Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, finally accepting the ring. (Credit: John Johnson/HBO Max)
Created by:
Tom King, Damon Lindelof, Chris Mundy
Starring:
Aaron Pierre, Kyle Chandler, Kelly Macdonald, Jasmine Cephas Jones, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Poorna Jagnnathan, Garret Dillahunt, Jason Ritter, Laura Linney, Paul Ben-Victor, Ulrich Thomsen, Shea Prichard, Jared Grimes, Romeo Brown, Hannah Christine Shetler
Synopsis (IMDb):
Lanterns follows new recruit John Stewart and Lantern legend Hal Jordan, two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, Earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.
Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart. (Credit: John Johnson/HBO Max)
Monique’s review (SOME SPOILERS):
To be fair to Lanterns, I watched the entire season before writing my official review, even though I was not really loving it after Episode 3.
In short, I didn’t like Lanterns, even though there was a lot I appreciated about the series. I liked the idea of creating a grounded superhero series a la Watchmen (Lindelof’s other HBO/DC series). I really liked Pierre and Chandler as John Stewart and Hal Jordan. I appreciated the series wanting to keep James Gunn’s focus on a character-focused superhero universe front and center. But I feel like the producers were way too focused on grounding Green Lantern on Earth when the biggest draw of Green Lantern comic books is the intergalactic stuff. Even if Lanterns was going to take place on Earth, we could have a bit more excitement about space.
My main gripes are:
Weird pacing:
The series is badly paced. What kept grinding my gears is how often the writers would stop the story just to keep the mystery going. Such as Episode 3 being entirely set in the past. Granted, it’s John’s backstory (more on that later), but it was irritating to me for us to start getting going somewhat into the mystery behind Rushville only for the series to stop and reverse course back to the ’90s for an entire hour. Hal’s backstory was told in about five to 10 minutes, and it was full of the pathos we needed to understand Hal as a character. I’m not saying that John’s backstory had to be that short, but it definitely needed to earn its hour more than it did with me.
The pacing of the story itself is just one aspect. The series’ entire set up is frustrating. The series is set up into two mysteries–the first being who is the Manhunter ruling over Rushville; the second being what is in the strange space box Hal put in a storage unit. However, this is supposed to be a continuous story of how John and Hal came to be and what paths their trajectories will take. Why aren’t the two mysteries just part of a seamless story? Why is the series set up into two halves, and then those halves are disjointedly told?
Episode 3:
I do not like Episode 3. I will not mince words about it. Yes, I know the episode is written by a Black writer (a former child star from Kenan and Kel, no less, so I want to like this episode!). But just because something is written by a Black writer doesn’t make it 1) applicable to every Black experience and 2) doesn’t make it good. In other words, just because I’m Black, and just because the show is written with a partially-Black writers’ room, doesn’t mean I have to like it.
I think that the episode undercuts its own argument about being Black in America by having Black parents inflict abuse on their son. Talking about how Black people feel like they must be twice as good to be treated with half of the respect they deserve is one thing. It’s a true statement and something that can be discussed in a show like Lanterns. However, that discussion gets muddled when John’s mom Bernadette (Cephas Jones) wants to train her baby as a revenge plot on the Guardians since the Guardians scared her husband John Sr (Nicholson).
J. Alphonse Nicholson as John Sr. and Jasmine Cephas Jones as Bernadette. (Credit: John Johnson/HBO Max)
She didn’t even believe John Sr. at first about the Guardians and threatened to shoot him for his unhinged behavior. So why does she all of a sudden care about John Jr. becoming a Green Lantern? Bernadette is, in my mind, simply a domineering, bullying stage mom and used Black pain as her reasoning to inflict harm for her own egoic gain. John Sr., on the other hand, is a codependent partner whose only retort to John’s questions or concerns is, “Go tell your mom.” He’s just as ineffective as a parent, but his abuse comes from abdicating his responsibilities and not standing up for his son against his wife.
This is not a Watchmen-level exploration of Blackness from the point of view of superheroism. For me, Episode 3 is clunkily written at best, bordering on irresponsible at worst.
The “mysteries”:
I don’t think the mysteries that define Lanterns stand up on their own merits. For the mysteries to work, the show keeps stopping its story to create intrigue and drag out the drama. But a mystery should inherently have enough drama to sustain itself over the course of several episodes. If a show has to literally halt the storyline each time it gets going, there’s not enough to say.
The best example for me is when the Halogram and John are trying to break into Hal’s otherworldly safe (a literal “mystery box” in a “mystery box” series). All John needs is for Halogram to say something in Hal’s voice. But Halogram literally shakes his head no, indicating through charades that he wants to see the sheriff first. Why? It’s still kinda unclear to me. I guess to see if Sheriff Kerry (Macdonald) had a hand in killing him. Or maybe it was originally to see the woman Hal loved, and once he met her, he then theorized that she killed Hal. In any event, I felt that regardless of the character’s reasoning, the real reason was because the writing team needed something to pad out the story so they could keep the mystery going even longer–longer than it needed to, in my opinion.
Discussing “fear”:
This gripe goes back to Episode 3, but this occurred throughout the season. I was really annoyed with how the series treated the concept of fear.
Yes, I know the whole thing about fear in this show is that the Guardians ask their potential Green Lanterns, “Are you afraid?” and the show is trying to dissect what this question means. But those discussions are, again, muddled. There’s Bernadette talking about how Black people live afraid every day, and how the Guardians’ question is essentially racist. There’s the ongoing belief that fear needs to be trained out of a Green Lantern, or that depending on the race, a potential Green Lantern might not have immense amounts of fear. There are other injected shots of “fear is bad, fear has no place.”
But if you know anything about psychology, you know that’s not true. Fear is an evolutionary trait that keeps us alive, first of all. But fear also teaches us about our limits and our thresholds for growth. We need fear to feel courage. And how can a superhero not be afraid with what they have to face? No person alive can get rid of fear. It was annoying to have the show try to push this as a concept, and even more annoying that it didn’t make John’s come-to-Jesus moment about fear’s importance more full-throated.
To Bernadette’s credit, she halfway comes to this point, but it’s only decades after abusing her son and the abusive ideas of fear she’s taught him are now firmly baked in. You can’t un-teach that with just one line of dialogue.
What I would have liked is for John to come to some conclusions about fear himself, and then I would have liked for him to hash it out with Bernadette (because she deserves it). We needed a scene with them breaking down the trauma she inflicted upon him regarding fear. Because she wanted him to not be afraid (which is impossible), she turned him into a pseudo-sociopath with no sense of personal agency until much later in life. Suffice it to say, it’s frustrating that the first person to talk semi-honestly about fear is Sinestro (Thomsen), and it’s only because he’s trying to manipulate John.
Aaron Pierre as John Stewart. (Credit: John Johnson/HBO Max)
Overall, Lanterns just frustrated me weekly. I wanted it to turn a corner, but all it did was try my patience. It’s a shame, because I do feel like there are good bones to this show. It just needed more fleshing out, a stronger story, a much stronger whodunnit factor, and, yes, just one time with Pierre in the Green Lantern suit.
