Lanterns' Penultimate Episode Finally Shows Why Hal Jordan Never Let Go, and It Does It With a Baseball

Lanterns episode 7 just showed why Hal never let go, and it did it with a baseball. The first person to say "great arm, kid" in this episode is Hal Jordan's father, a couple of months before he kills himself, and the second person to say it is Sinestro. I didn't catch that the first time through. I caught it going back through the hour trying to figure out why I wasn't crying when everybody else was.

One scheduling note before I get into it. Lanterns has one episode left, and the next series I'm covering premieres Wednesday, October 14 on Disney Plus, 10 days after the Lanterns finale, with the actor who plays Vision back in the role.

The Martin Jordan reveal is Hal's origin story, just not the one I wanted

This is the origin story. It's definitely the origin story. It's just not the one I wanted, and I need to be careful about what I do with that, because not getting the thing you wanted isn't a note on the episode. I had a feeling about the dad. I figured he'd be the guy who doesn't hear a word the coach says, and that's who walked in. What I didn't have was the note. That one's a real head spinner, and I think it recontextualizes a lot.

Then something happened that I didn't expect: it didn't land on me the way it landed on everybody around me. Kyle Chandler is in a boat telling you his father killed himself, and I'm sitting there going, okay, so what's that for? Not because it's bad, but because I was listening for a different sentence. A lot of what follows is me trying to figure out what I was listening for and whether I was right to.

What I know I felt is that the reveal has the trappings of being emotional: a dad, a note, a boy at a grave, a song. All of that's real and all of it is well made. My first thought was that this is the show reaching for tears it hasn't set up, because the Hal we've seen for six episodes is, I think, a man who's been bearing all of this anyway, and now a copy of him is handing it to me in one speech.

Three men and two notes turn Hal's speech into a family history

Then I went back to the boat again, and my first thought was wrong about what the speech is. It's three men and two notes. The grandfather went to the war, didn't come back, and left Martin a note. Martin killed himself, and because he was a test pilot, it passed as an accident. He left Hal a note in a safe under the workbench. Same thing, father to son, and they had a name for it.

So the speech is a family history before it's a confession. It's information, and information is what I was listening for, which is why the tears didn't come. But then he says the line, and I have to be honest about what it did to me: "I'm not fearless cuz I'm brave, I'm fearless cuz I'm broken."

That felt tremendously insightful, and it took me a minute to work out why, because it's coming out of the same speech I just said didn't move me. I think the reason is who's saying it. The real Hal is dead, quote unquote. This is a copy from 10 years before the front went up for good, and the copy doesn't need the front. He says the thing the living man spent the whole series not saying, and he says it flat, "like a fact about a car."

The note is the delivery mechanism, not the point

So that's my disagreement, and it's a narrow one. It's not that the scene doesn't work. It's that people are crying at the note, and the note is the delivery mechanism. The sentence that matters is the one about being broken, and the show could only get that sentence out of a version of Hal who had nothing left to protect. That's a smart piece of writing. It's also a trick, and the trick is, I think, aimed at you.

You can call it a retcon, and it is one. Lindelof said this week that when you're playing with canon, you have to treat it like plutonium. The question they asked was whether Hal Jordan is still Hal Jordan if his dad didn't die in a test flight. Probably not. So they kept the test pilot and changed how he died, and then they made sure that the only Hal who could tell you was the one who couldn't lie.

The baseball answers why Hal Jordan never put anything down

The note got me to the question. The baseball, I think, is ultimately what answered it. The father's speech at the airfield is that you can throw it away, you can't hold on to it forever, it's exhausting. The kid throws it. The last thing the episode shows you after Sinestro is that same kid in his funeral clothing walking back out and picking it up.

My first read of that was loyalty. The dad's gone, the ball's what's left, of course he goes back for it. I think you can read it that way. You can read it as grief. You can also read it as a kid who just can't do what his father told him to do. I sat with all three for a few minutes, and the one that held up was the last one.

The reason it held up is last week. I argued that everyone misread Hal Jordan's last words: get past the bravado in that eulogy and what's left is a man who was scared of being alone and knew the job could only be done one way. Easier to fly than to stay on the ground. I read that as a hero's letter, most people read it as self pity, and I didn't have a great answer for why I heard it differently. This episode is the answer.

Easier to fly than stay on the ground is his father's airfield speech in different words, and neither one of them could do it. The man who did 10 years and came back to knock on every door in a town that hated him is the kid who went back for the ball. He never put anything down. Not the town, not the job, not the ring, and by the end of this hour, not even John.

A key, a box and a Queen song define the legacy Hal leaves John Stewart

The last piece I got from the credits. The song is Queen's Father to Son, about a letter handed from father to son that the son will write all again before he dies. I clocked it live and almost dismissed it as a needle drop. Then I thought about the key. Hal's father handed him a key to a safe and told him it stays between the two of them. Hal left John a key with a bird on it, on his body, where John would be the one to find it.

John is the kid Hal is never going to have. This episode, I think, was about Hal doing for John exactly what Martin did for him: leave him the box, and ultimately leave him to open it. That's the legacy the title's talking about.

John Stewart's fear gas vision works because it wasn't noise

The episode changed temperature on me in the back half, and I think that's most of why I land where I land on it. John and the copy go through the portal and come out on a planet where everybody killed each other and then themselves. John's been there before, at least in his head, back in 2016 when those people's memories were put in him. What the show does with that is not what I expected.

It puts John in the rain, the gas gets in him, and he sees his father: "Are you afraid, soldier?" A young John says the quiet part out loud: you never wanted to be a Lantern, you just wanted to draw your little pictures. And John puts a gun to his own head. My first reaction was that's the fear gas, that's noise. But then the copy drags him out of the water and tells him what he was about to do, and I realized it was much deeper. It really did work.

I think it worked because it wasn't noise. The gas was the delivery. What came out was John's. If you've followed my coverage since the pilot, you know I've read John's refusal of the ring as a resignation letter to the Guardians, and this is the first time the show said it in John's own voice. He was scared they'd know.

The dead planet echoes John Stewart's Xanshi moment in Cosmic Odyssey

I have to stop here, because I didn't see this the first time; I saw it afterward. A dead world with every living thing on it gone, and John Stewart with a gun to his head. I've told this story before, back when I put Hal and John on trial against their comic book selves. In Cosmic Odyssey, from 1988, by Jim Starlin and Mike Mignola, there's the planet Xanshi. John tells the Martian Manhunter he doesn't need help. The bomb is yellow. A world dies, and afterward he puts a gun to his head.

How far does that get me? I don't know what anybody in the writers' room was thinking, and I don't know if they were thinking about Xanshi. What I know is that the image is the same image, and that this show has spent seven weeks proving it read the book. So I'm calling it an echo and not a plan. And if the finale makes it a plan, well, then I guess you heard it here.

Hal's confession cost him nothing, while John overcame his fear

Here's where I have to argue with myself, because there's a version of this where the copy's confession counts as the brave thing in the hour: a Hal who finally says it. I don't think it counts, and the reason is that it cost him nothing. He's dead. He's a hologram. The front's gone because there's nothing behind it to protect. John said his version with a gun in his hand on a planet full of people who had done it. That's the difference between admitting fear and overcoming it, and I think the show knows the difference because it built a scene around each one.

That's why the ring is doing the heavy lifting here. It comes off and Hal stays. The copy says he's got a little less than an hour of talk time, and as far as I can tell that clock stopped mattering, if it ever really did, because John is literally holding him in the room without the ring. And the copy does the thing the living one never did: "Bravo. Well done." And John's face. Hal never complimented him before, and he tells him it's just weird.

Some of you called this a week ago, that John was going to keep the hologram going without the ring the way he kept the bird going, and you were right. So keep the ring off, and let him power the thing himself. I've had a prediction since early in this run and I'm doubling down on it: sooner or later, a ring in the show is going to say the sentence. In the books, the ring picks you with a line: you have the ability to overcome great fear. Overcome, which means you had some.

Hal, by his own account, never had the fear to overcome. John tonight, in the rain with a gun to his head, is the one person in this hour who overcame anything. Hal, you're right. He can do something you can't, and you've been telling him that since the bird.

A table setting penultimate hour points toward Hal Jordan coming back

But the hour costs something, and I think I have to finally be the one to charge for it. It's a penultimate episode, and it spends most of itself setting a table. Unless this is a cliffhanger, and I don't think it is, we're heading toward some long explanation about how Jordan survived, because we're getting him back. I'd be surprised if that isn't where this ends, and I don't know how you make that leap or how you come up with it.

What I do know is what it would cost. If the living Hal walks back in, the confession in that boat belongs to a copy of a man who never said it, and the show has to decide whether the real one owns it. That's the thing I'm actually worried about, more than the plausibility.

The dead planet lost its depth in a room afterward

Then the planet. It's a practical location, real good, real light. I know that from what was shown afterward. I don't know who decided to paint out the horizon, or when, or whether they always meant to build a composite on top of it. What I can judge is the finished image, and the finished image lost its distance.

Take away the mountains and the horizon line and your eye has really nothing to measure the ground against, so a real desert reads like a stage with a sky projected behind it. That's a depth cue problem more than a volume problem, and it was really distracting the first time through. If you're about to say it looks fake, it does, and it got made to look that way in a room afterward.

Sinestro greets John Stewart with Hal's father's words

And Sinestro, who I promised at the top. He's on the island holding a hologram hostage and doesn't know it's a hologram, and he probably doesn't know Hal's dead. Ulrich Thomsen gets a handful of lines and makes you want the finale. But the line he gets is the father's line: "You must be John Stewart. Great arm, kid." A man standing on a planet where fear is the weather, greeting the son Hal never had with the words Hal's father used at the airfield.

I think that's a recruiter. The show's been pitching fear as a power source all hour: the yellow light, the gas, and now the man at the end of it talking to John like a father talks to a kid with a good arm. Two men offer John legacy tonight, and the finale is going to be about which one he takes. I could be wrong about that. We'll find out next Sunday.

My verdict: Lanterns episode 7 lands at an 8 out of 10

Kyle Chandler is playing two men in one body, and the difference is in how he listens. The living Hal lectured John in a cafe. The copy asks a whole lot of questions, laughs at his own jokes and gives John a name that sounds like a nickname and not a rank, and the first time John does something impressive, he lights up instead of filing it. That's a performance choice. The rain is earned because five episodes of 2016 built the fear it pulls on.

What it costs is, I think, ultimately the hour's shape: most of it spent setting up a finale it can't show you, a planet that lost its depth in post, and a reveal that carries less weight than the show wants it to, even though the line it produces is one of the best of the season. So Lanterns episode 7 lands at an 8 out of 10 for me. Two fathers told two boys to let go this week, and one of them went back for the ball.

I think deepening a character and explaining him are very different things, and I think the show was betting you won't notice. So did that note deepen Hal Jordan, or did it just explain him?