Lanterns Episode 7 Puts Carrie, Noah and Hal Himself in the Frame Before the Finale

Lanterns episode 7, The Jordan Boy's Legacy, was the penultimate chapter, and it left more than one suspect standing in Hal Jordan's death. It might have been a Hal who did the deed, maybe not this Hal himself, while the episode also leaves it very possibly open that Carrie was more involved.

For this one we had Erik Voss and Jessica Clemons, plus a special guest: Frankey Smith, co-host of the DC Studios Showcase podcast. Frankey said being here was "surreal" and "full circle," since following us from the start encouraged Frankey to start a page of their own. When the penultimate episode was coming up, we reached out to Frankey, and the answer was to do it immediately.

A Little League No Hitter Shows How Hal Jordan Was Raised

The episode opens in 1975, with young Hal being reprimanded for holding onto a baseball when he was about to pitch a no hitter. There was a case for siding with the Jordans: if a kid is two strikes away, you don't take him off the mound. That got pushback from someone who played softball until college: "This is not the MLB." Everyone has to play, and coaches will often swap you out when they know you're going to win.

Another view was that a better coach would tell the second pitcher he'd normally rotate in, but Hal is two strikes away. It was also said that Hal probably needed to be taken down a peg. He fought everyone on that team, and that suggests pent up animosity that didn't come from holding onto the ball alone.

What stood out was his father telling him he was exceptional, in contrast with John Stewart Jr.'s journey of being hardened for the world. Seeing how generational trauma manifests in different people was hard, but that still didn't earn Hal much sympathy, since that generation never apologizes and accommodates instead.

Should Anyone Have Gone to Jail Over Rushville?

The first view was that nobody deserved jail: "It was an alien manhunter who nuked that town." Neither John Stewart nor Hal should have gone, though someone had to take the fall, much as John once did for Hal. The opposite view came up too: "Lock up everyone in Rushville," for sheltering a war criminal and not sharing cancer treatments. The counterpoint was that opening those floodgates could create a domino effect, compared to Watchmen lore, and that the town had a gun to its head from Zoe.

Someone noted a dishonorable discharge is the equivalent of jail, so both went. The case against Hal was that protecting the town was his responsibility and his arrogance got in the way. It's still Zoe's fault, but him not being careful led to that destruction. As discussed, Hal figured it out after visiting Hector Gutierrez, leaving an eight hour window, though there's a case that he knew earlier from John's reaction to the drone attack at the Atlas Inc. compound, and probably had hunches from John's reaction in the motel parking lot.

Another reminder: Anton's group was about to nuke the whole town, and they're the real villains. The reply was that Hal could have called for backup. Either way, his sentence sounded like a white collar prison. It had pickleball.

Noah, Carrie and a Possible Hal Clone Are All in Play

After a father and son moment at the Air Force base teasing the family's secret, the story jumps to the funeral and to 2026, where it felt like True Detective. John is torn, with Maggie blackmailing him for $315,000, while the Hal hologram refuses to use his voice to open the vault box until he meets Carrie.

At the hat ceremony, Noah refuses to choose. Being in that gym would have been frustrating; the counterargument was that this was the point, echoing John Stewart Jr. telling him to decide for himself. It was also pointed out how much Noah is like Zoe and William Senior, using altruism the way the Manhunter used making the town better as a weapon. Zoe telling him to remember everything she taught him also stuck. There's a possibility he turns bad, maybe with a rage ring, though nobody was sure. His ambition to be a senator and then president drew some side eye, and there was a temptation to believe he was the one who shot Hal.

On Carrie, there was guilt to read in how she froze when she heard Hal's voice, with praise for the actress: "So I think it was either her or him." Kelly Macdonald was credited with showing nuances read a few different ways. The 2006 version of the hologram is the Hal who earned the most trust here, so if he reads guilt in her, that counts. It was called a favorite among penultimate episodes, likened to the moment before the switcheroo at the end of Clue, with plausible possibilities for Carrie, Noah and some version of Hal. As someone put it on the show, "I do need this finale to be two hours long."

That version may be a clone. There's a trailer shot of Hal in medical scrubs on a slaughterhouse floor with a tag on his arm, which suggests a Hal clone at some point. Episode 7 didn't answer that.

John Stewart May Not Need the Ring

It was noted how much the ring got out of a 5% charge, and one suggestion was that it's a low power mode. The show may be hinting that John can pull power on his own, since constructs existed without the ring on. In the comics, Jo Mullein got a self recharging prototype in Far Sector by N.K. Jemisin, called one of the best Green Lantern stories, and Kyle Rayner has moments where he doesn't need to charge as often. All of these Lanterns are people of color, and the way they manifest willpower from their lived experience is part of that.

John Walks Into Sinestro's Fear Rain

John and Hal's hologram take a boat out to a platform on the planet where Sinestro is being kept. At first it seemed possible that Sinestro was doing all this, then that he was exiled there to stew in fear, though it's unclear whether that would even hurt someone like Sinestro. On the boat, John lets the fear rain wash over him, and we see its effects from his point of view. This was "a really amazing scene" and the sound design on this planet was incredible.

John sees his father with the apple, slightly off kilter. The image becomes John himself as a boy, telling him to shoot. Right before he pulls the trigger, the hologram tackles him into the water to wake him up and tells him, "You were going to do it to yourself." That's what everyone on this planet went through: they saw the scariest thing they could imagine and jumped off the edge to stop the pain. When they reach the island, a cloaked figure who doesn't realize the hologram is just a hologram greets them: "You must be John Stewart." It's Sinestro.

Who Broke Sinestro Out Is Still an Open Question

Guy Gardner told us the episode before that someone broke Sinestro out. That raises the question of how much Guy actually knows, since he's there for optics and the people around him may just be lying to him. Another theory was that Laura Linney's rogue Guardian did it. That got pushback: the Guardians are so hands off, and freeing Sinestro wouldn't do anything helpful for her.

The suspect that kept coming up was Hal, or a version of Hal. Guy said Hal had a plausible alibi of being in prison, but how can that be plausible when dark matter manholes exist and anybody can be moved in or out? Maybe the breakout happened later, or there was another Hal out there. One idea was that the hologram stayed in prison while the other Hal left, though nobody knew how he would have gotten the ring. Sinestro also knew too much about Earth when Hal visited him in episode 4, so someone seems to have been feeding him information.

Other names came up. Carol Ferris is now on the field, but this version probably isn't Star Sapphire. There was also a question of whether Zoe gave Noah something, since everyone else had a deal with her, though it wasn't clear why it would involve Sinestro. There was also the thought that Sinestro, being so anti Guardian, could team up with the Manhunters to highlight the Guardians' mistake. The bigger question was how far gone this Sinestro is, and whether he has discovered the emotional spectrum.

On whether John should leave him on the island, the answer was "I would," since he killed a Guardian. The counterpoint was that we don't trust the Guardians either, or Hal. Sinestro came across as Napoleon on Elba: if you break out, don't you go hide and plan your comeback? Instead it seems someone broke him out to put him on this planet for a reason. There are also trailer lines and shots we hadn't seen yet, including John dragging Sinestro away from a facility in what looked like a wheelchair, and the expectation is a lot of Sinestro in the finale.

The Case for Letting Hal Jordan Stay Dead

One theory is that there's another Hal on the field, and that the Hal who went to prison and fell in love with Carrie was Atlas Inc. 3D printed flesh. Another view is that the real Hal is dead and the point of the story is that his legacy needs to move on. One self described bad theory: since the Guardians admitted the Manhunters were their mistake, could they have made a clone of Hal hoping to make a good one? That was called possible. The money would be on Hal being the one who broke Sinestro out, but it's unclear whether it's a clone.

Every time Mundy, Lindelof and King talk about this, it sounds like they want us to be okay with Hal Jordan being dead in the future of this franchise, with future resurrections a maybe. For all the love for Kyle Chandler, it does a disservice to the Green Lantern story to focus on bringing back one Lantern when there are so many, and Jessica and Simon could be brought in instead. There's also excitement about being in the John Stewart era: for a millennial kid who watched the Justice League animated series, John was the Green Lantern. And Hal being dead doesn't rule out past adventures, since Chandler, at 61, can play 42, or someone younger could play him, opening the door to the space odyssey people are yearning for.

Noah Feels Too Good to Trust

There's the dinner in episode 6 where Noah says he wants to be senator and president, the letters to FEMA, and a speech that makes him sound like a Nebraska boy you could see being elected. There's likely a reason they zoomed in on a Navy hat, which reads as Noah following the Manhunter's advice to go to power through the military. There was also the suggestion that places like Nebraska put the military on a pedestal. The distrust came through anyway: it's a little too virtuous, like he's following a script, and the show gives him so much screen time just being good.

We laid out three shapes of the theory. One: Noah killed Hal to hide his own identity, and Carrie covered it up because he's her son. Two: Carrie did it to protect her son. Three: as the hologram suggests on the boat, Hal did it himself and Carrie threw the gun away to protect him. But why would Carrie need the whole investigation in that case? A different take: "I think she killed him" was the line, with the suspicion that it's either her or her son. It's reminiscent of Mare of Easttown, where it was the son and a parent covering for him, and that may be what we're looking at here.

Zoe's Manipulation and John's Fear of His Father

On Zoe, maybe her programming tells her this is affection, but Manhunters are designed to connect, ingratiate and establish themselves. Her speech about racial divisions being an obstacle that makes her stronger felt out of touch, with the point made that among all the people of color met or worked with over the years, none likes being an outsider. It read as a sign she's alien: she dropped into Rushville and got with the richest man in town, so she understood it only from the outside and used it to manipulate John. Not everyone agreed, though: the speech was also called great.

John killing Zoe matters too. The hologram says he wouldn't kill even a Manhunter, and John has to sit there knowing he did. There's a light excuse for the Guardians: they never intended to send a ring to Earth, Abin Sur brought it, and after the ring traumatized dozens of people they started doing interviews. In the fear rain, John never sees his mom. He may be angry at his mom and afraid of his dad; he picks up her calls but calls her Bernadette. A lot of air time also goes to John on hold with the bank and the Comfort Cove home, and it seems like some writer has lived that.

Finally, it's a relief the big swing theories like Coast City, Parallax and the Red Lanterns aren't needed in what is a really fun, unpredictable story. It can also be seen as an eight hour origin story for John.

Which theory about Hal's death do you find most convincing?