‘Lanterns’ Premiere Ends With a Shocking Hal Jordan Twist — What Just Happened?

John heads to Rushville, where Hal is investigating what appears to be a mass shooting at a high school football game. Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) wants nothing to do with the Lanterns and insists they have no jurisdiction, while Hal believes whatever happened is alien in nature. John spots a suspicious man in the crowd, but Kerry is already watching him. His approaching her ruined her plan. When the man runs, she has him arrested.

At a nearby honky tonk, Hal tells John how he got his ring. He woke up inside a green bubble, asking if he was afraid, before being pulled across the galaxy and ultimately chosen as another Lantern’s successor. Now John is Hal’s trainee, selected by the Guardians to serve as Earth’s backup should anything happen to him.

The relationship between Hal and John gives Lanterns plenty of room to explore what happens when one hero is nearing the end of his time in the spotlight just as another is stepping into it. For Chandler, that dynamic — and everything the series allows the two characters to wrestle with along the way — comes back to the strength of the story they were given.

John Johnson/HBO Max

“We get to live that through really great writing and really great ability to explore it, with the OK and the yes, go explore it, from the writers and everyone. We all collaborated, and then once we saw what they did with the editing and all this stuff, it’s the human experience,” said Chandler. “It’s basically really good storytelling, and when an actor reads this stuff, you don’t say no to it. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime, and that’s where all this goes. And some of your questions are there. They’re all there. It’s all baked into the cake.”

He continued, “There’s so much to look at in this show, having these two kinds of characters, and it was just a tremendous opportunity. And I think, from how we experienced it, that experience is going to be seen by the audience. From what I know of being in the business for 35-plus, I think people are going to really dig this, and I think it’s going to be a great show. And it’s the credit of these guys up here to be so thoughtful in that writers’ room, to create something so wonderful for us to be able to have a shot to chew on.”

For Aaron Pierre, part of establishing the relationship between John Stewart and Hal Jordan meant shutting out other film and television influences and allowing their version of the dynamic to emerge on its own.

“I think it is something I really enjoyed about this experience. Kyle and I speak a lot about how when we work on projects — this project or any project that we are part of — during that time, and it’s a conscious decision, neither of us watch film, or TV really, and speaking personally for myself a lot of what I do is watch documentaries or listen to a lot of music because I don’t want to be directly or indirectly influenced and have it find its way into the work,” said Pierre. “So what was really enjoyable was doing all of the necessary research, all of the appropriate research, revising that, and then discovering what our dynamic was within the context of our versions of these characters. And it’s the first live-action, so of these two in an HBO context, so you know, discovering what that was and sharing it with audiences.”

Back at the bar, Hal deliberately gets himself arrested so he can question the mysterious man from the football field while John is distracted by a friendly local who shows him the sights of Rushville (i.e., they hook up). Hal’s plan backfires when Kerry sticks him in a broom closet before he’s arraigned. Her husband, Billy Macon (Jason Ritter), serves as Hal’s lawyer, gets him released on bail, and invites him to the Macon family “ranch.”

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Now, here is where things get complicated. The ranch is crawling with militia members led by Billy’s father, William Macon (Garret Dillahunt), who believes the Lanterns are part of an elite force preparing Earth for alien colonization. William insists he’s only trying to protect the planet after two of his sons were nearly killed in a mysterious shootout. John also discovers that Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), the woman he hooked up with at the bar, is William’s wife…and Billy and Kerry’s son’s grandmother. A bit of news that Hal seems to enjoy when John tells him, and a bit of lore that William appears keenly aware of. Eek.

Hal eventually gets his chance to question the stadium suspect, Waylon Sanders (Chris Coy), and quickly realizes something isn’t right. He’s surface-level, human. Walon knows only the basics of human pop culture, but that’s it. Heck, he can’t even muster an opinion about American politics despite being from the Midwest in the Obama era. Hal exposes him as an alien, and Walon admits he’s on Earth for a purpose that’s the opposite of peaceful. Worse, he has a biometric bomb woven into his skeleton that can be detonated with a thought.

After words of warning about what’s to come, Walon does exactly that, but Hal contains the explosion inside a green bubble, saving the town.

Then the episode jumps forward again, this time to 2026. John is driving across a frozen Nebraska landscape when he reunites with Kerry at the same football field where they first met a decade earlier. Waiting there in the bleachers is Hal — seemingly dead, bloody, frozen solid, and without his ring.

Lanterns, Sunday, 9/8c, HBO Max