SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details from Season 1 episode 8 of Lanterns on HBO.
“Are You Afraid?”
In Sunday night’s season one finale of Lanterns, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) finally uncovered his destiny, speaking the words audiences have awaited all season long. Not only did Stewart accept his role as Earth’s protector by the end of the episode, but he also learned the truth behind Hal Jordan’s (Kyle Chandler) death and the reason behind it.
The finale opens with a flashback to Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly MacDonald) retrieving Jordan from prison following a ten-year sentence after he admitted fault for the deadly attack on Rushfield. This marks the beginning of their relationship, with Jordan wary about how the town would accept his return.
His instincts prove correct when his house is firebombed, leaving Jordan for dead. He is ultimately saved by Kane’s son, Noah (Shea Pritchard), who is not only able to regenerate Jordan’s burned skin but reveals a family secret: like his grandmother, Noah is a Man Hunter.
Flash-forward to the present day, where Stewart and Jordan’s hologram have captured Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) on a desolate planet and discovered he forged Noah a very powerful lantern that could be deadly in the wrong hands.
Back on Earth with the new lantern in hand, Stewart is captured by Noah but ultimately released prior to the boy’s big football game, during which the boy admits he killed the real Jordan after discovering his plans for the new lantern. While watching the game, Stewart confronts Kane about Jordan, with her ultimately admitting she killed him after panicking when Jordan asked her to move away with Noah to protect them from the Guardians.
Kane asks to watch the end of the game before turning herself in, but Stewart suggests that isn’t what Jordan would want before they go their separate ways. In the final moments, Stewart tells Guy Gardner he is taking on the task of Guardian of Earth and accepts the role by speaking the oath, which while rooted in the original has a new twist for this show, before he takes flight.
Series creators and stars discussed the finale and the future of the show recently during a press conference.
When it came to Jordan’s hologram, Chandler offered an interesting outlook on playing the real version of Jordan versus the artificial one, feeling there was a paternal element to how he handled the material.
“I looked at the Hologram as more of a younger Hal watching himself or the version of himself and the subconscious of how at the time he was put in that world,” Chandler said. “It’s almost like a father watching a son grow up in a way. He’s viewing himself, making these decisions and yet he gets to also converse with himself at the same time. So it is kind of rather complicated and I took the dialogue and did what I could with it to make it more complicated. So no one understood what I was doing and I thought maybe that might work out.”
The running theme of not just the episode but the season is the idea of fear and how the characters handled it, and writer and co-creator Chris Mundy pointed out that as a writing team they embraced that idea when writing this episode.
“If you’re gonna do this story, you’re gonna talk about fear and is it a good thing? Like Sinestro says it in the finale, fear is just emotional intelligence,” show co-creator Chris Mundy says. “Show me a species without fear, and I’ll show you something on the extinction list. We wanted this to be a really human story, we wanted to talk about these people with, that are very real, flawed or complicated who get to do these heroic things, and what would it actually mean? And so it was really important to us that to embrace that and treat that question really super seriously.”
The final moments between Stewart and Jordan clearly signaled this could be the last time the two may share a scene together going forward, and Aaron Pierre talked about how after filming for so long the scene came together seamlessly regarding how the characters felt about each other.
“We had filmed a lot by that point,” Pierre said. “Kyle and I on the day we’re thinking of all the months that we filmed prior to that, It’s all going into the moment. It’s all very loaded and it feels earned and it feels deserved. And hopefully the audience is open and receptive to that and allows it to resonate with different.”
Fans of the original comics are sure to notice a change in the famous Lantern slogan, and Mundy said the idea of changing or “remixing it” had to do with the writers’ journey throughout the season and how it made sense to head in this direction by the end of it.
“I know Justin, one of the writers, was like, well, we’re not rewriting it, We’re remixing it.,” said Mundy. “I think the idea was, we sort of were taking a look back at what we’d done with the season and so John’s path was not the normal path. The ring didn’t choose him. He was interviewed. He was kind of raised for it. He was having to choose this thing. Then he decided not to do it, and then decided he needed to do it on his own terms. And so, it felt, we wanted to be true to the original, and respectful of the original, like his version is rooted in the OG version of it. We also wanted to tweak it to talk about the themes that we talked about, and fear, and make it, make it be a choice that he was choosing this thing, and not something he was like, Oh, I’m doing it because my parents wanted me to do it, or I’m doing it because of these things.”
As for everyone’s favorite pet plant Earl, there are not only signs we’ll see more of him next season, but it seems he’s much more resilient than the man that feeds him when it comes to toughness.
“I think Earl is pretty Earl is pretty resilient,” co-creator and writer Damon Lindeloff said. “The botanical creatures of the galaxy can grow their own skin, I would imagine.”