Full spoilers follow for HBO’s Lanterns Episode 2.
After last week’s premiere episode of Lanterns – the latest show in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Universe – got some fans fuming and others interested thanks to the radical decision to kill off legendary Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) right out of the gate (albeit in its 2026 time period), this week’s episode slows down a bit to focus on the main mystery of the show (set in its 2016 time).
And while Lanterns remains largely earthbound, with Hal messing around in Sheriff Kane’s (Kelly Macdonald) jurisdiction of Rushville, Nebraska, while John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) is sent on an errand to retrieve his mentor’s (“mentor’s”?) lantern, the show does finally give us a taste of its cosmic side at the end of the episode. After John fills Hal in on the aliens (disguised as humans) led by Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor) who he encountered, Hal decides to finally suit up for the first time in the show (not including in the brief TV interview flashback we saw last week) and head out to space. And not just space – this Green Lantern flies to what can only be OA, home of the Guardians of the Universe who run the entire Green Lantern Corps. And why is Hal heading to Oa? Oh, to visit with his former mentor – and arch-nemesis – Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), who is now incarcerated after going bad some years earlier.
At first glance, this show could be confused with being just another detective series set in smalltown USA. But then a scene like the one that ends Episode 2 happens, and there’s no doubt that this is the space cop Green Lantern, a guy who can fly to another planet at the drop of a hat.
“It’s like Kyle says in the bar in the pilot, ‘When and where to use the ring is the whole ballgame,’” showrunner Chris Mundy told me when I asked him about the use of the Green Lantern ring on the show. For him and his team, the decision on when to use it, and when not to use it, was not taken lightly.
‘That was a character thing for Hal, but it was also sort of us talking to ourselves a little bit.’“
“That was a character thing for Hal, but it was also sort of us talking to ourselves a little bit,” he continued. “We wanted to earn the times we used it in a big way. We start small and start kind of playful with the $20 bill and all those kinds of things, so that each time we used it, people trusted us, like, ‘Oh, they’re not just plastering everything with it all the time.’ It’s those characters [deciding when to use it], and then because of that, those writers who are making those characters do that thing, they know when to employ it and when not to.”
Mundy emphasizes that if something involving the ring felt out of character or out of story, it was important to the writers that they chose the correct character/story moment rather than a ring moment just for the sake of the spectacle.
“And then as we went, we realized the show could hold more of [the ring’s powers] than maybe we would’ve guessed at the beginning, which was great,” he said. “It felt good that we could use it a lot and it felt organic.”
Do you think the ring is being used enough in the show? Let’s discuss in the comments, and vote in our poll too!
Talk to Scott Collura @scottcollura.bsky.social, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!