Lanterns: Forget Everything You Know About Green Lantern

First things first. Hi, I’m the Answer-Man and I talk about comics. Superheroes are a specialty. And while I have been away, I am still watching out for new releases. Tonight, Lantern’s S1:E1 and S1:E2 will be lovingly questioned, only slightly spoiled and sprinkled with a light vinaigrette with croutons.

The first course: Forget everything you know about Green Lantern.

Pop.

Now it will be great. Your prior knowledge of these characters is interfering with my enjoyment. Especially on social media. If you know enough to know Hal Jordan is NOT the first Green Lantern of Earth — the honor goes to Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern — if you know there are more colors in the emotional spectrum, and that those colors have their own codes of ethics and behavior, and if you know enough to know the Oan Power Ring is arguably one of the most fantastic pieces of equipment in speculative fiction, I need you to shut the hell up and let people learn.

Seriously. Let’s honor DC Comics’ return to having a multiverse without having to hide in shame about it. Yes, this is the company back in 1986 was so ashamed of its continuity and its complexity, it blew up its entire multiverse. Yeah.

This is a company that once bought characters it didn’t quite know what to do with, so it let them live on their own Earths. Keep the rights alive. Bring them over for the occasional visit. And every now and then, some talented writer would wander into the toy box and demonstrate exactly what DC had been missing.

Then they blew it up and spent the next forty years trying to correct that mistake, unsuccessfully, I might add. DC got it together in the last decade and decided multiverses are cool. Thanks, Marvel. It’s okay, DC. A multiverse isn’t anything to be ashamed of. Or proud of. Still talking to you, Marvel. It depends entirely on how you don’t use it.

So today, in the spirit of dynamic and multifaceted Hypertime, I hereby designate this Earth-HBO. Maybe it is part of the Gunn-Verse. Maybe Hypertime will eventually eat the distinction for breakfast. Doesn’t matter.

What happens here is canon here.

What Drives This Hal Jordan?

New continuity means we get a new Hal Jordan. Not cool. Not suave. Presumably still a test pilot, and it also means Hal Jordan can be a wild-eyed, beer-swilling burnout who looks like he’s just a few meters away from developing his own thousand-yard stare.

And frankly? I like this guy. Hal Jordan was always a man of relatively few words. He was driven by action. The doing mattered to Hal. Point him toward the impossible thing and he’d worry about whether it was actually impossible somewhere along the way. Becoming a Green Lantern didn’t change that.

Hard-charging Hal Jordan eventually went insane — or as insane as anybody gets in superhero comics, where subsequent writers may eventually discover that your psychotic break was caused by an ancient yellow space parasite. After the destruction of Coast City, Hal broke. In Emerald Twilight, he tore through the Green Lantern Corps, took their rings, destroyed the Central Power Battery and emerged as Parallax.

It was a dark time for Hal Jordan. But here’s the important part: Green Lantern continued. Other Lanterns had already taken the stage. Guy Gardner. John Stewart. Eventually Kyle Rayner. Earth kept producing these impossible people capable of wielding one of the most powerful technologies in the universe.

And that is where Lanterns becomes interesting. Because this show isn’t introducing us to Hal Jordan at the beginning. It is introducing us to a man who looks like he’s somewhere frighteningly close to the end.

Rude? Absolutely. To everyone except children and their mothers. He is especially rude to John Stewart, but I suspect what we’re watching is closer to hazing than genuine antipathy. In this universe, Earth already has another Green Lantern. Guy Gardner is out there ring-slinging in Metropolis with the Justice Gang, although we don’t yet know how long he’s been doing the job. We may get to find out during Lanterns. Knowing Guy, he will almost certainly have words for Hal.

But there is Hal Jordan, presumably Earth’s first Oan Green Lantern, who has apparently been doing this for about a decade. And now he’s been assigned a trainee. Normally, this wouldn’t be remarkable. Green Lanterns train other Green Lanterns. Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals of the ring, this is a profession best learned by doing. Eventually somebody has to stop explaining how to survive an alien invasion and let you survive an alien invasion.

Except John Stewart isn’t merely Hal’s trainee. He’s his replacement. The expectation appears to be that when John’s training is complete, John gets Hal’s ring. Hal Jordan gets retirement. This is a literal legacy operation.

Yeah. I can see why Hal might be a little pissed. Consider what they’re asking him to surrender.

You possess the ability to cross interstellar distances in hours. You can reach entirely different worlds. You carry an extraterrestrial database on your finger. You possess an object weighing considerably less than a pound capable of turning thought and will into motile, dynamic energy constructs bounded principally by your imagination, determination and ability to impose your will upon reality.

You can fly. You can walk between worlds. You can stand in space and look down upon planets.

And someone has just arrived to tell you it’s time to give them the ring. Never mind the job itself. Dangerous? Check. Likely to die on duty? Check. Lose more friends than you can possibly count? Check. Witness things no human being was psychologically designed to witness? Almost certainly. Those are excellent reasons to retire. They are also completely irrelevant.

Because after ten years of being a Green Lantern, what exactly does someone expect Hal Jordan to retire to? A house? A pension? Golf? Hal Jordan has seen the universe.

Nope.

I’m not giving up that ring without a fight.

Especially after everything it cost me to wear it.

What Happens When a Green Lantern Retires?

You know, I have wondered about something I rarely see addressed. The Corps has always been very good at showing us how someone becomes a Green Lantern. Selection. Training. Sector assignment. Partnership. Promotion. Death. Disgrace. Replacement.

But retirement? Almost nothing. And psychologically, retirement from the GLC should be bizarre. Consider the escalation of normality.

On Monday you’re selected because you possess extraordinary willpower. Within some relatively short period, you’re flying without a ship, breathing in space, communicating with species whose languages you’ve never encountered, accessing an interstellar database, crossing enormous distances, fighting beings capable of destroying civilizations, meeting the Guardians, and being entrusted with jurisdiction over an astronomical region of space.

Eventually that becomes Tuesday.

That’s the part superhero fiction rarely examines. Human beings normalize extraordinary circumstances remarkably quickly. After ten years, Hal doesn’t wake up thinking: I possess the most extraordinary piece of technology humanity has ever encountered.

He wakes up thinking: Where’s my ring?

And retirement means suddenly becoming subject to all the limitations everyone else considers normal. You can’t fly anymore. You can’t leave Earth. You can’t understand every language. You can’t ask your ring what something is. You can’t receive a distress signal from another planet and be standing there shortly afterward. You can’t construct whatever tool you need simply by imagining it. You can’t survive in space.

And perhaps most psychologically devastating: You know what’s out there. Everybody else gets to look at the stars and imagine. You have been there. You used to WORK there. In space. With thousands of other aliens.

That’s considerably stranger than Superman losing his powers. Superman’s abilities are intrinsic to him. Hal’s aren’t. The Corps gave a human being access to a vastly expanded mode of existence and can presumably say: Thank you for your service. Ring.

There should be an entire body of Green Lantern literature about what happens next. Some retired Lanterns should be perfectly happy. Some should become planetary leaders, teachers, diplomats, scientists, artists, or philosophers because their conception of existence has become enormous.

Others should be absolutely fucking miserable. And there should probably be something analogous to veteran culture among former Lanterns because who else could possibly understand them? There’s another systems-level consequence here:

Retired Green Lanterns are themselves strategic assets.

Even without rings, they retain knowledge of alien civilizations, technologies, vulnerabilities, political structures, navigation, languages they may have learned independently, military doctrine, Corps procedures, cosmic threats, and potentially classified Guardian information.

You don’t simply retire Hal Jordan. You have created one of the most cosmically experienced baseline humans who has ever lived and then taken away his equipment. Maybe what looks like burnout isn’t merely: I’ve been doing this too long. It could be: I know they’re about to make me small again. And John Stewart is walking beside him wearing the future in which Hal Jordan no longer gets to touch the stars.

Stop Trying to Solve the Bird

All this other speculation about how the ring works, what the green bird means, or what its relationship to John might be? For now, those things are simply part of the story as we’ve been given it. We don’t have to reach backward into continuity and point out that there was once a story where John Stewart was imbued with Green Power comparable to that of the Guardians.

Cool story, bruh. That’s probably not happening here.

We can just watch. We can note the peculiarities of the bird. We can ask whether it was trying to protect John. We can wonder why it appeared when it did and what, if anything, that means. More interestingly, we can ask why these aliens seem to know so much about Green Lantern constructs. They don’t merely know that Green Lanterns exist. They apparently understand something about the operational limitations of the technology—including how far away a Green Lantern can travel before a construct can no longer maintain its integrity.

That’s not trivia. That’s tactical. Someone has studied Green Lanterns. Which brings us to a word some of you may be hearing for the first time:

Manhunter.

If you’re somewhat familiar with the DC Universe, you already know Manhunters don’t get invited to parties, don’t have any organic friends, and are supposed to be extinct. They are nevertheless the liveliest group of extinct alien death machines I know.

For everybody else, that’s all you need to know right now. You don’t need forty years of continuity. You don’t need a wiki. You don’t need me explaining three Crises, two retcons and something Geoff Johns decided twenty years ago.

The show said Manhunter. Quiver appropriately. It is sure to be a surprise even to the diehards. Meanwhile, put a pin in it. We’ll come back when Lanterns decides we need to know more.

Why Are They Walking Everywhere?

And if I have to hear one more person ask: “Why are they walking everywhere? They’re Green Lanterns! They can fly across worlds!”

Yes. And then they land on them. And walk to wherever the thing that brought them there happened. What exactly do you think Green Lanterns do? Hover ominously three feet above witnesses while taking statements? These are investigators. More importantly, think about the kind of event that requires a Green Lantern in the first place.

Imagine what kind of crime must be occurring before somebody decides their own police aren’t sufficient. Their government isn’t sufficient. Their military isn’t sufficient. Their secret police isn’t sufficient. Their secret police’s secret police aren’t up to the task. Someone needs to call an interstellar police agency.

That’s the threat environment in which a Green Lantern works. You may be investigating something capable of destroying a city. You may encounter something capable of ravaging an entire world.

You may discover that the crime you’re investigating is merely the visible edge of something happening across several star systems. And depending upon where you are when you discover it, your nearest meaningful backup may be light-years away.

That’s the job.

Green Lantern stories sometimes obscure this because we’re accustomed to seeing Hal Jordan standing next to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the rest of the Justice League. That’s not the normal operating environment of the Green Lantern Corps.

The normal operating environment is: You. Your ring. Your judgment. Whatever the hell is happening on this planet. Good luck.

Take away the cosmic spectacle and suddenly we’re forced to notice what the Corps actually hired these people to do. Not fly. Not make giant boxing gloves. Not shoot green beams. Make decisions when nobody more qualified is coming. The ring gives you extraordinary agency.

The job asks whether you can be trusted with it while you’re alone.

Meanwhile, What the Hell Is Wrong With This Town?

Then there are the Macons. William “Will” Macon has a ranch. This guy is creepy and the actor always finds himself in these roles where I have to wonder is he the good guy or the bad guy. Yeah. He is giving me that vibe here.

Calling his base of operations a ranch is perhaps technically accurate in the same way that calling NORAD an office building is technically accurate.

Will has armed men. Firing ranges. Guard towers. Automatic weapons. Alien-detection technology sophisticated enough to get Hal Jordan’s attention. And apparently enough money behind the operation that Will isn’t even the actual owner. He’s merely the caretaker for some mysterious benefactor protected by an NDA.

Perfectly normal Nebraska ranch stuff. His wife is Zoe Macon, whom John has already met under circumstances that become considerably more awkward once he discovers she is married to Will. Their son Billy is married to Sheriff Kerry Kane. They have a child. Everybody appears to know everybody. Everybody appears to know considerably more than they’re saying.

I don’t like this town.

Will, meanwhile, believes aliens have colonized Earth before and may be preparing to do it again. And here’s where Lanterns gets interesting, because underneath all the militia nonsense is a question worth considering. What happens if he’s right?

Not necessarily about these aliens. Not necessarily about his mysterious benefactor. And certainly not about whatever ideology Will has constructed around his fears.

Just the basic proposition: What would extraterrestrial colonization actually mean for Earth? Human history gives us some unpleasant examples of what happens when civilizations operating at radically different technological levels collide. The technologically disadvantaged population doesn’t generally have a good afternoon. Now increase that technological disparity until one civilization crosses interstellar distances while the other is still arguing about whether to go ahead with Friday night’s football game.

That’s not first contact. That’s an existential vulnerability. Lanterns has quietly placed that possibility underneath everything happening in Rushville.

Which brings us back to Will Macon. Maybe he’s a paranoid asshole. Maybe he’s a dangerous paranoid asshole. Maybe somebody has deliberately cultivated his paranoia because a ranch full of heavily armed humans makes an excellent tool if you’re trying to accomplish something without revealing yourself.

Or maybe Will knows something. We don’t know yet. And that’s okay. Because the mystery isn’t asking us to solve it using DC Comics continuity. It’s asking us to pay attention. And Rushville is giving me plenty to pay attention to. Don’t trust anyone.

Let Them Cook

Okay, if you’ve read this far: Mazel Tov. I am a bitter pill to swallow.

Because I know the DC and Marvel Universes better than the backs of my hands, I am asked all the time who has the best heroes, who tells the best stories, who has the best writers—and usually what people really want is for me to verify choices they have already made.

I almost never do that. I talk about the stories first.

Once I tell you why a story moves me, then we’ll speak briefly — and hopefully positively — about the writer, artist, director or performer who helped make that happen, and move on.

Our goal is to enjoy comics. Sometimes the people who create them are assholes. Just like every other profession in the world.

When I watch something like Lanterns, which is smartly written, lovingly directed, and performed by actors who feel like they are actually feeling things, something wonderful happens:

I feel it with them. Hal’s frustration becomes my frustration. Hal getting shot, however, was all Hal. The man cannot stop talking.

Then there’s John Stewart. That guy is intense. With good reason. Because there is something about John Stewart nobody seems terribly interested in asking:

Why John?

Why was his father plinking fruit with him from the time the boy was barely tall enough to stand up? Go back and look at that scene. Count the holes. Why does John’s life look like preparation?

In the comics, John Stewart was already out of the military and working as an architect when the ring came into his life. Green Lantern wasn’t something his childhood had apparently been pointing toward.

Here? Something is different. Why? Who knew? Who decided?

Doesn’t that make anyone else go: Hmmmm?

Because if I were Hal Jordan, I’d be mad as hell too. Remember that power ring we’ve been talking about? The comics routinely describe a Green Lantern’s power ring as one of the greatest weapons in the DC Universe.

I think that’s selling it short. The ring is something much more interesting than a weapon. It’s an interface. Give it to someone who thinks like a boxer and you get a fist. Give it to someone who thinks like a soldier and you get a weapon. Give it to an architect and you get structures. Give it to an engineer or scientist and suddenly the same ring can produce constructs and solutions other Lanterns might never conceive.

The limitation isn’t simply the ring. It’s the wielder. So why create John Stewart? And since we are on the subject, what has Hal done, or what has happened to Hal, that requires him to train his own replacement?

Because I caught that. Usually succession works the other way around. The old Lantern falls and someone else gets the ring. Here, apparently, the replacement has shown up while the old Lantern is still standing there wearing it.

That’s not succession. That’s a decision. Somebody decided Hal Jordan’s time was over. Somebody decided John Stewart was next. And neither man appears particularly happy about the arrangement.

Now that’s a mystery.

Not whether the green bird corresponds to something that happened in issue #whatever of a comic published twenty years ago. Not whether some obscure piece of continuity can tell us who the Manhunter is before the television show does. Not whether this Hal Jordan behaves exactly like whichever version of Hal Jordan you have decided is the One True Hal.

Forget everything you know about Green Lantern.

Pop.

Watch the story they’re telling you.

Because two episodes in, Lanterns has proven itself smartly written, lovingly directed and beautifully performed. It is asking questions without immediately answering them. It is giving its characters histories without handing us encyclopedias. And it trusts us enough to notice when something is peculiar without immediately explaining why.

I wish fandom could resist the desperate need to solve everything long enough to appreciate this bright, shining jewel of speculative fiction from a property that has been kicking ass on the page for more than sixty years and has finally arrived on television with some of the finest creative effort I’ve seen devoted to it.

We don’t need to know everything yet.
Let Hal be an asshole. Let John stare holes through him. Let Guy Gardner inevitably show up and make everything worse. Let the strange people in the strange town be strange. Let the Manhunters hunt whatever the hell Manhunters are hunting.

Let them fight. Let them cook. Let them clean up. Let them save the day. I’m certain it will be glorious.

“In brightest day, in blackest night.
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.”

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CAST & PRODUCTION

Aaron Pierre — John Stewart
Kyle Chandler — Hal Jordan
Kelly Macdonald — Sheriff Kerry Kane
Garret Dillahunt — William “Will” Macon
Poorna Jagannathan — Zoe Macon
Jason Ritter — Billy Macon
Ulrich Thomsen — Thaal Sinestro
Nathan Fillion — Guy Gardner
Nicole Ari Parker — Bernadette Stewart
J. Alphonse Nicholson / Sherman Augustus — John Stewart Sr.
Chris Coy — Waylon Sanders

Series creators: Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King
Showrunner: Chris Mundy

Episode One — “Pilot”
Directed by James Hawes
Written by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King

Episode Two — “Trust Fall”
Directed by James Hawes
Written by Vanessa Baden Kelly and Chris Mundy