A superhero show has to stick the arrival. Especially in 2026, when jaded audiences have seen every in media res battle scene introducing the latest big or small screen hero battling for their life, nodded, and thought, “Okay, now what have you got?”
Lanterns, the newest introduction of a DC Comics icon to the promising, James Gunn-helmed DCU rebirth, sets its tone deliberately. No colorful cadre of characters pummeling some anonymous beastie to the sounds of the ’70s here. Lanterns begins with the purest image of comics fandom: A child watching in awe as a real live superhero announces himself to the world. And then the show shatters that image with a gunshot.
The boy is named John (Cario Cash Lee), and DC aficionados know he’s going to become the next Green Lantern, John Stewart. He’s watching a 1996 60 Minutes interview (back when that meant something) billed somewhat breathlessly as “the first ever heart-to-heart with a superhero”—a major piece of DCU world-building nimbly done in short order.
The hero is, naturally, Hal Jordan, introduced as Earth’s first Green Lantern. The Lanterns are described as a squad of space police, each patrolling assigned sectors of the universe. We also learn that, while Hal made his masked public debut 10 years earlier, this is his first sit-down, and the first time people learn his name, and his story. And it’s the first time we meet Kyle Chandler, here de-aged a bit through iffy CGI on young John’s CRT television, which finally shrinks to a glowing dot when John’s brothers frantically snap the set off upon seeing the approaching lights of their father’s car.
But not before John learns further that Hal is an Air Force test pilot, and an orphan, his test pilot father having died in a fiery crash when Hal was eight. As the no-nonsense but folksy Hal tells his interviewer, he’s like a beat cop for the galaxy, and his neighborhood is Earth. (We learn he’s just stopped a meteor from crushing Victoria Falls, presumably the one in Zimbabwe, pop. 35,000.) The young John, enraptured as his panicky brothers beg him to shut off the TV, smiles as Hal Jordan delivers the seemingly incompatible messages that he was “chosen” to be a Green Lantern because he passed the test of never being afraid and—turning to address the screen—that he’s “a regular person, like you.”
When John’s father, dressed in military fatigues, enters, John’s brothers freeze, but John calmly answers his father’s abrupt question about the interview he knew John would watch. “He tell you his name?,” the man asks. “Hal something,” John answers, before following his father outside where he puts an apple on his head, barks a boot camp “No sir!” to his father asking if he’s afraid, and then doesn’t flinch as his father expertly shoots the apple with a pistol.
Welcome to Lanterns.
We leap to 2016 (where, it turns out, we’ll spend most of our time), with the now grown John (Aaron Pierre from The Underground Railroad and Rebel Ridge) is beating the hell out of a gym’s punching bag. (He doesn’t shatter it like Steve Rogers, but there’s the sense the hulking Stewart could if he really wanted to.) Turns out he’s waiting for Hal, who arrives in a pristine old sedan, screeching tires, K.C. And The Sunshine Band blaring, and a laconic driver—a bit rougher around the edges than he was during that 60 Minutes interview—announcing nonchalantly, “I’m late.”
The world builds a bit more as the stoic John listens impassively to Hal’s explanation that he’d just stopped a civil war on the planet Feron 4 (“A little diplomacy, a little punching,” Hal tosses off his mission), that he’s hung over, and that he’s supposed to be training John to be a Lantern.
John’s averted eyes and one-word answers (“How come it is every time you say ‘sir’ it sounds more and more like ‘fuck you?,’” Hal notes) introduces the idea that the partnership isn’t going well, with Hal’s pronouncement that John is “just a substitute teacher” cementing the idea. And then Hal places his Green Lantern ring on the dashboard, dares John to take it, tells John to meet him at a taco stand up the road, and dives out of the speeding car as it—with John still inside—plummets over a cliff. Cue title.
Lanterns, created under executive producer Gunn by Damon Lindelof, DC comics vet Tom King, and Chris Mundy, plants its tonal flag early, and decisively. While there are echoes of broader buddy-cop adventures in the Hal-John intro, the young John’s entrance and Hal’s backstory lets us know there’s a lot of baggage to becoming a hero—and that fathers and sons pack much of it.
The pre-air marketing seemed desperate to play up the odd couple lightness of this weighty new DCU entry—in the clips chosen for the promos, Chandler channels no less than peak Burt Reynolds with his swaggering Southern dickish charisma. But Lanterns, it becomes increasingly clearer with each scene, isn’t that show. As the still-alive John, trudging dustily to the rendezvous tells his father over the phone, “He tried to kill me!,” with the unseen older Stewart counseling, “They’re allowed to have tantrums. We’re not.” And then a holographic Hal Jordan pops out of the ring on John’s finger to ask, “Shit—am I dead?”
More sly groundwork here, as this Hal (dubbed a “Halogram” by John) is revealed to be the ring’s failsafe backup consciousness. Hal’s supposed to update him every week, but this one was last clued in in 2006, so we learn that Green Lanterns aren’t usually assigned trainees from their own worlds. We also see that, 10 years ago, Hal was a lot more like the Burt Reynolds version the trailers hinted at: goofier and, well, nicer. He also drops a code phrase and the name Rushville, NE before disappearing.
At the taco stand, John sees Hal doing expected superhero selfies for goggling locals. Brushing off John’s understandable exasperation (he quickly coated himself in green bubble wrap to survive) by pointedly telling the proprietor that he doesn’t wear the GL suit anymore because he has nothing to prove. Receiving the message with a scowl, Hal peremptorily zips away to Rushville, while John is left to fly commercial.
All this prickliness extends to the ensuing investigation, where the late-arriving John discovers Hal perched impassively on some high school bleachers as local police cope with a mass shooting. The presiding sheriff, Kerry, (Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald, as at home in the American West as she was in No Country For Old Men) is deeply unimpressed by the newly arrived superhero, parking him on his ass by asserting jurisdiction (his Earth authority only extends to extraterrestrial threats) and treating John with disdain by association.
Naturally, Hal, judging by his message to himself (“There’s hail in Rushville, Nebraska”) just knows there are aliens involved in the shooting that’s left four dead strangers on the field. There’s a nifty shorthand in how each of these three main characters are good at their jobs—each of their observations of the scene is picked up by one of the others, who’s already thought of that, thanks. When one bloodstained witness, spooked by John’s sole misstep, takes off running, his capture gives Hal the opportunity to finally step in.
Of course, he has to provoke a bar brawl, get locked up, and have a hefty bail set by an unimpressed local judge first. Again, the everyday fact of a real live superhero on Earth is treated with intriguing ambiguity. Average people might be starstruck, but anyone having to deal with Hal Jordan is quickly tired of his cocky schtick and overconfidence, Hal having to engineer his own arrest just to continue the chase. (Kerry outsmarts him by sticking Hal in a broom closet.) The fact that Hal’s correct about the seemingly ordinary trucker (Chris Coy) who fled the scene doesn’t so much impress the sheriff as it does leave her with an administrative superhero headache.
I mean, Hal’s questioning of the, as it turns out, eloquently menacing alien does see the trucker suicide-blast a hole through the sheriff station. (Hal’s quick ring work contains the worst of it.) And Hal’s abrupt questioning of the local good old boy militia leader who seemingly runs the town, William Macon (Garret Dillahunt, as courtly and menacing as only he can be) is equally trying. The sheriff is married to Macon’s glad-handing son Billy (Jason Ritter), who appoints himself as Hal’s attorney, while her polite son Noah (Cary Christopher) takes a welcome football tip from the observant John.
And so the stage for Lanterns is set. There are aliens in Rushville, whose residents seem to know more than they’re letting on. Green Lantern’s on the case, his unwanted protégé in tow, and the formidable local cop thinks Hal’s a pain in the ass.
But then we jump ahead to 2026 and Hal Jordan’s dead in Rushville. Same town, same bleachers—only this time they’re covered in snow, and there’s a bullet hole in Hal’s forehead, above a broken nose. John, snazzy in a clipped beard and business attire, steps out of his expensive truck to meet a sad Kerry. He asks about Noah, now a local football star, and they trudge to view the body. Hal’s not wearing the ring—but neither is John.
Lanterns cites procedural heavy hitters like True Detective (Mundy was a producer) and Slow Horses (the pilot’s directed by that series’ James Hawes) as inspirations, and those are some prestige heights for a superhero show to aim for. But the integration of those two dramatic spheres here feels well structured and deliberate. And Lanterns has Chandler, Macdonald, and Pierre, a formidable core clearly prepared to reveal some depths. As the DCU continues its fascinatingly diverse rollout, Lanterns suggests there’s plenty of exciting new territory to color.
Stray observations
- • Kyle Chandler + high school football stadium. Always a winner.
- • Kelly Macdonald’s Kerry drops some economical world building with her bored, singsong delivery of, “They understand your job, they know we’re not alone…”
- Ah, the ring. Bulky but handsome, its powers finally get a workout (we never see John’s bubble wrap) in the sheriff’s office explosion where Hal tellingly has to reinforce his force bubble with his body.
- Interestingly, there’s no mention of the comics whole “weakness against yellow stuff” thing.
- Hal drops that the Guardians Of The Universe, bosses of the Green Lantern Corps., regard Earth’s Sector 2814 as “a galactic fuckin’ backwater” and that they never wanted it on anybody’s radar.
- He also tosses off his own origin story (dying alien Lantern Abin Sur summoned him in a bubble, he passed the fear question test) over some shots at the local bar.
- Tough few years for Melanie’s “Brand New Key,” which not only soundtracked Dave Foley’s post-apocalyptic madness in 2022, but Hal also uses here to provoke a barful of rednecks into beating him up so he can get close to the suspected alien prisoner. (We’ll always have Roller Girl.)
- “This is a stupid plan.” “I’ve had stupider.” “That I do not doubt.” (The sort of flip exchange the trailer deceptively promised more of.)
- I’m not sure how much we needed John’s romantic subplot yet, but him lighting the enigmatic older woman’s (Never Have I Ever’s Poorna Jagannathan) post-coital cigarette with Hal’s ring is a baller move.
- The stalwart John’s a vegan. Or, according to Hal, “He doesn’t believe in anything that causes enjoyment.”
- Dillahunt’s William Macon asserts his all-white militia boys have been preparing for alien invasion ever since Hal’s public arrival on Earth, referring to the local Native people’s supposed unpreparedness for their defeat. “Colonization is ugly from any angle,” he notes, “But especially if you’re the one being colonized.”
- Hal knowingly trips up the alien prisoner by noting that while his practiced Nebraska football knowledge is letter-perfect, it’s inconceivable that, “You’re from rural Nebraska and you don’t have an opinion about Barack Hussein Obama?”
- Hi all. I’m Dennis and I’ll be your Lanterns guide. Look forward to journeying with all of you.
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