Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner Appears

It’s a very different John Stewart we encounter in this week’s “Lanterns,” which takes place entirely in 2026 and which brings the show back to the mystery from the premiere: Who killed Hal Jordan?

This iteration of John — whom we met briefly in the season premiere — eats meat. He’s cold with his mom. And he’s stayed true to not wanting to be anywhere near a certain superhero or his ring.

How ironic, then, that John spends a chunk of the hour in the presence of three Green Lanterns. (OK, one is dead and the other is a hologram, but it counts!)

Read on for the highlights of Episode 6.

We start the hour in 2026, as John is pitching the company he and his brother. Marcus, started — which builds high-grade, impenetrable panic rooms — to the Midway City Powers That Be. Given that there’s no resident Superman or equivalent, John proposes building underground football stadiums that can shelter 20,000 people each in case of an attack. The officials on the panel are charmed, in part because of John’s familiarity with superhood. (“I was the Green Lantern,” he confirms, “for five minutes.”) The final step will be for John to make his presentation to an influential military colonel.

The good news is tempered by a call soon after from John’s mom, whom he now addresses as “Bernadette” and with whom it appears he is no longer close. “Hal Jordan wants to apologize,” she tells him. After a 10-year stint in prison, Hal is “different now. Grown,” she continues, adding that he’s back in Rushville. John hangs up, annoyed… but drives straight to Rushville anyway.

John finds an older, somehow scruffier Hal eating dinner at the cafe. “All right, let’s have it,” John says. “Your f***in’ apology.” Hal doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and John realizes that his mother lied to him. Hal doesn’t know why John is so angry. “I took the fall” for the town’s devastation, he says. “I spent the time. We’re square.” Stewart is livid. “You didn’t take the fall. You fell, and people got killed, and we’re a long f***in’ way from square.”

But Hal’s got some fight left in him. “There’s more than one killer at this table,” he tells his former protege. “You realize that, don’t you?” Hal goes on to needle John that the real reason he turned down the ring because he was scared; he stops when John punches him, hard. Before John goes, Hal begs him not to tell anyone he was there. “Stay the f*** away from my family,” Stewart replies.

But almost as soon as he gets home, John receives a call from Sheriff Kane: It’s the one that brought him to the football field at the end of the season premiere. Hal is dead, and his ring is gone.

There are no witnesses and no security footage. Kerry theorizes that whoever broke his nose probably offed him; John, the nose-breaker in question, says nothing except that he never thought Hal would actually die. Kerry is very sad, and explains that everyone in the town hated Hal for what happened the day Zoe died. She called John because she just wanted someone around “who’d care that he was gone. We also learn why Hal was even in Rushville again. “He came back for me,” Kerry says.

She and Billy have been kaput for three years, she explains, and Hal started writing her letters when he was in prison. He moved to town after he was released and went on a kinda pathetic/kinda sweet apology tour, knocking on doors to see how he could help. Kerry found it endearing. Pretty soon, she admits that she and Hal were dating.

Kerry sets John up at the house Hal was renting — complete with booby-trapped front door and Earl, the carnivorous plant — and then, the next morning, deputizes him so he can accompany her to Hal’s autopsy. The findings: The Lantern died of a single shot to the head from a 9mm pistol, the body wasn’t moved, and the shooter was looking right at him. Kerry asks about the broken nose. Again, John says nothing.

There’s a key (on a bird keyring) to a storage unit in Hal’s effects. When John opens it, he finds the vault that was in the closet in Hal’s massive estate. But it’s still voice-activated. Kerry plays a saved voicemail from him, in which Hal muses about what pet name he should use for her. It’s sweet, and sad, and the kicker is that it doesn’t work: High-Tech Space Vault needs a live voice, not a recording.

Kerry invites John for dinner that evening. In the interim, he stops by the town’s beacon to summon Green Lantern — the current one, Guy Gardner (played by Nathan Fillion) is a derpy guy with an even derpier haircut — and John turns it on. Four men instantly show up and tell him to shut it off, and tempers are high and climbing when Billy arrives. John asks his old acquaintance to call off the dudes, but Billy sides with them, saying Green Lantern isn’t welcome in the town. John’s training kicks in and he takes them all out, singlehandedly. The beacon stays on.

So John is at dinner with Kerry and her now-teenage son, Noah, when she gets a call. “Did you just attack my ex-husband?” she asks incredulously. “No, I defended myself,” Stewart says. Still, she locks him in the sheriff’s office’s holding cell for the night. John uses his one call to contact Marcus and ask him to wire bail money from the company account.

Guy Gardner arrives the next morning. John informs him of Hal’s death. “I can’t help you solve this murder, you know,” he says. “It’s bad optics.” But John’s got a different ask: They’re going to have a funeral, and Hal should be buried in his uniform and ring. Guy says no-can-do, because Hal’s ring is decommissioned and locked up at the Guardians’ headquarters on Oa. “Everything you have is because I didn’t take it,” a ticked-off John reminds him. Guy also relays that “someone busted out Sinestro” from “Space Azkaban” while Hal was in prison.

After John is released, he checks voicemail. His father was kicked out of a care facility for shooting out his window. Bernadette apologized for lying but maintained she was right about Hal wanting to make amends. An exasperated John then calls his other brother, Aaron, and has to threaten to yank the money he’s investing in Aaron’s album to get him to help with their dad.

Back at Hal’s, a young woman who was at the café when John punched Hal demands more than $300,000 for not telling anyone he was there. She deems the number she cites him as “reparations,” because she was 9 when the town was destroyed, and she wants restitution. Pay up, she says, or she’ll talk. Meanwhile, Marcus is freaking out that John won’t be there for the big meeting with the colonel, but John says he’ll be able to handle it from the phone.

John shows up to the funeral in a suit borrowed from Kerry’s son, Noah. Hal is laid out in uniform, complete with his ring, because Guy came through after all. Aside from Kerry, the only other mourner is Hal’s former girlfriend, Carol Ferris, who hands John a eulogy Hal wrote himself years before. She asks him to deliver it. “I’ll be he liked you, John,” she says, “and I’ll also bet he never said it.”

After the brief graveside service — at which John does read the unintentionally hilarious eulogy (Hal thought everyone and their mom would be clamoring for a seat at his send-off) — John tells Kerry he’s going to stick around town for a few days. And that evening, he returns to the burial site and digs it up, illuminated by his headlights. He’s mid-dig when Marcus call to connect John to the colonel. Though John tries to present like he’s got it all together, the military man hangs up almost instantly.

Stewart keeps digging and ultimately uncovers the coffin, which he pries open. He takes the ring off Hal’s finger and puts it on his own. He uses some of the 5% charge remaining to summon the Halogram, who peers into the coffin.

“Goddamnit,” the Halogram says.

Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!