SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of the Season 1 finale of Lanterns on HBO.
“Are you afraid?”
In Sunday night’s Season 1 finale of Lanterns, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) finally found the answer and his destiny as he spoke the words audiences have been waiting all season to hear. Not only did Stewart accept his role as Earth’s protector by the end of the episode, but it also became clear why Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) was killed and for what reason.
The finale starts off with a flashback to Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) picking up Jordan from prison following a 10-year sentence after admitting fault for the deadly attack on Rushfield. This is also the start of their relationship, with Jordan wary about how the town will accept his return.
His instincts are correct as his house is firebombed, with Jordan left for dead only to be saved by Kane’s son Noah (Shea Pritchard), who is not only able to regenerate Jordan’s burned skin but reveals his secret that he, like his grandmother, is a Man Hunter.
Flash forward to present day, where Stewart and Jordan’s hologram have captured Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) on a desolate planet and found out he has forged Noah a very powerful lantern that could be very deadly in the wrong hands.
Back on Earth with the new Lantern in hand, Stewart is captured by Noah but ultimately released prior to Noah’s big football game, with the boy admitting he had killed the real Jordan after he had found out his plans for the new lantern. While watching the game, Stewart confronts Kerry about Jordan, with her ultimately admitting she killed him after panicking when Jordan asks her to move away with Noah to protect him from the Guardians.
Kerry asks to watch the end of the game before turning herself in and Stewart suggests that isn’t what Jordan would want before going their separate ways. In the final moments, Stewart tells Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) that he’s taking on the task of Guardian of earth and accepts role by speaking the oath that, while rooted in the original, has a new twist to it for this show before he sets flight.
The series’ creators and stars talked about the finale and the future of the show recently during a press conference.
When it came to Jordan’s Hologram, Chandler had an interesting outlook when it came to playing the real version of Jordan and the artificial one, and felt that there was a paternal feeling 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.”
A running theme of not just the episode but of the season is the idea of fear and how characters handled it, and writer and co-creator Chris Mundy pointed out how as a writing team they embraced that idea when penning the season finale.
“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,” 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, 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 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, and 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 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 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, not only are there signs we’ll see more of him next season, it seems that when it comes toughness, he’s much more resilient then the man that feeds him.
“I think Earl is pretty resilient,” co-creator and writer Damon Lindelof said. “The botanical creatures of the galaxy can grow their own skin, I would imagine.”
