John Stewart's Parents Weren't Villains, They Were Building a Manhunter, and Lanterns Fans Are Missing It

Monday I said John Stewart's parents weren't villains and that what they did to that boy was never malicious. Then I opened the comment section and found a comment that had only 11 likes and was buried under 1,800 comments, making a point I couldn't argue with: that the parents did what they did to give John an opportunity and are incredibly abusive at the same time, and that it isn't an either-or situation. He's right. And so was I. Both things are true, and untangling why is the whole point this week.

John Stewart's Parents Committed Abuse Even Though It Wasn't Malicious

I stand on everything I said Monday about intent. Malicious means setting out to do harm, and nobody in that house set out to hurt that boy. Where I got sloppy was letting "not malicious" do the work of "not abuse." Those are two different words with two different jobs, and the second one applies here.

A five-year-old with an apple on his head is abuse. Period. A kid walking home alone at night through a neighborhood his father picked for him because he decided fear was a muscle is abuse. A mother finding the one thing her son loves and using it as a lever is abuse. All three of those things were done by two people who loved him out of a belief that a door had opened once in their lifetime and wouldn't open twice.

The show puts the cost on screen and the argument online keeps skipping it. John walks in the door after that night alone and his mother is crying. That's not a woman who enjoyed what she did, that's a woman paying for it in real time and doing it anyway because she decided her son's one shot at something bigger was worth what it was costing both of them. You can call it wrong, and I think in a lot of ways it was, but a sacrifice and a cruelty aren't the same thing just because they leave the same mark on the kid.

Fear Was Bernardet's Tool, But That Doesn't Make Her Sinestro

The single biggest comment on Monday's video, sitting at 1,681 likes as of Thursday afternoon, pointed out that John's mother ripped a page out of Sinestro's playbook by ruling over him with fear and masking it as making him fearless. My reply underneath was that this was a great point and that fear was definitely the tool. I still mean that.

But agreeing that fear was the tool isn't agreeing that Bernardet is Sinestro, and I'm not going to let a good comment get stretched into a bad conclusion. Sinestro rules by fear because fear is what he wants. Bernardet used fear because she was terrified. There's a whole hour of television about that difference, and I'm not apologizing for pointing it out.

The Loudest Argument About This Episode Is Hiding the Actual Story

Some people this week wanted a confession out of me, and that has nothing to do with the show. Those arguments are about somebody's own politics using a fictional family as the field, and I'm going to keep talking about what the story is doing instead. There are about two lines of dialogue in this episode designed to light a fuse, and they lit it, and the fuse is all anybody is looking at.

I've watched this exact pattern happen before. A couple of weeks ago, Strange New Worlds turned the crew into puppets and the internet spent a week angry about puppets, while almost nobody talked about the fact that the episode actually moved Spock forward as a character. It's the same thing here. The loudest thing in the hour is standing directly in front of the most important thing in the hour, and if you only argue with the loud thing, you've missed the entire show.

John Stewart Was Built From Fear, He Was Never Actually Fearless

Two weeks ago I spent a whole segment on how Hal Jordan, built up for years as the man without fear, changes the day he finally gets scared. John is the other half of that sentence. Hal earned the word fearless and then lost it. John was handed the word before he could earn anything, and there's nothing under it.

A fearless man walks into a room and decides. The man we've been watching for three weeks walks into a room and waits to be told. He sat in that interview room all night because somebody said to. He ate the cheeseburgers. He took the sniper mission. He walked home through a neighborhood his father chose for him. He built a watch because a tester told him to. And when Aganon looked him in the eye and asked if he was comfortable secretly replacing the man he was about to partner with, John said, "It doesn't matter if I'm comfortable with it."

Courage would look different. What we're watching is a man who had the part of him that objects removed before he was old enough to use it. What's left when you take the objection out of a person isn't bravery, it's apathy, and apathy with a power ring on is recklessness. The ring doesn't know the difference.

"The Parents Built a Great Marine, and the Marines Built the Perfect Lantern"

One comment noted that John acts more and more like a Manhunter himself, and that the Guardians seem to want exactly that: blindly following orders, mission over logic. Nearly 400 people agreed. Another commenter, Duncan 2x4, put the whole thing in one line: "The parents built a great marine, and the Marines built the perfect lantern. An obedient soldier who didn't need a why, just a who, where, and when."

Doesn't need a why. That's the sentence, because a Manhunter is exactly a thing that doesn't need one. I went and checked whether anyone else covering this show had landed on that idea this week. I read the reviews, the recaps, the theory pieces. The idea that this show is quietly building a Manhunter out of a human being and calling it a Green Lantern exists in one place on the internet right now, and it's the comment section under my own videos.

This Was Never a Villain Origin Story

People keep calling this episode a villain origin story, and I don't think they remember what that phrase actually means. A villain origin story is where horrible things happen to somebody and they succumb to them. A hero faces the same adversity and doesn't. For Spider-Man it was Uncle Ben, for Batman it was his parents in an alley, for John Stewart it was his childhood, and the show just spent an hour on it the same way those stories spend pages on theirs.

There's going to come a day, and I think it's inside this season, where this man hits a fork in the road and goes right or left, and that's when you find out what he's made of. Nobody gets to be a hero without it. Some of the best people I know come out of the most broken houses, and I think it says something about our culture that the second we see a hard upbringing on screen, we file it under bad guy. Superhero stories were built to teach the opposite: you get broken down first, then you pick yourself up.

Why the Flashback Had to Land in Episode Three

Put the producer hat on for a second. If I'm building an eight-episode mystery and I know the third hour is the flashback, I make that hour comfortable. I make it the hour where the audience finds out the man they've been rooting for was assembled, and I make the people who assembled him sympathetic, because if they're monsters the audience gets to feel superior and check out. Making Bernardet a person means you can't dismiss her, and that costs a week of people yelling but buys five episodes of nobody looking at John the same way.

That's also why the mystery pauses for a flashback three hours in and not sooner: it's after the audience has met the man and formed an opinion, and before the back half turns the screws so every scene already watched gets recontextualized. Go back and watch the bird. Watch John tell the kid not to aim the football. Watch him get out of the car. None of those scenes changed, you did.

A commenter named Broccoli caught what I think is the best single observation on the whole wall: the art school scene is the Guardians' last test. The kid finally does the one scared thing left in him, the thing he loves, and the second he passes, here they come. Off you go. That's the machine confirming the part works.

Where I Got Ahead of Myself on Hal Jordan

Three episodes in, this show has painted Hal Jordan in about the worst light it could, and we haven't heard one word from him about any of it. On Monday I said Hal knew who John Stewart was before John Stewart knew who Hal Jordan was. A lot of people pushed back, and they're right. The text shows Hal blew up a mission. It doesn't show Hal knowing the sniper's name. I connected those two things and should have said I was connecting them rather than stating it as fact. That's mine to hold at least until Hal actually talks.

Reading the Bernardet and Guardian Scene as Staging

Bernardet tells the Guardian that Hal got to be fearless because he never had to be afraid. Take that as a claim about how fear gets handed out rather than a grievance, and she's not wrong about that part. She's wrong about what the ring does with it. The ring doesn't grade on a curve, doesn't ask what you've been through, doesn't ask what skin color you have. It asks one question, and it asked a father in the middle of the night the same way it asked Hal Jordan, and it walked away from both of them the same way. That's the cruelest thing in the episode, and it's exactly why Bernardet builds a son who will never be asked a question he can't answer.

Watch who she says it to. Lyanna doesn't argue with her, Lyanna recognizes her. Fear is the one variable the Guardians' entire system is built to measure, so the Guardian identifies with the mother off her own reading, and gets the boy completely wrong because she's reading him through the only thing she knows how to read. Two women in a house agreeing about fear and talking past each other about everything else. The show never lets the alien hand down a verdict on the human argument, which leaves the human holding it, which is the only honest place to leave it.

Hal Jordan Hasn't Been a Racist Character, and the Show Still Has to Prove Itself

I won't pretend Hal Jordan has been a racist character for sixty-some years, because he hasn't. He was introduced when the culture was living in a narrow place and he represented that place, and every step since he's been what the moment needed. There's a version of this show where he's still doing that job, and I think we're watching it. One caveat on the record: I said trust it, let it play about an episode of X-Men '97 this summer, and it didn't get better, and I told you so when it didn't. So when I say let this show tell its story, understand I know how that can go. The evidence is going to be the show itself, and that cuts both directions on both arguments.

The Fans Who Called This Episode Before It Aired

Everything above came after Monday's video, so none of it counts as independent. Three predictions from Friday's video, before anyone had seen a frame, are different. One viewer, Kevin, wrote a crackpot theory that John's father was chosen before Hal to be Abin Sur's successor, and that's why he knows about the "are you afraid" question, except unlike Hal, he said yes and the ring moved to the next candidate. That went up Friday at 8:34 p.m., two days early. Right after the episode ended Sunday, someone replied to him with three words: "Yep, you were right."

Another comment predicted the bird, plus John telling the kid not to aim the football but to imagine where he wants it to go, would turn out to be a huge clue. That comment sat at 100 likes on Friday, and by Sunday night the bird had turned out to be the spine of the entire origin. The last one nobody saw: I asked viewers Friday night to name the one shot in episode 3 that would prove their suspect before seeing it, and exactly one person did it on the record, naming John's conversation with a Guardian as the scene the whole hour turns on, 48 hours before it aired, sitting with zero likes.

Introducing a Second Score Alongside My Own

Every video on this channel ends with my own number, the index I invented and stand behind. This week, for the first time, there's a second one. Members got a ballot to score the same episode I score, one to ten, and the average goes up next to mine. I gave Lanterns episode 3 an eight. The average from members who voted came in at 8.5. One member, Tracy, left a note with her score of ten explaining that the story tracked her own life and that the choices paid off, and I'm not going to add a word to that. I want to see over a whole season how far a room full of people who actually watch the show lands from the person who talks about it.

What's Actually Being Assembled Here

The question this week was never whether John Stewart's parents were villains, that one's answered. The real point is that everybody, myself included, spent a week standing in front of one word while the show has been telling us for three hours that its hero was built and not born, and that the people who built him are the same people who built the Manhunters, and the last thing they wanted him to have was a why. They spent eighteen years making sure he'd never be afraid. Nobody spent a day making sure he'd ever be anything else.

Episode four airs Sunday, and if my producer instincts are right, that's the hour where the show swings hard into where Guy Gardner finally speaks up. Somewhere in this season, John Stewart is going to refuse an order for the first time in his life: which order, from whom, and what does it cost him?