I loved Lanterns. Just wanted to get that out of the way.
A quick scouring of the internet reveals this is by no means a universally held opinion. I see a whole bunch of posts accusing it of “slopmaxxing”, a phrase I have never heard of before. I find it completely the opposite. For my money, I’d say that’s that pejorative is better suited for the latter seasons of shows like The Flash or Supergirl. Lanterns, I’d argue, is an intelligent, thoughtfully constructed drama. But you know, to each their own I guess.
Full on Spoilers ahead
If you don’t know, Lanterns is the new DC Universe streaming series about one of my favorite superheroes, Green Lantern, and two of my favorite iterations of that hero, Hal Jordan and John Stewart.
Hal Jordan of course made his way into live action before, with Ryan Reynolds playing the guy in the ill-conceived, ill-fated 2011 movie, but the less said about that the better. This time around, rather than badly paced, thinly-characterised, wannabe blockbuster, mess of a movie, Hal Jordan finds himself headlining an eight episode neo-noir sci-fi Western superhero murder mystery, in which the victim is no less than Hal Jordan himself!
Now, if that mash-up of genres gives you the feeling that Lanterns doesn’t really know what type of show it wants to be, let me dissuade you of that misunderstanding. Because it’s actually an incredibly self-assured, confident piece of storytelling that delivers its plot with deftness and its characters with depth.
The show starts off by introducing us to John Stewart, a former Marine whose father is also a military man. We meet them when John is a kid and the father comes home from work only to take John outside and shoot an apple off of his head. With a gun. We don’t find out why he’s doing this for a couple of episodes but when we do, it’s even more messed up and outrageous than you already think.
Anyway, the series then jumps ahead to 2016, with John as an adult where he is now played by Aaron Pierre and is in training to be a Green Lantern, under the tutelage of the current earth ring bearer, Hal Jordan, played by Kyle Chandler.
(Green Lanterns, if you don’t know, are integalactic police officers who are equipped with an incredibly powerful ring that allows them to fly, form bullet-proof shields, and create any other construct that their willpower can sustain).
Anyway, the two have a contentious relationship to say the least, but no sooner do we get a sense of that than Hal’s attention focuses on something happening in a little town called Rushville, Nebraska. That turns out to be the murder of several spectators at a high school football team, whom Hal deduces were actually aliens. There they meet the town’s sheriff, Kerry Kane (played by Kelly Macdonald), who is the show’s third central character. Rushville itself turns out to be right nearby where Hal originally received his ring.
What does that have to do with the murder of these aliens? What secrets is Rushville holding, and is Sheriff Kane on their side or not? And why does Hal Jordan show up in this town ten years in the future, only to get a bullet into his head? These are the mysteries that the series proceeds to unpack. Along the way we learn more about Hal and John and what makes them tick, and find out why John is being trained at all, apparently not as Hal’s backup, but as his replacement.
Like the best of shows like this, the overall questions it raises are compelling, and the scenes we get along the way are in themselves interesting. Not every show pulls this off. For my money, something like Silo has interesting questions but largely fails to craft interesting scenes that sustain the process of exploring them. Lanterns, I’m happy to say, does both, which means I was always enjoying what I was seeing, and I always wanted to jump to the next episode as soon as the current one ended.
Lots of credit must be given to the series’ smart writing, which unfolds its plot and revelations in a very effective way. But the delivery of the writing is down mainly to the two lead performances, which are both excellent.
Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan is, I think, a real accomplishment. The actor manages to take an incredibly obnoxious man and turn him into an immensely likeable and interesting character. It’s a colorful performance with lots of shades, and I found myself distinctly missing the guy once the season was over (all the more so since by all appearances he is dead and gone from the story). It’s been rare that I really feel like I couldn’t get enough of a character, but that is true here.
Aaron Pierre also is great as John Stewart. In many ways, he’s the opposite of Hal–a disciplined soldier instead of a boisterous wildcard. It’s intentional, I believe, that he is a more honorable man than Hal Jordan, but a less likeable character. Or maybe it’s that he hides his unlikeable qualities behind an honorable facade. In any case, none of that prevents him from being an interesting figure on screen, which is the most important thing.
Somewhat surprisingly, the show hits something of a climax in its 5th episode, where pretty much all of the 2016-set portions of the story are wrapped up. We find out exactly what’s going on in Rushville and why the aliens were killed at the football game, and we see all the drama between Hal and John play out and reach what seems like a conclusion. The only big questions that seems to remain is why Hal ends up shot and killed ten years later.
I admit I was worried about the show after that. It felt like they were basically just getting ready to tell a new story at this point, with only tenuous connections to the first one, and I was concerned that this would throw off the pacing and that this second story would be inferior to the first.
Fortunately, I was wrong, about pretty much the entirety of that impression. The second part of the series is just as smartly plotted as the first, and it even turns out that it’s still telling the same story as it picks up on plot threads that I didn’t even realize were dangling. It all builds to an ending that I found affecting and satisfying.
We also got a bit more of Ulrich Thomsen as Sinestro, which is kind of cool.
One criticism of Lanterns is that it is a “Green Lantern” series with a minimal amount of actual Green Lanterning going on. People do use the ring and they do fly and make constructs and such, but it’s true to say that it happens a lot less frequently than one might think. So it’s a valid point to bring up, and is presumably born out of budget limitations.
But I have to say that I just don’t care. And the reason I don’t care is because of all the positive qualities I’ve mentioned above. I’ve seen superhero shows that depicted the characters’ superpowers a lot more, but which were way harder to sit through because of the inability to pull off the essential things: story, pacing and characters. And Lanterns does in fact show the characters using the ring, it just does so selectively. So it gets a big pass from me on that front.
So I liked the show a lot, even though Lanterns doesn’t look precisely how I view the world of Green Lantern as I know him from my comic books. The uniforms, the look of the constructs, the way the Guardians are shown or the Manhunters are used–none of it adheres to my mental picture of that universe. Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan doesn’t behave like I think Hal Jordan is “supposed” to behave, and John Stewart is driven by passions that don’t fit the way I imagine the character. And everyone swears way more than I’d like.
But I still like Lanterns, and I don’t like it in spite of the ways it doesn’t fit my mental idea of Green Lantern–I like it because it’s different. It’s different, but it’s also compelling and it’s well-acted and it’s well-thought through, and that is what I want from a show. Any show. That is way more important than whether something adheres perfectly to how the characters or concepts or shown in the comics (or in the particularly comics I like the best, since you can’t even say the comic book depictions are consistent).
I felt the same way with Superman last year. I realize that for the most part, I don’t want things to look exactly like my imagination. I want things to look somebody else’s imagination, like from an actual writer or storyteller. And then I want those things to challenge and expand my imagination, so that my picture isn’t the same anymore after seeing it.
And Lanterns pulled that off, and it both did a good job doing that and did a good while doing that. And I hope we get to see more of it, and I hope it’s just as good, even if Kyle Chandler doesn’t end up in it anymore.
