This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 5
At the climax of “Lights Out,” the fifth episode of Lanterns, every conflict the show has been building to boils over. Macon activates his men and his defenses to protect the Manhunter Zoe from not just the Green Lanterns, but also Antaan and his people, who have arrived to take her in. Zoe also begins destroying Rushville via the red light lasers she used to fake her death in the previous episode, decimating the town she once called her home.
And what are our heroes doing while all this devastation occurs? They’re punching each other in the face over who gets to wear the ring. Written by Justin Britt-Gibson and directed by Geeta Vasant Patel, “Lights Out” represents both the culmination of Lanterns‘s main plots and a betrayal of everything it set up. Even its attempts at action and complex themes feel mishandled, resulting in not just the worst episode of an otherwise excellent show, but a worrying sign as Lanterns moves into its back half.
“Lights Out” picks up right where the previous episode ended, with Zoe confirmed as the Manhunter and Hal crashing the car with John inside, leaving his trainee trapped while he goes to deal with the threat. Hal contacts Antaan and arranges for them to come get Zoe, hoping that they will fight it out with Macon’s men, providing cover that would allow him to sneak away with the Manhunter. Then, he can deliver the Manhunter to the Guardians, thus securing his position as Earth’s true Green Lantern.
Of course, it doesn’t go as planned, for a variety of reasons. Hal apparently left John to burn alive in the wrecked car and never came back to check on him, giving space for Zoe to arrive and rebuild his charred body using Manhunter tech. Hal also neglects to recharge his ring before rendezvousing with Antaan, so when Antaan and his men start exploding themselves and when the Macon satellites start destroying Rushville from the sky, Hal’s ring has barely enough power to contain some of the blasts. Worse, when Hal does steal away to charge his ring, he gets interrupted by John, who has arrived to take what belongs to him.
Yes, that’s right: while scores of innocent people die in a conflict that John and Hal exacerbated, our heroes duke it out in a hotel room.
Before we get too angry at what has been heretofore a great TV show, let’s get a little context. “Lights Out” is just the fifth part of an eight-episode series, the right time for a surprising fall from grace. Moreover, Lanterns has never been more devoted to the True Detective model, putting its big action set-piece midway through the season instead of at the end. In the first season of that show, the flashy oner in episode four represented the break in the past that required Marty and Rust to reconvene in the present. The fact that Hal is dead in 2026 complicates Lanterns‘s ability to perfectly follow in the footsteps of its HBO big brother, but we can probably guess that there’s more to Hal and John’s actions than what we see on screen.
Finally, there is the fact that John ultimately uses the defeated Hal to draw Zoe into the open so he can kill her with a sniper shot. And in his final exchange with the Guardian, when he gives up the ring he spent his whole life chasing, John admits that he had been on the wrong path, which suggests that his heroic turn actually begins now.
But is that consistent with what this show has been building thus far? For all his arrogance, Hal has been shown to be constantly competent. And while his gut was bound to be wrong eventually, forgetting to charge his ring or letting John burn to death feels like the actions of a different person, not intuition gone wrong. Likewise, John may be disillusioned by his parents’ expectations and drawn to Zoe’s frankness, but he’s repeatedly shown attention and care to regular people, as when he taught Noah how to throw a football. He wouldn’t pause his quest for the ring for a moment to deal with the devastation around him?
Beyond poor character choices, “Lights Out” betrays two other things that have been impressive thus far. We’ve been able to forgive the show’s decision to keep superhero shenanigans on the periphery and let the character-driven mystery play out. But when you have lasers blasting from the sky and aliens blowing up, a path has been opened to fanciful Green Lantern constructs. We do get to see Hal make bubbles and shields and cyclones to deal with the chaos, but he has to rely on infrared goggles to get through a black cloud and he uses fists to deal with most of Macon’s men. If ever there was a time for Lanterns to be a superhero show, this was it.
Worst of all, “Lights Out” makes thematic decisions that sour much of what came before. While Zoe rebuilds John, the two have a conversation about race—a reasonable topic of conversation between the only two people of color in Rushville, even if aliens weren’t attacking. Zoe explains that she chose her current skin because it allowed her to approach the town as an outsider and assess the target’s power structures and customs. What does she do with that information? Sure, she forms attachments and helps people, but she ultimately blows up the town with her sky lasers while drawing the attention of suicide bombers, who are also aliens who look like humans.
Given the way the show has used Macon to draw explicit parallels between the actions of Manhunters in the fiction of the show and real-world acts of genocide, how are we supposed to read the actions of Zoe and Antaan? It sure seems like the show is saying that it’s dangerous to let outsiders into your community, especially those with different skin colors or different ideologies, because they’ll just explode your idyllic home.
Surely, that can’t be the theme Lanterns intends. And the show still has three more episodes of story to tell, plenty of space to complicate what we see. But given the way “Lights Out” bobbles its central characters and its superhero conceit, one fears that the bright light that Lanterns cast in its first episodes is starting to dim.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
Green Lantern Illuminations
- To be clear, John and Hal have made major mistakes in the comics too. Hal, of course, goes crazy in the mid-’90s, kills most of the Green Lanterns, and becomes the villain Parallax. Even though most of those he killed have been resurrected and Parallax has been ret-conned into a parasite that possessed him, a black cloud still hangs over Hal.
- In the 1988–89 miniseries Cosmic Odyssey by Jim Starlin and Mike Mignola, John decides to ignore Martian Manhunter’s warnings while dealing with a threat to the planet Xanshi. When John gets depowered (because of the color yellow, but we can’t get into that now), Xanshi explodes, haunting John forever.
- For all that Hal and John get wrong in this episode, they are right about one thing: you can’t trust the Guardians. Time and again in the comics, the Guardians prove to be manipulative, uncaring, and given to hubris. Also, they accidentally introduced the concept of evil into the universe, but that’s another story.
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