Lanterns Finale: John Stewart Has Been Refusing the Suit Since 1971, and Episode 8 Knows It

Eight episodes, and John Stewart never puts on the suit. That is what people are angry about this morning, and I wanted that moment too. But John Stewart has been refusing the suit since 1971, and the finale of Lanterns is going back to his very first page when it holds the costume back.

A week ago I told you how Hal Jordan was coming back, and nine out of 10 of you who took a side said the same thing. The show said no to all of us, so I guess that one is on me. I have been through the finale twice now, and where I keep landing is disappointed yet satisfied. A whole bunch of stuff I wanted did not happen, and what did happen mostly worked. I came out of this finale with two answers, and they belong to two different people: the fan in me has one, and the producer in me has the other. I will also get to why the three things everybody is mad about are three things the comics already did.

The car scene between Noah and John Stewart is the whole show

Let me start with the fan, because I think the fan is the easy part. The scene I keep going back to is the car. Noah is sitting there and he says he is afraid his programming is going to happen. John sits down next to him and says, more or less, that he felt the same thing about his. When I heard that, I thought, that is it. That is the whole show. It is what the series has been talking about the entire time.

Noah is a manhunter built to do one thing. John is a soldier raised to do one thing. Both of them got handed a program by somebody who loved them, and the whole question of the season is whether you get to say no to it.

Then there is the copy of Hal. Chris Mundy said the copy never once called John Junior, not one time, until the last line: "I love you too, Junior." Then John charges the ring, and the charge is what erases him. He has to let go of the last Hal to become the next lantern. I don't know, man. That works for me. It just works.

Guy Gardner, Carrie and Earl deliver the human moments

Guy Gardner shows up and John tells him to get rid of the gold tooth. "You take the stars, I'll take the dirt." That was fun. That was a guy who has been told what to do his whole life finally getting to say it back.

Then there is Carrie. I have already seen people asking how she did it, how she got the jump on him, and how she could be that calm afterward and ask John whether Noah is going to be okay. If you are asking that question, you have clearly never been a parent. Hal walks up and tells her he knows what her son is and that he wants to run. She is terrified, and what she does is a reflex. "That's the killer instinct of a mom." Out, done, and then the horror of what she did. Say what you want about her, that is probably the most human thing in the hour.

And Earl got a home with the Stewarts. Somebody had to say it.

I wanted a funeral for Hal Jordan, but his death was not brushed aside

Now the stuff I didn't get. I wanted a real hero's funeral for Hal Jordan so badly, and I didn't get it. But I said this last week and I will say it again: not getting the thing you wanted isn't a note on the episode.

Here is what I think people are missing about Hal. Some of you said he just got shot and we moved on. We didn't move on. We spent the whole season on the fact that he got shot. That is literally the inciting incident, and believe it or not, that is more weight than I think most shows ever give the thing that starts the story. Damon Lindelof said that from the very early days of the writers' room they didn't want it to be a fake out, and they held to it.

No suit: John Stewart refused the mask on his first page in 1971

The fan is not who is writing online this morning, though. The anger comes down to three things: no suit, somebody changed the oath, and the lanterns got yellow in them. I want to take those one at a time, because the books have an answer for every one of them, and a couple of them I have already put in front of you this season.

You can call the missing suit the show chickening out on the costume. I get it, and I wanted the moment too. But two weeks ago I sent you back to John Stewart's first appearance: Green Lantern number 87, December 1971, by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams. Go back one more time and look at the part I didn't talk about. Hal hands him the uniform and John takes it, and on that very first page he refuses the mask. He says he has got nothing to hide. Fifty four years ago, John Stewart was already editing the costume on day one. That is the show going back to his first page.

The new oath follows a long line of lanterns writing their own

You can call the oath a rewrite of the most famous four lines in comics, the ones that begin with brightest day and darkest night. But lanterns have been writing their own oaths for as long as there have been lanterns. Alan Scott, the first Green Lantern, debuted in All-American Comics number 16 in the 1940s and started with a completely different oath about shedding light on dark evil.

Then there is my favourite, Rot Lop Fan, from Green Lantern Corps Annual number 3 in 1987, written by Alan Moore. He is a lantern who can't see light at all. Brightest day means nothing to him, so he writes his own, which begins in loudest din.

A reader put it better than I did: in the comics, other lanterns have their own personal oaths too, and Hal's just became the norm because of his legend. That is exactly right. The standard oath is Hal's oath. John is not Hal.

The yellow goes all the way back to Hal Jordan's first story in 1959

The yellow goes back to Showcase number 22 in 1959. A dying Abin Sur hands Hal the ring and tells him it is useless against anything yellow because there is an impurity in the battery. That is in Hal Jordan's very first story. And as I said back in August, Lanterns is not Green Lantern, and that is why it works.

I have also walked you through what Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver did with that impurity decades later in Green Lantern: Rebirth. It is Parallax, fear living inside the light, and the rule Rebirth gave us is that a lantern who can overcome great fear can beat the yellow. In episode 7 I told you that sooner or later a ring in the show was going to say the sentence, you have the ability to overcome great fear. Instead, the ring put an oath in John's mouth, and the word isn't overcome. It is embrace: "I'll embrace my fear. I'll do what's right."

That is the one real canon move in this whole hour. The show built a lantern out of a place where fear is the water, handed it to the one man who spent eight episodes being told what to be, and let him say yes to the fear instead of fighting it. Tom King said it flat out: John is not 100% a Green Lantern anymore. He chose this one. One reader compared the yellow streaks to kintsugi, the Japanese pottery where you fix the crack with gold. That is the gold in the crack. I don't know yet if it is a bomb or a scar, and frankly I don't think the show does either, but somebody in that room chose it. Which means the complaint everybody has is the wrong complaint.

The producer's note on Lanterns: a runway with no takeoff

Now the producer. I am a little obsessive about penultimate episodes, because a penultimate episode has two jobs. I talk a lot about rules and how you can break them as long as you understand them, but this is a structure rule, not a taste rule. When we consume serialized storytelling, we expect a rising tide toward the end that builds to a crescendo. That comes from book reading and how chapters are laid out. An editor will tell you flat out that by certain chapters certain things need to be happening. In a movie script, by a certain page a thing has to happen; in a TV show, by a certain episode a thing has to happen.

Either the penultimate episode is the climax and the finale is the fallout, where you watch everybody deal with what just happened, or it is the runway and the finale is the climax. Episode 7 looked like a runway. It built the island, it built Sinestro, it built the fear, it built the confession in the boat, and everything in it said the big thing is next week. Then the big thing never came. The finale is three acts of buildup to a climax that isn't in it. By my own rule, this was neither.

Chris Mundy said this week that there was never a version of the finale that was more focused on action. Fine, I believe him. But I am not asking for a fight. I am asking where the peak is. In this one, we are still climbing when the credits roll. The parts of Hal's story they added here should have been in last week's episode. Put the backstory in seven and you have room in eight for everything they revealed. Instead the finale has to stop and explain. One reader called it a lot of tell not show, talking head after talking head, and I am with him, and that is never a good thing.

Beautiful photography, but John Stewart's flight came off stiff

The show is shot beautifully. It looks great all season and it looks great here. But the flying is another matter. Guy Gardner lands, and that is practical, on a crane. They have been doing it all season, and it reads like Nathan Fillion on a hook. Then John goes up, and he goes from standing normally to an awkward position, as if his whole body is suddenly being pulled up by something. Kyle Chandler had a much smoother flight earlier in the season, and this just doesn't have that.

I can't tell you if they ran out of money. And I think John's mom's makeup could probably have been done a little better as well. So the producer's note on this finale is structure: they built the runway beautifully and then forgot a landing needs a climax to land from.

My verdict: Lanterns episode 8 lands at 8 out of 10

This is a two score deal, because I am at war with myself. The fan in me wants to give it a 10. Aaron Pierre carries the weight of the whole show on his face, especially in that car. Kyle Chandler gets one line, Junior, and it makes the whole season kind of pay off. Kelly Macdonald plays a mother who did the worst thing in the world for the only reason that I think really makes sense. And the oath is a choice, which is exactly what John Stewart has never been allowed to make.

The producer in me wants to give it a 6. It is a finale with no climax under it, a penultimate episode doing the wrong job, too much of the hour told instead of shown, and a flight that should have been the shot of the season and came off a little stiff. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed all those parts. Put the two together and Lanterns episode 8 lands at a satisfying 8 out of 10. John Stewart stuck the landing. The finale just let him do it alone.

Fan questions: Hal's return, Parallax and John meeting Superman

Plenty of you sent thoughts after the finale. One fan wanted a more cosmic ending instead of a grounded one, and I am with you; if Mogo had shown up, I think I would have been a happy man. Aaron Pierre is in Man of Tomorrow next summer. Another felt the show handwaved John's family, and I think that is fair. It is the same note I have on the whole hour: the reunion is one of the things the finale told us instead of showed us. One reader loved John essentially telling the Guardians he took care of their manhunter problem so they will let him keep this ring. Chris Mundy said it himself: John is more or less blackmailing the Guardians right now, and I think that is a heck of a way to start a career.

Will we see John's suit in Man of Tomorrow? I hope so. If the suit is coming, that is the next place John Stewart shows up. What I really can't wait for is John in a room with Superman. This man just told the Guardians of the Universe no, and I think he walks up next to Superman and honestly defers to him, very chain of command, like the soldier he was raised to be. That opens a door I didn't see coming: somewhere down the road, Clark or maybe even Batman could tell us they knew Hal Jordan. I could totally hear Batman talking about how rude Hal was, how surly, how impossible to work with, and that is probably why he liked him.

On whether Hal returns, I'd be shocked if we don't see Hal again in some way, shape or form, and I would absolutely take Kyle Rayner too. One fan wondered whether Sinestro could revive Hal as Parallax. I think they have got Parallax on the board, but I think it is for John this time, not Hal. In the comics it was always Hal who carried that, and this show handed John the lantern with yellow in it. Another fan read Noah lying about killing Hal as his programming trying to push John to kill him. I read it as Noah breaking his programming, but if that reading is right, the car scene gets a whole lot darker, and I am going to have to revisit it with that in my head. As for whether Hal's death was wasted, I really don't think it was. "I think the whole season was the funeral." I still wanted the real funeral, too.

So here is the real argument: was episode 5 the climax of this season and the last two hours the fallout, or did Lanterns build a runway and never take off?