SPOILER WARNING: This article discusses the entire first season of HBO's LANTERNS, including the identity of Hal Jordan's killer and the events of the season finale.

What LANTERNS Promised

There was a moment, early in LANTERNS, when it seemed DC Studios had figured out how to put Green Lantern on television without trying to reproduce the expensive cosmic spectacle that helped sink the character's previous live-action outing. The solution was surprisingly simple: don't start in space.

Instead, LANTERNS brought the Green Lantern Corps down to Earth and turned Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) into mismatched detectives investigating an extraterrestrial mystery in Nebraska. The approach was less STAR WARS than TRUE DETECTIVE with power rings, and at first the odd combination worked. The rings were often used for mundane purposes, costumes were not constantly on display, and even flight became something John had to earn rather than an effortless superhero prerequisite.

More importantly, Chandler and Pierre gave the series two men worth watching. Hal was older, worn down and increasingly aware that the Corps might be preparing to replace him. John was a former Marine sniper and artist who had learned enough about institutions to question their orders before surrendering his judgment to them. Their friction gave the mystery energy because neither man was entirely wrong about the other.

But Green Lantern comes with something larger than iconography. Hal Jordan and John Stewart are heroes whom generations of readers revere as heroes. Their flaws matter because they exist beside courage, responsibility, sacrifice and integrity. A successful reinvention can challenge those virtues, test them and even expose failures beneath them, but eventually it has to show us why these men deserve the rings and the reverence.

That is where LANTERNS ultimately runs into trouble. By the end of eight episodes, the series has reconsidered or inverted nearly everything that traditionally makes Hal and John heroic. Hal's courage is reframed as pathology. John's integrity culminates in suppressing the truth about a murder. The show gives both men complicated psychology, excellent performances and provocative choices, but complication is not the same thing as heroism.

The problem, then, is not that LANTERNS asks difficult questions about Green Lantern mythology. The problem is what it finally decides constitutes a heroic answer. To understand that, we have to begin with the man who once wore the ring -- and with a franchise that has learned before how fiercely readers react when Hal Jordan stops being Hal Jordan.

What Happened to Hal Jordan?

Killing Hal Jordan in the opening episode was certainly one way for LANTERNS to announce that nobody's comic-book collection was going to be treated as sacred text. The dual timeline made the decision even more provocative: most of the story unfolded in 2016 while flashes to 2026 reminded us that whatever happened between Hal and John, it ended with Earth's legendary Green Lantern dead in high-school bleachers from a bullet to the head.

This Hal is not merely an older interpretation of the character. LANTERNS systematically reconstructs him. Confidence shades into arrogance; resistance to authority becomes a conviction that his judgment supersedes everyone else's; and his famous fearlessness is eventually given an explanation that changes the very premise on which Hal Jordan became Green Lantern.

Traditionally, Martin Jordan's death in a test-flight crash is one of the defining events of Hal's life. Hal witnesses his father's death, grows up idolizing him and follows him into the cockpit. LANTERNS instead reveals that Martin deliberately crashed the aircraft and that suicide existed in the family before him. The Halogram eventually concludes that Hal was not fearless because he was brave; something inside him was broken.

That is a powerful dramatic idea, but it is an extraordinary thing to do to Green Lantern. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage requires fear, because there is nothing courageous about doing something that does not frighten you. The traditional Hal Jordan possesses the ability to overcome great fear. LANTERNS instead suggests that the heroic trait for which he was selected may have been an inherited psychological wound.

There is history here that Green Lantern fandom remembers. In 1994's EMERALD TWILIGHT, DC transformed Hal into Parallax after the destruction of Coast City, turning one of its longstanding heroes into a villain and replacing him with Kyle Rayner. The backlash became organized enough to produce H.E.A.T. -- Hal's Emerald Advancement Team, originally remembered by creators as Hal's Emerald Attack Team -- a fan campaign seeking Hal's restoration and redemption.

A decade later, Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver's GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH did not simply erase the intervening stories. It recontextualized them. DC's own retrospective describes the revelation plainly: Parallax was a cosmic fear entity that had possessed Hal, clearing the way for his redemption and the celebrated Green Lantern run that followed. Johns preserved the catastrophe while restoring the premise that Hal Jordan was fundamentally a hero.

That history does not mean adaptations must leave Hal untouched. It does mean DC has already discovered how sensitive the distinction is between deepening a hero and dismantling the quality that made him heroic. LANTERNS knowingly walks back onto that ground.

Kyle Chandler is the strongest argument for accepting the experiment. He makes Hal abrasive without making him impossible to like, wounded without constantly advertising the wound, and intermittently heroic despite a story increasingly interested in explaining heroism as another symptom of damage. The Halogram is especially effective because he is a preserved version of Hal forced to discover what the man he represents eventually became.

The tragedy is that the older Hal already contained everything the series needed. Here was a man who had been Earth's Green Lantern for decades and had begun to confuse experience with infallibility. He concealed information, made disastrous decisions, suffered consequences and eventually tried to repair some of the damage. That is a character arc without requiring courage itself to be diagnosed away.

And when the final moment comes, Hal does something recognizably heroic. He tries to protect Kerry Kane and her son Noah. Whatever else LANTERNS has done to Hal Jordan, his last intention is not domination, punishment or self-preservation. It is rescue. Kerry shoots him in the head.

John Stewart and the Question of Programming

If Hal spends LANTERNS discovering that the story he told himself about his past was incomplete, John Stewart spends the season deciding whether his past gets to determine his future. His father shaped him through rigid expectations; the Marines shaped him again; then the Guardians recruit him into another institution built around uniforms, weapons, sectors and orders.

That parallel becomes explicit once the Manhunters enter the story. Noah is not merely connected to them; he is one. The revelation turns an alien conspiracy into a question about programming. If Noah was created as a Manhunter, must he become what Manhunters were designed to be? Can upbringing overcome purpose? Does someone deserve punishment for a catastrophe he has not yet chosen to cause?

John's sympathy for Noah is therefore one of the season's most defensible moral positions. Noah has lived as a human being and has not chosen the circumstances of his creation. The Guardians' own history hardly inspires unquestioning trust, and John is right to resist the proposition that Noah should be condemned simply for existing.

But LANTERNS also wants John to represent moral independence. Showrunner Chris Mundy said after the finale that John's path was deliberately abnormal: the ring did not simply choose him, and John ultimately decides to become a Lantern on his own terms. TheWrap's finale interview makes that intent explicit.

That should be fertile territory for John Stewart, because John is not revered merely for wearing the same uniform Hal wore. He is revered as a hero in his own right. Discipline, responsibility and integrity are central to the appeal of the character. Rejecting authority can be part of integrity, but it is not synonymous with integrity. Moral independence means accepting responsibility for what happens after you decide your judgment is superior to the rules.

John will make precisely that decision. Before he does, he has to solve the murder that has hung over the entire season.

Who Killed Hal Jordan?

For most of LANTERNS, the answer appears to be Noah. That possibility is horrifying because it would confirm everyone's worst assumptions about him: perhaps the human childhood was only camouflage over Manhunter programming. Noah eventually confesses, seemingly resolving both the murder mystery and the nature-versus-nurture question in the bleakest possible way.

Except Noah did not kill Hal. Kerry did.

The actual scene matters because Hal is not threatening Noah. He understands what the boy is and what might happen if the Guardians come for him, but his solution is protection. He offers to get Kerry and Noah somewhere safe, even off-world if necessary. Kerry, terrified that the man she loves will take her son away, hears a threat where Hal is offering escape.

She produces the gun. Hal does not attack her, threaten Noah or summon a construct against her. He tells Kerry that he loves her, and she shoots him.

The scene works as tragedy because Kelly Macdonald does not play Kerry as a calculating murderer. She is a terrified mother whose perception has narrowed until Hal and the danger she fears for Noah become indistinguishable. Understanding that state is important. Excusing the act is something else, and for a moment the finale seems to understand the difference.

Ten years later, Kerry is prepared to turn herself in. She has lived with what she did, understands that Hal was trying to help and knows that Noah has carried responsibility for a killing he did not commit. Her decision to confess could have completed a tragic arc in which fear explains an irreversible act without erasing responsibility for it.

John talks her out of it.

His reasoning is that Hal would not have wanted Kerry punished and that exposing the truth would destroy what Hal died trying to protect. It is emotionally comprehensible. It is also an astonishing moral decision to make on behalf of a dead man. Hal cannot say what he would have wanted. Kerry is ready to accept legal responsibility, and John persuades her not to. The truth about the murder therefore remains hidden because John Stewart decides that compassion entitles him to decide the matter for everyone else.

Noah is protected. Kerry is protected. The Guardians avoid another complication. Hal is the only person in the equation who receives no choice.

This is where the series' claim to be creating a heroic John Stewart becomes difficult to accept. John does not merely forgive Kerry personally. He appoints himself judge of whether she should ever face judgment at all. A hero can show mercy, but mercy is not the same as concealing a killing and preventing a willing perpetrator from taking responsibility.

When Understanding Becomes Absolution

There is an uncomfortable real-world echo in the way LANTERNS asks us to understand Kerry's killing of Hal Jordan, and the comparison requires precision.

In January 2023, Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy killed her three young children. At her 2026 trial, her attorneys argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and therefore lacked criminal responsibility. Prosecutors presented expert testimony disputing that conclusion and argued that she remained legally responsible. The jury deadlocked and a mistrial was declared on September 4.

On October 1, Judge William Sullivan rejected a defense request to enter a finding of not guilty, ruling that prosecutors had presented sufficient evidence for a jury to find Clancy criminally responsible. Reuters reported that several jurors later said publicly that all but one juror had been prepared to find her not guilty by reason of insanity. Prosecutors had not yet announced their final retrial plan at the time of this writing.

Kerry Kane is not Lindsay Clancy. LANTERNS does not diagnose Kerry with postpartum psychosis, Noah is not an infant, the victims and circumstances are radically different, and a television drama should not be used to diagnose a fictional character with a real psychiatric disorder.

The echo lies instead in the argument about culpability. Both stories force an audience to consider how a mother's mental and emotional state while focused desperately on her child changes the judgment of a terrible act. In Clancy's case that question belongs to a legal process in which defense experts and prosecution experts offered competing conclusions about criminal responsibility.

LANTERNS avoids that process entirely.

The creators make clear that Kerry's maternal motivation is intentional. The finale frames her act through terror for Noah, and the series asks the audience to see the killing through that fear. That is legitimate dramatic territory. Fear can explain terrible behavior. Trauma can explain it. Mental illness can explain behavior in circumstances where mental illness is actually present. Love and a desperate desire to protect a child can explain behavior as well.

But explanation and exoneration are not synonyms.

The most troubling moment is therefore not Kerry pulling the trigger. The shooting is a tragedy produced by panic and catastrophic misjudgment. The troubling moment comes a decade later, when that panic is gone, Kerry knows what happened and decides to accept responsibility -- only for John to tell her she should not.

A courtroom can hear evidence about state of mind, culpability, mitigation and punishment. John prevents any of that from happening because he believes he already knows the morally correct result. That may be intended as grace. Aaron Pierre described John in the finale as becoming able to extend empathy and understanding to experiences he does not personally share. The creators and cast explicitly frame the choice that way.

Yet compassion and responsibility are not opposites. We can understand why someone acted from fear rather than malice and still believe that person must answer for what the fear caused. Kerry herself reaches that conclusion before John overrides it.

That is why the comparison to the Clancy case is worth making carefully. The real case has consumed weeks of testimony, competing experts, a deadlocked jury and continuing judicial proceedings over the difficult boundary between explanation and criminal responsibility. LANTERNS reaches its answer much more easily: a mother was terrified for her child, killed someone she loved, regretted it, and a good man decided she had suffered enough.

The show may call that compassion. But if John Stewart is supposed to emerge as a hero defined by integrity, the decision leaves a harder question behind. Hal Jordan is still dead. Kerry Kane still killed him. Understanding why changes the moral context. It does not change either fact.

A Green Lantern on His Own Terms

By the end of LANTERNS, John Stewart knows who killed Hal, knows what Noah is and knows how much the Guardians concealed about the Manhunters. He has enough information to decide what kind of Green Lantern he intends to become, and his answer is essentially: not theirs.

There is genuine satisfaction in watching Aaron Pierre stand up to the Guardians. John refuses to surrender Noah simply because of what he was created to be, and he refuses to function as another unquestioning instrument of Oa. He is no longer Hal's understudy.

But even the series' creators emphasize that he is no longer exactly a conventional Green Lantern either. Tom King said after the finale that John is “not 100% a Green Lantern anymore,” because his new lantern contains yellow fear energy as well as green willpower. John also discards the traditional oath for one built around embracing fear and choosing the fight himself. TheWrap's account of the finale press conference presents these changes as the culmination of John's unique path.

As psychology, the idea has merit. Fear does not have to be denied in order to be overcome. But Green Lantern already had a concept for that: courage. The classic mythology does not require a Lantern to be literally without fear; it celebrates the will to act despite fear. Folding fear into the power source changes the symbolism rather than merely clarifying it.

Then John finally flies, the ability the season has withheld from him. The image is staged as liberation: John Stewart has stopped trying to become someone else's Green Lantern and has become his own.

I wish the season had convinced me that he had also become the hero John Stewart is supposed to be.

That is ultimately the problem LANTERNS creates for both of its central characters. Hal Jordan and John Stewart are not revered because they are psychologically uncomplicated men who always obey the Guardians. They are revered because, at their best, they choose courage and responsibility when those things are difficult.

LANTERNS denies Hal that foundation by telling us his celebrated fearlessness was evidence that something in him was broken. It then denies John his defining integrity at the moment it believes it is proving that integrity, because his great act of independent moral judgment includes concealing the identity of Hal Jordan's killer and persuading her not to accept responsibility.

The irony becomes sharper when viewed against Green Lantern history. DC once tried to move beyond Hal by turning him into Parallax. Readers objected so intensely that H.E.A.T. became an early organized internet-era fan campaign, and GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH eventually restored Hal not by pretending EMERALD TWILIGHT never happened, but by restoring the heroic core that readers believed had been violated.

LANTERNS is free to challenge that history. Adaptations should not be museum exhibits. An older Hal can fail. John can distrust the Corps. The Guardians can be wrong. The oath can even change. None of those choices, individually, disqualifies the series from telling a worthwhile Green Lantern story.

But deconstruction carries an obligation of its own. If you take a hero apart, there should be something recognizably heroic when you put him back together.

For Hal, LANTERNS never gets the chance. He dies trying to protect Kerry and Noah, and the series leaves his murder buried beneath a compassionate lie. For John, the show insists the reconstruction is complete: he rejects the Guardians, takes up a hybrid power, writes his own oath and rises into the sky.

The creators clearly see that flight as the moment John Stewart becomes Green Lantern on his own terms. I see an excellent actor playing a fascinating, conflicted man whose final moral choice keeps him from becoming the hero the series says he is.

There is plenty here worth admiring. Chandler is compelling even when the script is dismantling Hal around him. Pierre gives John gravity, intelligence and vulnerability. Macdonald makes Kerry's remorse believable. The mystery keeps finding new dimensions instead of merely withholding its answer, and LANTERNS deserves credit for taking risks rather than embalming its source material.

But risk is not automatically insight, and changing mythology is not automatically deepening it. The series spends eight episodes asking whether institutions, programming, trauma and inherited expectations determine who a person becomes. Its own answer should therefore depend on choice.

Hal's final choice is to protect Kerry and Noah. Kerry's choice is to kill him. Ten years later, her choice is to tell the truth. John's choice is to stop her.

The Guardians are rejected, the old distinctions between fear and will are blurred, the oath is rewritten, and the new Lantern finally takes flight. It is staged as liberation and the birth of a new kind of hero.

But Green Lantern already had two heroes.

Their names were Hal Jordan and John Stewart. LANTERNS gives us compelling versions of both men, but by the time the first season ends, neither is permitted to be the hero readers have spent decades believing him to be. Hal is dismantled and buried. John flies away carrying the lie.

For a series so determined to redefine what Green Lantern means, that is the part I find hardest to forgive.