Lanterns Episode 6 Review: After the Light Fades

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 6

Previously, on Lanterns… everything went wrong. What had been a surprisingly excellent superhero series took a turn that seemed so wrongheaded on a narrative and thematic level that it’s hard to see how Lanterns could recover. William Macon, his Manhunter wife Zoe, and the vengeful Antaan all died in the fight, which also destroyed most of Rushville, all while John and Hal fought each other more than they did the bad guys. Where can showrunner Chris Mundy go from there?

Turns out, the answer is “nowhere,” and that was the best possible answer. Episode 6, “Bad Optics,” doesn’t entirely make up for the problems of its predecessor. But it does take advantage to do something unique, offering a meditation on how superheroes fail.

In “Bad Optics,” we finally return to 2026, where John now works with his brother as a successful architect, having put his Green Lantern days behind him. Not only does the public not hold John accountable for Rushville, but his experience has become a selling point, helping him market high-end panic rooms to clients with money and military contracts. Less improved is John’s relationship with his parents, to whom he no longer speaks.

Hal Jordan has had the opposite trajectory. After serving time in prison for what happened, a sentence he served without mentioning John’s name, Hal moved to Rushville in a failed attempt to atone for his crimes. He offers to do good works for the citizens, and kindles a romance with Sheriff Kerry, now divorced from Billy. Hal asks John to meet one last time, hoping for some sort of recognition from the other guilty party, but John refuses. The next thing John knows, he’s been called back to Rushville to help Kerry with Hal’s murder.

Despite the fact that “Bad Optics,” directed by Stephen Williams and written by Justin Britt-Gibson and Damon Lindelof, finally gets back to the dead Hal Jordan that we saw at the end of episode 1, it doesn’t really address the mystery. There’s some talk about possible suspects, with John immediately ruling out Kerry. But instead, the episode wants to let John face the past he left behind. That ranges from preparing for Hal’s funeral with the help of current Green Lantern Guy Gardner, played by a returning and more foul-mouthed Nathan Fillion, and being blackmailed by Maggie (Hannah Christine Shetler), the little girl who watched John steal Hal’s ring in 2016.

“Bad Optics” lets Lanterns get back to doing what it does best, examining a person overburdened by responsibility. John wants to believe that he’s put his Green Lantern days behind him and that he’s happier for it. He wants to believe that he did nothing wrong in 2016, that all those people died because Hal made a mistake. But Hal’s murder forces him to see the truth.

The focus on John’s journey gives Aaron Pierre room to do his best work yet as a man who can’t acknowledge his own feelings. Pierre puts just a little too much energy into John’s pitches to clients and to the way he teases with Kerry and Noah (now played by Shea Pritchard) at dinner. With just a bob of his head, he transitions John from false friendliness when encountering Billy to rage, sucker-punching him and other angry Rushville residents. And Pierre goes dead-eyed when John talks with his brothers, trying to pretend that he cares about his next client as much as he ever cared about the ring.

Outside of the final moment, in which John gets enough charge from Hal’s ring to revive the Hal-o-Gram, Kyle Chandler only appears in one scene as a living person. But that’s all he needs to make his presence known through the rest of the episode. Chandler has done incredible work on this show to make Hal an arrogant jerk who deserves a punch in the face and the most charming, charismatic man on the face of the planet. He retains both those qualities during his reunion with John, but Chandler also adds a level of sadness and regret. He knows that he messed up, but he knows that John messed up, too. He hopes that the recognition will be enough for John to extend the grace he cannot extend himself, to prove that—as he wrote about himself in his own eulogy—he mattered.

The pathos in Hal works to make the audience believe everything that Kerry says about his actions in the past six years. It also adds strength to John’s redemption story as he makes his way back to the ring. Hal may have been less worthy than John, but he’s had the bravery to try to make things right, something John’s still too scared to do. Even better, the episode doesn’t use superpowers to undo the mess that the two men made, and instead treats the ring as a standard that they both failed to uphold.

“Bad Optics” doesn’t redeem everything with the previous episode. Hal and John’s regret now doesn’t make their actions feel less out-of-character in the past. Worse, the story doesn’t do anything to address the anti-immigration theme the last episode apparently invoked. On a less pressing level, some of the choices in “Bad Optics” feel tired, especially the extortion subplot with Maggie. It’s almost like Mundy is repeating beats he covered in Ozark, and not just because we have another small-town girl with curly blond hair embarking on a life of crime. It’s an unnecessarily literal way to highlight John’s guilt.

Still, the episode goes into territory we rarely see in superhero fiction, looking at a hero’s failure. It’s hard to be mad at Lanterns for a few mistakes when it delves into unfamiliar material with such honesty and without fear.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max

Green Lantern Illuminations:

• John gives his pitch in Midway City, a major metropolis in the Michigan of the DC Universe. Midway City has been the home of Hawkman and Hawkgirl, as well as the Doom Patrol, but it makes sense for the Detroit native John Stewart to move there. The only question is this: has John, who was established as a Detroit Red Wings fan in episode three, now pull their pro hockey team, the Midway Wolverines? Or is Dylan Larkin demanding a trade in the DCU too?
  
• Speaking of Wolverines, Noah’s hat ceremony shows that he’s considering going to the University of Michigan. Canonically, the Boston-born Guy Gardner played football for Michigan, and even has a U of M sticker on his power battery.
  
• Carol Ferris is here! Traditionally, Carol is Hal’s Lois Lane, the high-powered president of the aerospace company where Hal worked as a test pilot. Even more than most superhero couples, Hal and Carol have a habit of falling apart and coming together, a problem made worse when Carol became Star Sapphire, a superpowered villain committed to earning Hal’s love by dominating him. These days in the comics, Star Sapphire has become a hero and she and Hal are pretty steady in their romance… for now.