Lanterns Writer Vanessa Benkelly Reveals Episode 3 Was Originally Meant to Air Fifth in the Season

Episode three of DC Studios' Lanterns, titled Outcast, was not always meant to land where it did. Vanessa Benkelly, who wrote the episode, told us that it was originally conceived to air as episode five before the writers' room moved it earlier in the season. "I can say this, I double checked. This episode was originally supposed to be episode five," Benkelly said, adding that she now thinks the earlier placement works better for the show.

We told her we would have been upset having to wait that long for it, and Benkelly agreed the new order serves the story. Because John Stewart has been trained not to speak, there was no way to get his backstory out earlier except by giving him his own dedicated episode. Hal Jordan, by contrast, is a talker who reveals himself gradually, including in the 60 Minutes-style interview scene earlier in the season, so his history could unfold at a slower pace across multiple episodes.

From Nickelodeon Sets to Ozark's Writers Room

Benkelly grew up in Florida, the child of a teenage mother, and started acting as a kid partly to give herself and her mom something to do together. She ended up on three Nickelodeon shows filmed out of Orlando during the era when the network was pushing boundaries for kids' programming: My Brother and Me, Gullah Gullah Island, and Kenan and Kel, on which she played Kenan's little sister. She described that period of Nickelodeon as diverse and envelope pushing, crediting executive producer Brian Robbins, who was there at the time and later ran Paramount.

After high school her family pushed her toward a stable path, so she attended Florida State, sharing editing bays with Barry Jenkins' graduating film school class before his career took off. A random job as a receptionist at Ben Crump's law firm before it became widely known pulled her toward community organizing, which she did for about ten years, including work at a community coalition where Karen Bass was involved before becoming mayor of Los Angeles.

Her directors from her Nickelodeon days, including Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Kim Fields, had warned her that a pivot would eventually be necessary in a childhood career, and that turned out to be true. When acting opportunities stalled after she returned to Los Angeles, she started writing seriously. A friend from an improv group who was leaving her job as a showrunner's assistant referred her for the position, and Benkelly got the job with Chris Mundy on Ozark while two months postpartum. She stayed on Ozark for its first three seasons and was eventually staffed as a writer, later earning an MFA while still working in the room because she felt outpaced by colleagues' knowledge of film and literature.

Why John Stewart's Parents Are Married, Alive, and Complicated

Benkelly said the choice to keep John Stewart's parents alive and married was deliberate. "I was like, I don't want John's parents to be dead. Tired of everybody's parents being dead. That cannot be the only superhero origin story," she said. She felt that for a Black superhero, the most subversive image was a nuclear family that was still together and happy, since that kind of representation is rarely shown on screen regardless of race.

At the same time, she was careful that the family not be depicted as simply functional. "It's not that they're one hundred percent abusive or they're one hundred percent doing the right thing. They're just complicated," she said of the Stewarts. She described the parents as having a mission that is flawed but pursued with resolve, calling it something that was cool to watch play out.

Writing Bernadette and John Senior Without Defending Them

Asked about the family dynamic in the apple scene, Benkelly noted that John Senior was drunk and incapacitated at that point in the story, physically unable to help, which is why it fell to Bernadette to act. She compared her approach to writing morally complicated characters to how Killmonger and, in a different universe, Thanos were handled: "I just don't think it's any writer's job to defend a character. You're just presenting who you think that character is and what they would do."

She applied the same logic to John Senior, saying a green bubble appearing with no context, no comic book knowledge, and no idea it might mean becoming a superhero would be terrifying to anyone. She compared his broken reaction to discovering the interview had already happened without him to watching boys in Florida come close to the NFL and then not make it. She said she personally would not have made the same choice Bernadette did, but felt someone in the family had to act.

Hal Jordan and John Stewart Are Afraid in Different Ways

Benkelly connected the fear theme across both leads. Hal Jordan says in the season's early interview scene that losing his father was the scariest thing that could happen to him, meaning little else afterward could frighten him the same way. John Stewart Senior, by contrast, recognized what losing a parent young would do to his own sons and was terrified of causing that trauma, which is part of why being bubbled up and asked if he was afraid hit him so hard.

When we suggested that the two men's fears are simply different rather than comparable, Benkelly agreed that was central to the writers' intentions. "I think that saying that the wounds are different is really like crystallizing everything that we were hoping for it to be," she said, adding that more of the connective tissue between Hal's and John's histories will come out as the season continues.

Not Playing Favorites Between the Two Lanterns

Benkelly said she does not believe anyone in the writers' room favors one lead over the other. "I don't know that anybody in our room is team either. Like I think we love them both tremendously," she said. She added that John Stewart was her own Green Lantern growing up from watching the Green Lantern cartoon, while Hal Jordan is, in her words, the most fun character to write for on the planet.

She addressed viewers online who felt the show was favoring John Stewart early on, saying that impression is likely temporary since John's episode is the freshest thing audiences have seen, and that Hal's material is still coming. She said what the writers built is meant to function as a yin to the other's yang, and that there will come a point, likely around episode five or six by her estimate, when audiences know as much about one man as the other.

Damon Lindelof's Bird Symbolism and the Themes That Got Cut

Benkelly credited Damon Lindelof's approach to weaving thematics through the season, describing several threads including nature versus nurture and the recurring bird imagery. She said the birds were originally conceived similarly to the idea of Santa Claus watching to see if a child is good, a belief that can persist as a private mantra even after someone stops believing it literally. Early drafts had gone further, including scenes of John in a bird watching group with a set of older women, though that material was trimmed.

Asked whether that lingering, half-believed watchfulness is meant as something beautiful or sad, Benkelly said, "Both." She said there is a beauty to belief that both Hal and John share, since accepting a Green Lantern ring requires a kind of faith that things will work out, even in the face of extraterrestrial danger. But she said there is also something sad in characters who are always reaching for something that never quite fully arrives.

Building DCU Canon: Detroit, Midway City, and Tom King's Guardian Lore

On questions of shared DC Universe history, Benkelly confirmed there were direct conversations in the room about where John Stewart needed to be by the time of the upcoming Superman film. She said the writers debated whether the Stewart family's hometown should be treated as Detroit specifically, since John is canonically from Detroit, but ultimately left it as simply the Midwest because they could not commit to a firm answer. "We know it's in the Midwest. That's all we know because we can't make that decision right now," she said, noting both real place names like Rushville and Nebraska football and invented ones appear in the show.

She credited fellow writer Tom King as the room's lore keeper, with an encyclopedic knowledge of DC history. She recounted that when the writers needed a password for Hal's pocket dimension that would feel authentic to longtime readers, King suggested "Moo doesn't socialize," a reference to the character Mogo's introduction by Alan Moore, which the room immediately recognized as right.

Keeping Track of Other DC Shows to Avoid Repeating Stories

Benkelly compared the need to track parallel DC properties to her time on Ozark, when Breaking Bad was airing in real time and the writers had to make sure Marty Byrde was not making the same choices Walter White had just made on screen. On Lanterns, she said the room similarly had to watch other DC shows, citing an instance where a storyline they were considering had already been used on Peacemaker and had to be dropped.

Communication with James Gunn during the writers' room mostly went through Chris Mundy and Damon Lindelof by email, since Gunn was filming the first Superman movie at the time, though Benkelly said Peter was talked to more directly. She also described DC staff sending small gifts and comics to her young son when he visited the office, which he still believes came from Gunn personally, though Benkelly clarified that they did not.

Defending a Faithful Adaptation Amid Fan Pushback on Guy Gardner

Asked about a Guardian's line implying Guy Gardner's genetics make him a strong candidate, Benkelly clarified it was simply the Guardians noting that their current Green Lantern cannot be controlled and that, having studied human genetics, Guy is likely to be a good candidate if he is not scared, since he shares his father's DNA. She said the writers have already faced criticism online from people noting Guy was not the first Green Lantern of Earth, pointing to Alan Scott, and responded that Alan Scott forged his own ring outside the Lantern Corps, so the situations are not the same.

Benkelly compared the reaction to adaptation choices to the range of Spider-Man versions across different films, noting that not every version of a character appears in every adaptation and that the show is building its own track drawn from a mix of comic sources. She said knowing fans already love these characters is reassuring, since the writers do not have to work to make audiences care about them. She also said reading fan fiction helped her identify which traits of characters like John Stewart fans feel are essential, including his identity as an architect who did not finish art school, which she confirmed is intact in the show.

The Guardians Are Emotionless, Not Ignorant

Benkelly said the Guardians in Lanterns are written as emotionless rather than unintelligent, capable of processing that humans experience something like sadness without truly understanding it themselves. She pointed to a scene where Laura Linney's Guardian character tells Aaron Pierre's character that people come into the world alone and leave it alone, and when he calls that sad, she cannot fully process why.

She said the show's 1986 setting also explains some of the Guardians' cluelessness about race, since a Guardian asking what it means to be Black and then clarifying "brownskinned" reflects genuine ignorance rather than malice, given the era predates widely broadcast civil rights coverage that might have reached beings capable of monitoring Earth. "They were not even being racist. They're just ignorant," she said, adding that the Guardians in Lanterns are written as both untrustworthy and possessing a point of view worth understanding, which she said makes for tense, layered television rather than a simple villain dynamic. She also confirmed that the Guardian named Lyanna at the end of the episode was deliberately chosen from among many possible Guardian names to avoid inheriting an already established comic backstory.

The Ring as a "Service Weapon" and What Comes Next

Benkelly relayed a phrase from Lindelof that shaped how the writers treat the Green Lantern ring on the show. "Damon said it, and I really can't stress it enough, and the way he said it was so concise, is that we want to treat the ring like a service weapon," she said, explaining that unlike in comics, where a ring can solve any problem instantly with no consequence, television requires space between a problem and its solution. That meant leaning into canonical limits like how long a ring stays charged and how often it needs recharging, along with in-universe beliefs about the appropriate way to use a ring at all.

Looking ahead, Benkelly said she is looking forward to the next two episodes resolving many of the questions viewers have been raising, and she is especially interested in audience reaction to the reveal of who killed Hal Jordan, which she confirmed is a latter half of the season reveal. She also pushed back gently on the idea that the show is a low budget production, saying more of what viewers are hoping to see is still coming.

The Real Baseball Story Behind the Apple Scene

Benkelly said the scene of John Stewart agreeing to let Bernadette shoot an apple off his head was directly informed by a real experience with her own son, a baseball player who was hit by a pitch in the same spot repeatedly during a double header as a young child and became afraid to get back in the batter's box. She reached out to family friend and former MLB player Prince Fielder for advice, and he told her son that everyone gets hit sometimes and it takes courage to get back in, while privately telling Benkelly and her partner that the only real fix was to keep pitching to him until the fear passed.

Unwilling to ask her son to do something she was not willing to do herself, Benkelly said she and her partner had their son pegged with tennis balls alongside them so he would not go through it alone. That experience shaped how she wrote Bernadette's decision to be the one holding the bow, since Benkelly felt that if a mother wants a child to believe he is fearless, she cannot flinch while proving it. "I'm never going to ask you to be more brave than I can be," she said of the principle behind both the real story and the scene she wrote.

Which storyline are you most curious to see play out as Lanterns moves into its next episodes?