, from an alien called Legion to Atrocitus once Geoff Johns' Secret Origin came through, so a rewritten seat isn't new. What I can't get past is the staging. You rewrite your lead character's entire existence and play it face down in the middle of a scene about a skin graft, then go straight back to the gunfight.

The "Lanterns Don't Kill" Rule Forces Hal Onto That Rooftop

There's a rule the show wrote itself. When John suggests a plan that ends with Zoe dead, Hal snaps at him: "We don't kill." That's the hardware talking. The ring won't do it, the prohibition is real, and it tells you we're sitting in the era before the Sinestro War, before the Corps voted itself permission to kill. Follow that rule forward and, if the ring can't kill her and she has to die tonight, the show has written itself into a corner with one way out: a rifle. That's how the hero of a Green Lantern show ends up on a roof with a hunting rifle, breaking an oath he never got to say out loud. It's the most honest thing in the hour, and also a show solving a rule it wrote by handing the kid a weapon the rule doesn't cover.

Was Hal Jordan Really Losing the Plot, Or Remembering Too Hard?

The read the show wants, and the read people who made it have said in the press, is that Hal lost the plot, that he's a broken man. The director of the episode talked about John walking through the ruins deciding not to become who he's been, which I think is "a beautiful thing to say about John." Underneath it, I think, is a claim about Hal forgetting what the ring is for. So I watched Hal for an hour instead of watching John.

Hal lies. He tells the man interrogating a suspect that the Manhunter is Will Min, a decoy who spilled his guts figuratively, buying himself room. That decoy gets tested with questions about a life he didn't live, gets his heart cut out, and it doesn't crystallize because it's a human heart. He's dead because Hal lied, and then the sky over the town opens up and starts burning people alive. That's on him.

The sheriff has already emptied a gun at Hal and told him the best thing he could do for everybody is leave: "Please just let it go. We had peace before you showed up. We can have it again if you leave." The whole street wants him dead, and he stays. With the ring almost dry, he goes to charge it, which is not running, it means he intends to come back and keep doing it. When lasers come down on the motel, he puts what's left of a dying ring over himself and over the man beating him unconscious. That's not a man who forgot what the ring is for. It's a man who remembers so hard he can't stop, which is a real flaw, and arguably a much better show than the one where he simply lost his way.

The Ranch Interrogation Reveals a Marriage Nobody Mentioned

Before any of that, at the ranch, the interrogation of the decoy is a test made of things only one specific person could know, including the question, "What were our children's names?" The decoy has been coached and has answers loaded for most of it, but the answer that comes back is, "We couldn't have children." That tells you Zoe and her interrogator were together long enough and close enough that there's a marriage that ended. His interrogator says the real Manhunter would never have bothered having that conversation, she'd have killed him in the doorway, and that's how he knows he's got the wrong man. He cuts anyway, and the heart stays a heart.

A Guardian's Lie Sends John to Kill Zoe and Reject the Ring

The Guardian who sent him tells John that Hal's reports say he can't wield the power anymore, but Hal hasn't reported to anybody in years, so that statement couldn't have been true when she said it, and she said it anyway to a kid who'd been waiting his whole life for permission. That lie is what sends John to kill Zoe, cut the crystal out of her chest, and carry it into a bar to the person who sent him. She looks at it and says, "You make mistakes. All we can do is correct them," which is a woman calling a genocide a filing error. John calls the heart her sins and consequences, which tells you he knows exactly what he's holding. He tells the Guardian he doesn't want the ring because having it broke him. Most people are reading that as John growing up. I think he looked at the woman across the table with a heart he cut out sitting between them and understood whose errand he'd been running his whole life, and the ring is her hand, so you don't take the hand. That's not maturity. It's a resignation letter addressed to her.

Two Scenes About Kerry and Noah That Nobody Is Talking About

This show plays fair, every clue is visible, nothing gets hidden and sprung on you later, but a face up mystery can still misdirect you by showing you something else. Put a man on a roof with a rifle in the middle of the frame and you'll stop looking at whatever else is standing in it. Twice tonight, with the sky coming down, the show stops for a kid. Kerry won't let Billy come with her to face a Green Lantern, telling him to stay with Noah instead. Zoe, in the middle of the town arming for war, finds Noah and asks him if he remembers everything she told him, and he promises. That's the last thing she ever says to him.

Put that alongside "we couldn't have children" from the ranch, and then Kerry screaming at Hal Jordan while shooting at him, "You can never understand what she gave me," not a finger this time. Noah is the only being in Rushville more important to Zoe than her own life. I think she succeeded in making another Manhunter, and I think Noah is the one coming to replace them, that Noah was the goal all along and everything else, the ranch, the town, thirty years of loans, was the nest she built to raise him in. Go look at where they find Hal Jordan's body in 2026, a high school football field, and listen to Kerry say Noah is tall now, he's the quarterback. Then go back to the first hour of the show and watch John Stewart teach that boy to throw: stop aiming, close your eyes, see the ball go through the hole. That's how you make a construct.

This Wasn't a Finale, and the Center of the Story Is Still Missing

Whatever this was tonight, it's the end of a storyline told in three points in time. We left the far past, we left what the show has been calling the present, and next week is the future. That means the center of this thing is missing. We don't know what the fallout was or what the Guardians did with that crystal, and nobody's shown us what ten years in that town does to a woman who owes a dead alien everything or to a boy who was told to remember. Everybody's going to assume this is how Guy Gardner ends up with the ring, and I think that's a fine assumption, probably the right one, even though it's different from the comics, which is fine. I don't know yet whether that hole is the plan or the problem, and I won't know until next week. The last shot is a ring sitting alone on a bar table, and it does not match the ring we've seen on Guy Gardner. Somebody in the production designed those two rings not to match and then put one of them in the final frame.

My Score: An Excellent Hour That's Slightly Embarrassed by Its Own Best Ideas

This is the best hour the show has made, and I've got my hand halfway up and can't get it the rest of the way. The craft isn't in question. The 2007 open is probably the most efficient piece of writing in the series, and the motel fight between two men with no heroes is shot like a divorce, with nobody's performance dropping for a second. What I'm taking off is the spending. You have a reveal that rewrites how your lead got his ring and you play it under a scene about a skin graft. You have a boy standing in the middle of the frame twice while the world ends and you let him go by. Then you build your whole ending out of a refusal, the one move in this business that gets applauded automatically, and you let the applause cover the fact that the two biggest things you did tonight you did quietly and then walked away from. Lanterns episode 5 lands at an 8 and a half out of 10 for me.

Kerry says, "You can never understand what she gave me," and the episode never tells you what that was. What do you think she meant, and what tipped you off?