Lanterns: Every Unseen Trailer Shot Predicted for Episodes 5 Through 8

Published 10 September 2026. Words like "tonight" or "next week" refer to that date.

We are now halfway through this season of Lanterns with the back four episodes remaining. I have gone back through every trailer, next episode promo and behind the scenes featurette to work out what I think are more than 100 shots still to come this season, and I am grouping them by time period, by setting and by episode so you can stop reading whenever you want to avoid spoilers for episodes you have not reached yet.

Episode 5 Picks Up With John Stewart's Burning Car and a Manhunter Who Isn't Actually Dead

A fan edit strung together trailer footage that I think all belongs in episode 5, titled Lights Out. It looks like the episode picks up right from Hal jumping out of the rental car and letting John Stewart crash into the light pole at the end of episode 4. There is a trailer shot of Hal walking back to the wreckage to check on John Stewart, saying, "Sorry about that, Junior. I'm gonna have to move you off the game board." John Stewart then gets his knee jammed in the glove box and struggles to escape as the car catches fire.

Through the flames, John Stewart sees Manhunter Zoe standing across the street, alive, wearing the same blue jean jacket she had on when she left his motel room in episode 4. As I pointed out in my episode 4 breakdown, I think she pulled a kind of switch in that scene, where a hologram or visual decoy actually drove off in her truck to make Hal think she had been killed by her own space lasers. I think she rematerializes from the bracelet she left on John Stewart's nightstand.

There is a shot of Zoe sitting beside a heavily burned and bandaged John Stewart in the empty, unused Rushville Hospital. In an extreme close up shown in the recent episode 5 preview, we see her dropping some of her Manhunter blood on his burned eye, presumably healing him completely, the same way she cured Will Makin's cancer. Around this, promo audio gives a citywide warning telling Rushville residents "this is not a drill," and I think once word spreads of Anton's group attacking the town, citizens will be armed and warned that these alien invaders are walking bombs hunting the Manhunter.

There is also a second town hall meeting, similar to the one in episode 2 but different because this time Hal and John Stewart walk in together while Carrie and William Makin Senior address the crowd from the stage. If Hal and John Stewart are together here, that is a little confusing since so many other shots suggest they spend most of the episode apart. A behind the scenes image also shows a grayer, older Hal Jordan and a bearded 2026 John Stewart alive together in a diner, though it is hard to place the timing since Rushville residents do not seem to age thanks to the health care privileges the Manhunter provides.

Episode 5's Diner Shootout Sets Up Anton's Reveal as Atrocitus

One of the alien bombs arrives at the gates of the Makin Ranch, where William Makin Senior appears to greet him at gunpoint before the whole area explodes in what looks like something out of Zero Dark Thirty. My first instinct was that this kills William Makin, but I think he actually gets away. There is also an earlier trailer shot of one of Anton's aliens running at the ranch's structure and blowing up the whole building.

At the diner outside town where John Stewart called Anton to meet him, and where John Stewart first met Zoe back in episode 2, Hal arrives to find a shootout has already happened, shell casings scattered across the parking lot and a corpse outside the door. Inside, Hal finds more bodies and bubbles up a green shield as Anton's crew opens machine gun fire on him before Anton himself steps up to confront him. I think this is when we learn that Anton's real identity is Atrocitus, from the planet the Manhunter wiped out.

I think both Anton and William Makin survive into a later scene, because another trailer shot shows Anton in Makin's office from episode 3, where the laser emitter on the desk, the same tech seen on the wall of the slaughterhouse killing floor, activates and aims a barrage of lasers right at him. That could end in a standoff, or it could blow up the whole ranch house. Meanwhile, Hal lands on the road in front of Sheriff Carrie, who holds him at gunpoint and tells him, "The best thing you can do for all of us is just go."

Trailer shots also show the Rushville water tower Hal and John Stewart use as a lookout, with two support beams breaking and the structure collapsing. In a field, Hal faces a swirling darkness cast by Makin's darkness guns, but using a pair of special goggles he sees through it and manifests something new with his ring, a tornado that sucks up one of the explosive aliens and detonates it high in the air. If Hal is meant to be a Nebraskan or a Midwesterner, I think tornadoes could be part of his past, maybe something he feared as a kid the way birds were an obsession for John Stewart.

Episode 5 Ends With Hal and John Stewart Tearing Each Other Apart Over the Lantern

A downtown action sequence shows trucks opening fire on Hal in Rushville, and he disables one with his ring. Satellite lasers converge on a building that looks like Will Makin Jr.'s bar rather than the domed town hall, since John Stewart appears inside that bar in the same footage. Hal manifests a huge green dome to block the blast. Since the Manhunter shares this laser tech with both Hector Gutierrez and the Makin Ranch, I think this is the Manhunter targeting one of Anton's group, maybe Anton himself, from orbit, with Hal blocking it to keep the whole town from getting caught in the blast.

John Stewart, now healed and wearing medical scrubs, breaks back into the guns and ammo shop from episode 4 to grab the sniper rifle he left behind. A behind the scenes shot shows Hal charging at John Stewart in what looks like Hal's motel room, the two of them fighting over the lantern and the ring, smashing through walls and furniture until John Stewart gets Hal in a headlock. John Stewart says, "Was it worth it?" before leaving with the lantern, and part of the motel's parking lot sign is shown destroyed, presumably by the satellite lasers.

The aftermath in downtown Rushville looks grim: a severed human leg and foot, two crying girls, and John Stewart walking barefoot through the rubble holding the lantern as Makin's goons surround him at gunpoint, with Sheriff Carrie among them giving him a hard stare. I would not be surprised if that is exactly where episode 5 ends.

Episode 6 Looks Like the Hal Jordan Origin Episode I've Been Waiting For

There is disagreement among people following this closely about whether episode 6 or episode 7 is Hal Jordan's flashback origin episode. I think it is episode 6, because according to Wikipedia's episode credits, episode 6 is written by Damon Lindelof and Tom King, the first episode they are credited on since the pilot. I think Hal's origin is a critical part of the series bible Lindelof, King and Chris Mundy developed, and that it is why John Stewart's origin episode was moved from its original episode 5 slot back to episode 3, to avoid two origin episodes airing back to back. That Wikipedia listing could still be wrong, and there was no way to know for sure until the episode aired.

Early trailer shots show the day of Hal Jordan's father's funeral, an Air Force flyover, and young Hal sitting beside his mother. The pilot established that Hal's father was an Air Force test pilot who died in a crash when Hal was very young. In episode 4, Hal said his father claimed to be fearless but actually feared something he would not admit to John Stewart, and that his mother died of cancer. My theory is that Hal's father was a 1970s Air Force test pilot who wanted to be a NASA astronaut but did not have what it took.

Based on trailer shots, these appear to be memories that the bearded 2026 John Stewart witnesses by joining a hologram Hal recorded in 2006, suggesting an interesting physical memory structure for this episode. I have to note that Lindelof was previously known for Lost, whose first episode was literally titled Pilot, about finding the pilot in the cockpit of Oceanic flight 815. It makes me wonder if this episode is really about the pilot Hal Jordan, or his father.

Among these memory shots is a grim, industrial looking location with a tower venting blue energy, where an earlier era Hal, maybe the hologram or a memory, faces Sinestro, who screams. This could be a memory from 2006, or the 2026 hologram revisiting the moment Hal apprehended Sinestro after his attempted coup against the Guardians. That location could be OA, possibly even OA's central battery, though it looks grimmer and more cyberpunk than the design of the rings and lantern we have seen so far would suggest. A July trailer also shows the bearded 2026 John Stewart paddling a canoe across a foggy, stormy lake to a platform, which might be an Earth location tied to this same memory episode.

Episode 7 Brings Guy Gardner and a Jail Cell Reunion With John Stewart

Whichever episode ends up being the Hal Jordan flashback, the following batch of shots shows the bearded 2026 John Stewart back in Rushville during a period without snow, so not around the time his body is discovered at the end of the pilot. In this stretch, John Stewart faces Will Makin Jr. and punches him in the face. The same episode appears to feature John Stewart beside a lantern signal alongside Guy Gardner, played by Nathan Fillion, who also appears as Guy Gardner in Superman and in Peacemaker season 2.

A tacky lantern signal like this feels like something Guy Gardner would suggest, borrowing the idea from Batman's bat signal in Gotham City. I think this takes place before the events shown at the end of the pilot, maybe back in 2025, when Hal's ring first disappeared and went over to Guy Gardner, which would explain why Gardner has the ring during the events of Superman, which is set in 2025. I think this is also the episode where we see John Stewart in the town jail as Guy Gardner chats with him, telling him, "He's gonna send an army to put you down. First time I met Hal Jordan, he was in jail, too."

Episode 8's Finale Shots Point to a Yellow Planet That Could Explain the Show's Title

The last batch of unseen shots I am assuming belongs to episode 8, though it is possible some of it belongs to whichever episode is Hal's flashback. It is also possible none of the trailers so far have shown us anything from the actual finale, since shows like this often finish visual effects and audio mixing on later episodes while earlier ones are already airing, and I was assuming episode 8 would not even be locked until later in September.

The final shots show a yellow tinted, arid, dead landscape with at least two moons visible, which suggests this is not Earth. Most of these shots feature just two figures, the bearded 2026 John Stewart and the 2006 era hologram, but one shot from the weeks ahead trailer clearly shows three figures. In it, 2026 John Stewart wears the green lantern ring and picks up a dried skull beneath a massive extraterrestrial floating structure, and everything in frame is yellow.

One theory is that this is Anton's home planet after what the Manhunter did to it, with the skull belonging to Anton's race and the floating structure something the Manhunter built to flatten and terraform the planet. Another theory I really like, though I am not sure the show would go through with something this big, is that this could be the remains of Coast City in Southern California after its destruction, with the structure overhead being the beginnings of Engine City, referencing the 1993 Superman number 80 Deadly Alliance storyline where Cyborg Superman and Mongul destroy Coast City, killing 7 million people, and convert its rubble into Engine City for an Earth Warworld plan. The pilot episode's shots of Coast City were literally Los Angeles with the US Bank building scrubbed out. For this to actually be Earth, they would have had to add a second moon to the shot just to misdirect viewers, but I would not put it past them for a twist this big.

The key detail is the color itself. Yellow is the color of fear and of the fear entity Parallax, and in the Emerald Twilight storyline, Hal Jordan, grieving what happened to Coast City, gives in to Parallax and lets fear take over his body. That could be Sinestro's plan all season, to corrupt Hal with fear so Sinestro can escape and start a Sinestro Corps of yellow lanterns, which could be why the series is called Lanterns and not Green Lantern, since we may be seeing lanterns of multiple colors. As for who killed Hal Jordan, I have floated before that the body we saw might not be Hal at all, but the Manhunter taking his form while the real Jordan is still alive somewhere with a yellow ring, which could explain that behind the scenes shot of the two of them alive together in a diner booth.

So who really killed Hal Jordan, and is that yellow planet Anton's ruined homeworld or the ashes of Coast City?