Lanterns Season-Finale Recap: In Brightest Day

Lanterns
Dirt and Stars
Season 1 Episode 8
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Lanterns has come to a close, and we can only hope the folks left at the Frankensteined Paramount–Warner Bros. — the newly formed Skydance — greenlight a second season. The most justifiable criticism against the DC detective series is that its mysteries play out wordily, without letting the audience in on how its space cops come to major conclusions. This remains the case right up until the end of season one. However, it’s a small price to pay for such wrenching emotional payoffs, in what might just be the best superhero TV series ever made.

After the gut punch of the penultimate episode — an hour dedicated to the emotional inheritance of the show’s literal and symbolic fathers and sons — “Dirt and Stars” takes us back to the series’ brutal flashpoint: the aftermath of Manhunter Zoe’s destruction in Rushville. It’s the last time we visit the 2016 setting, extending scenes we’ve already glimpsed, just long enough for some devastating beats. A boyish Hal sits bloodied and defeated in the debris of his motel, as Sheriff Kerry delivers a conflicted “I told you so.” Whether or not Hal was right to entice Zoe (upon whose shoulders the carnage ultimately falls), his decision to circumvent the Guardians’ chain of command is what ultimately leads to countless deaths and his imprisonment for reckless endangerment.

A decade later, it still weighs on his conscience, though from the moment Kerry arrives to greet him at the prison gates, he spots a glimmer of … something. Perhaps it’s hope, or a shot at redemption or rehabilitation by helping the citizens of Rushville, despite them staring daggers at him. Either way, he sees it in her eyes as she tells them off at a restaurant, and Kyle Chandler delivers a magnificent performance whose subtext murmurs, “I can’t believe I’m loved, despite what I’ve done.” 

A show like Lanterns is hardly the product of a single creative voice, but it’s hard not to spot the thematic through-lines that series co-writer and co-creator Tom King has frequently brought to his comics. As a CIA operative, King was part of the group that helped plan the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a colossal blunder of geopolitics that led to numerous war crimes. As a person, there is perhaps much he has to answer for, and that justice may never come. As an artist, these open-ended questions seem to haunt him too, and Lanterns’s final two episodes may be the ultimate expression of those conflicted introspections. When the finale returns to its present timeline — as John, along with Hal’s younger self, the “Halogram,” confront a bound Sinestro on the remnants of Antaan’s planet — the characters jump right in and set the stage for this quiet drama.

Flashbacks to recent events reveal that the townspeople never let Hal find peace and even firebombed his home, only for a grown-up Noah — Kerry’s son and Zoe’s grandson — to save him and regenerate his skin using Zoe’s covert alien tech. That Noah is, somehow, a Manhunter as well comes to light rather clunkily, as Sinestro relays these events to John after having interacted with Noah himself. How did this scenario come to pass? It was Noah who broke Sinestro out of prison in the hopes of using him to retaliate against the Guardians, for whom Noah still harbors a vengeful streak for killing his grandmother and chasing down those like him. 

To assist Noah, Sinestro has also forged a new lantern from the water on this dead alien planet — imbued with Zoe’s fear toxins — causing golden cracks in the object’s surface. It’s reminiscent of kintsugi, the Japanese art of fixing broken objects while highlighting the process and accepting the object’s flaws, a key theme as the episode unfolds. The golden yellow is also reminiscent of Sinestro’s long arc in the comics, as the leader of his own fear-based Sinestro Corps. That the show doesn’t yet dive headfirst into a lore bomb of alien color theory (green is will, yellow is fear, and so on) is undoubtedly for the best, as it leaves the door open for these developments while still maintaining a key focus on the characters.

This setup is heavy on exposition, but it allows Sinestro to come off as a master manipulator — it’s how we find out that charging Hal’s ring with a new lantern will delete the Halogram, a second death — while also laying the groundwork for potent developments. Okay, Noah is somehow a Manhunter, though how this came to be is left vague and almost intangible for much of the episode. In the process, this affords John some surprisingly alluring drama when he makes his way back through the alien portal to Rushville, only to be attacked and incapacitated by Noah, before they take a long car ride back to his football game, with Hal’s ring in the teen’s possession. 

With the whiz-bang action long in the series’ rearview, this quiet road trip proves its emotional centerpiece, as Noah confesses both his true nature and his desire to be better — the conflict of his programming. Although he still strives to help people (his teammates, Hal, and so on), he harbors dark thoughts of gaining power using Hal’s ring and rising through political ranks. It’s his programming as a synthetic being, but this is also something John (and no doubt King) relates to as a human put through militaristic trials that have similarly rewritten his psychology. As a child of parents who bred him to be the next Green Lantern, John knows full well the conflict between conscience and instinct, a ceaseless war that threatens to explode to the surface. 

He also comes to the conclusion that Zoe drawing the Lanterns out to kill her was born of a desire (subconscious, or otherwise) to be stopped from carrying out her own programming. And while this stops short of being a plausible explanation based on what we’ve seen, it sets the stage for some disarming confessions. Noah believes the only way to prevent him from using his powers for harm is for John to kill him. It’s a heartbreaking request, and one that feels entirely in tune with the series’ thematic developments about sons raised for destruction and people trying their damnedest to get haunting thoughts of killing and suicide out of their heads. 

It’s hard not to read this without thinking of King’s background, and while it sort of places Lanterns in the militaristic shoot-and-cry genre, where perpetrators are given more narrative weight than their victims, the laundering of this perspective through a superhero story affords it a more palatable abstraction. It also allows John to come to a quiet but meaningful understanding of his own mother, when he gently confronts Kerry about her son as she watches his game, beaming with pride. Another flashback reveals what the Halogram hinted at last week, with Kerry being the one to shoot Hal, albeit in a moment of heightened confusion over what to do when he confronts her about Noah’s true nature.

She doesn’t seem aware of Noah’s shifty movements behind the scenes. And while her conversation with John mildly hints at how Noah even exists in the first place — something to do with Zoe using alien tech to regrow Kerry’s severed pinkie; is there an unconfronted specter of sexual assault here too? — Kerry’s pure love for her son despite his precarious origins is a meaningful emotional fulcrum. It pushes John to take the enormous step of not only letting Noah live, but preparing for a possible future where he may potentially do harm, rather than preemptively making him a casualty of an ongoing war between the Guardians and the Manhunters (the very same war Hal was caught up in). 

It’s with this mission in mind that John, for the first time, accepts the responsibility of being a Green Lantern, but he does so by breaking the chain of command and going around Guy, the Guardians, and, in a way, his own parents. Once a character for whom militaristic structure was akin to life itself, John now cobbles together his own Lantern persona from the pieces of the sprawling mystery plot, and from the shards of Hal’s identity as well — his own form of kintsugi — as he dresses down Guy while telling him to update the Guardians on his plans to protect the Earth.

A sly parting word from the Halogram, before John charges the ring, fools the young upstart into relaying Hal’s last words to Kerry (“I love you”) as though they were John’s own, so that the Halogram can deliver a sentimental retort: “I love you too, junior.” And as “Hero,” by Michael Kiwanuka, plays over the season’s closing montage, John reunites with his family after coming to a greater understanding of them — and of himself, and of the thorny, complicated love they share — while forging his own oath as Lantern too, as a tribute to his mentor. It’s not one we’ve heard in the comics thus far, but it sets Lanterns apart as a bold new take on decades of continuity, woven into a deeply personal story of all the conflicting things that break a person slowly, over decades, and the ways in which they can start to see themselves as a whole.

In brightest day
In darkest night
I’ll embrace my fear
I’ll do what’s right
I choose this ring
I choose this fight
In service to
His lantern’s light.