Lanterns continues to baffle and confound me. There are so many things I enjoy about it and so many things that make me question what it is they’ve been trying to do all season, and who this show is actually for. Tonight’s penultimate episode of the season was perhaps my favorite of the bunch, but it sits awkwardly with the first half of the show.

On the one hand this show seems to be written for only the most hardcore Green Lantern fans. Basically everything surrounding Sinestro is played this way. Sinestro’s first introduction was a cliffhanger. He’s talked about on several occasions in very weighty terms. It’s as though we’re all supposed to really understand what a big deal this guy is without really having that explained in the show itself. Tonight’s episode ended with another Sinestro reveal, this time on the planet that Hal (Kyle Chandler) – or, rather, Hal-o-gram – and John (Aaron Pierre) portal themselves to, only to discover that Sinestro is trapped there.

At the same time, actual hardcore Green Lantern fans are all a little puzzled by some of the big changes from the comics, especially when it comes to how the ring selects a Lantern and the whole “are you afraid?” stuff. So I’m really not sure who the audience is supposed to be.

The two timelines and buddy cop framing also makes this a True Detective -ish drama, whereas many hardcore Green Lantern fans would prefer something more similar to the comics, with Green Lantern adventures on other planets (though we do finally get that in tonight’s episode) and more powers and special effects in play.

I bring all this up because I think the show has been largely a miss (even as it finally finds its stride) because A) it never really figured out who its audience was and what kind of show it was trying to be and B) its pacing and plotting are really weird and all over the place. It wasn’t until last week that I really started to feel at all invested in these characters, despite the strong performances all around.

Really, it hasn’t been until John and the Hal-o-gram teamed up that this has actually felt like a buddy cop drama, and it wasn’t until Hal’s murder that this felt like a decent mystery. And now we only have one episode left and no renewal (yet, at least) for a second season.

This episode had lots of great moments. The flashback with young Hal and his dad Martin Jordan, who seems like such a loving, awesome dad. We’ve heard up until now that he died in an accident as a test pilot and that this made Hal fearless. Later in the episode, Hal-o-gram reveals that his father committed suicide, just like his grandfather before him. Far from making Hal fearless, it’s haunted him ever since.

This is the titular “Jordan Boys Legacy” and Hal-o-gram wonders if he might have killed himself. I think this is unlikely for two reasons: First, the gunshot wound does not look self-inflicted (the forehead isn’t a common entry point in suicides). Second, at the very end of the episode, young Hal picks up the baseball. I think this symbolizes his determination to live, to hold on rather than to let go. And there was no suicide note in his safe like there was in his dad’s.

Rather, the contents of Hal’s safe included a poncho, a gun and an Einstein-Rosen bridge leading to another world. It’s basically a glob of black goop that stretches out into a hole that you can portal yourself through. Curiouser and curiouser.

(This reminded me so much of the old Looney Tunes cartoon “The Hole Idea” that I had to go back and watch some clips from it .)

Hal and John go to the safe after paying a quick visit to Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) who acts quite surprised to see Hal, and frankly a little frightened. Maybe that’s an honest reaction, but Hal-o-gram thinks she’s guilty. Maybe she loved him, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t kill him he tells John.

But why would Kerry kill Hal? There’s only one explanation that makes any sense: Her son, Noah, is a Manhunter. There’s something wrong about the kid, for one thing. Not only did Zoe pay particular attention to him before everything went down in 2016, he’s grown up to be wildly popular with ambitions to become president. Not only is he a football quarterback star, the simple choice about which college he’s going to attend takes center stage at a school assembly and merits a massive party.

Only someone with extraordinary charisma would inspire this kind of collective admiration and excitement. This isn’t the NFL drafting him right out of high school, which I could see rallying a small town. It’s just a college choice. The speech he gives, telling everyone that the town needs something to celebrate, so he’s going to focus on the game and not his future education for the moment, is too slick. He didn’t get this from either of his "parents." (I use scare quotes because I don’t think Kelly or Billy are his real parents at all. Zoe created Noah and gave him to Kelly to raise).

If Hal discovered this, Kelly would have every reason to kill him. So would Noah, of course. Now the question is whether Hal is truly dead or if that was a clone of Hal. Or if, perhaps, Hal-o-gram will be able to become a real boy, just like Pinocchio, thanks to John’s mega-ring powers.

Catharsis, But Was It Earned?

There are many great moments between Hal-o-gram and John in this episode. When John summons Hal without the ring, his former mentor is incredibly impressed. He heaps praise onto John and John responds by laughing and saying it’s weird, because Hal never praised him or said anything nice to him at all while he was alive.

It’s possible that Hal didn’t because he knew John was there to replace him against his will, but it’s also a failure of the show. I’ve brought up the Marvel show Wonder Man before when talking about Lanterns . That’s also a “buddy” movie, though it’s about actors rather than space cops.

In that show, Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Matten II) befriends veteran actor Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) after losing an acting gig. Simon is a struggling actor who is notoriously hard to work with, but Trevor (who we’ve met before in Iron Man 3 as the Mandarin, a fake terrorist). In any case, they form a bond and both audition for the film Wonder Man . I won’t spoil what else is going on, but their friendship is really lovely and charming, though we in the audience know that both men are keeping secrets from the other.

This leads, eventually, to conflict and broken trust, and it’s honestly quite painful to watch because we want them to be friends so badly.

I bring all this up because Lanterns has put the cart before the horse. We never really got any time with John and Hal as friends. They didn’t develop their relationship over the first few episodes and then have a big falling out that they could later bounce back from and reconcile. They just always disliked one another.

Since the show’s creators and HBO have likened this to True Detective , we’ll use that as another example. Rust (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty (Woody Harrelson) – the actors are once again starring across from each other in Apple TV’s Brothers , which I reviewed here – are an odd couple. They are very different. They have wildly different values and ways of looking at the world. Rust is a pessimist and a nihilist in many ways, driven both by his deep cynicism with humanity and a contradictory desire to protect his fellow humans (he tells Marty the world needs bad men like them to keep the other bad men at bay).

Marty, on the other hand, isn’t much of a philosopher at all. Insofar as he has a guiding principle, it’s essentially a pretty boilerplate social conservatism: Family, religion, a man and a woman each have their place, rules and order matter. Of course, Marty is also a hypocrite who cheats on his wife and drinks to excess and neglects his family and uses violence to solve his problems. Rust may not be a hypocrite in the same sense, but his actions repeatedly betray the nihilism he professes.

In any case, the point is, these two men do not get along well, but they work well together and they make huge strides through the first half of the season toward solving the case. Then they have a major falling out and it isn’t until years later that they come back into one another’s orbits, take up the case again, and eventually reconcile in the process. This trajectory wouldn’t have worked if they simply hated one another the whole time. They needed that in-between stage where they moved past the initial mistrust and dislike and became actual friends, going on double dates and spending some good years together.

That’s the part Lanterns just skips in its rush to get from one plot point to the next. John and Hal are just bitter and hostile toward one another from the get-go, so when they’re on a boat in a strange, dead alien planet, unloading heavy stuff to one another, and finally bonding (even if one of them is just a projection), it feels unearned to me. It’s great on its own, and Hal’s revelation about his dad is emotionally powerful, but this feels way too late in the season for this kind of bonding to occur.

Now we know that both men were royally screwed up by their parents. I’d say “by their dads” but John’s mom was just as guilty as his dad. Hal’s dad seemed like an amazing guy, but then he killed himself and left the note for his ten-year-old son to find. That’s . . . quite the heavy burden to leave for your child.

In any case, I liked all of this. This is the kind of character development I’ve wanted all season. I just wish they’d done more to give these characters a more nuanced relationship before Hal was murdered.

So What’s Up With Sinestro?

The episode ends with Sinestro ambushing Hal and John on the dead planet – the planet the alien Antaan and his assassins were from – after they take Hal’s boat across a creepy lake. During the boatride, John hallucinates and sees his apples in the water, then his father asking him if he’s afraid, then his own childhood self accusing him of not wanting to be the Green Lantern. He crashes into the water and is saved by Hal, though it turns out this was all a hallucination and really he was about to shoot himself when Hal tackled him and knocked the gun away.

They make it to the island and a hooded figure grabs Hal-o-gram and puts a knife to his neck, demanding the boat and to know the location of their portal. He doesn’t realize it’s not a real person he has hostage and when Hal disappears, John lands a strong right hook into Sinestro’s face. “You must be John Stewart?” Sinestro says, marking the second time an episode this season has ended with Sinestro saying “John Stewart.”

“Great arm, kid,” Hal-o-gram says approvingly, echoing what his own dad said to him many years ago after he threw a baseball. We’ve moved all the way from the two men really loathing one another to this new version of Hal being a father figure to John. But even the other Hal apparently told Kerry that he was always rooting for John, but that John kept letting him down. It’s a bit of narrative whiplash.

In any case, the questions now expand beyond who killed Hal and why (and if that was just a clone of Hal) to why Sinestro is here, specifically on this planet, and what Hal knew about his escape and whether Hal imprisoned Sinestro here or was hiding him. It’s also possible that Sinestro has been here for years and the version of Sinestro in Spazkaban was just a projection. There are so many possibilities and mysteries to tie up, and just one episode to get it all done.

What did you think of tonight’s Lanterns? Let me know on Twitter , Instagram , or Facebook . I’ll have a YouTube review up soon as well on my YouTube channel . In the meantime, here’s my review from last week :

My previous Lanterns reviews are below:

  • Read my Lanterns Episode 1 recap and review here . Watch my video review here .
  • Read my Lanterns Episode 2 recap and review here . Watch my video review here .
  • Read my Lanterns Episode 3 recap and review here . Watch my video review here .
  • Read my Lanterns Episode 4 recap and review here . Watch my video review here .
  • Read my Lanterns Episode 5 recap and review here . Watch my video review here .
  • Read my Lanterns Episode 6 recap and review here . Watch my video review here .