Lanterns Episode 1 Review

HBO Grounds The Green Lantern...And It Works

SPOILER WARNING: This review gets into the big swings of "Lanterns" Episode 1, including that ending. If you haven't watched yet, go watch first. DC has thrown a lot at the wall this year, and not much of it has stuck. Supergirl bombed (even if I personally really liked it). Half the slate feels like it's stuck in limbo. So when HBO's "Lanterns" showed up promising a Green Lantern show that plays more like True Detective than a space opera, the skepticism was earned. Then the pilot actually landed the plane.

TL;DR (For The Skippers)

• Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and rookie John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) investigate dead aliens on a Nebraska high school football field, and it's way more small-town procedural than space opera
• The episode juggles three timelines: 1996 (young John watching Hal on 60 Minutes), 2016 (the murder investigation), and 2026 (the aftermath), and somehow never loses the thread
• Rancher William Macon (Garret Dillahunt) and his wife Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan) tangle Hal and John up in small-town politics that turn out to matter a lot more than they first look
• A captive alien gets outed through Nebraska football trivia and Harry Potter questions, then detonates a bomb wired into his own skeleton
• The episode ends on a gut-punch: 2026, a decade later, John finds Hal's frozen body with a bullet in the forehead and no ring in sight
• Chandler and Pierre are doing the heaviest lifting here, and it's not close

The Review

"Lanterns" opens in 1996, with a kid named John Stewart watching a washed-up test pilot named Hal Jordan get interviewed on 60 Minutes because he was picked to wear a ring that makes him Earth's first Green Lantern. The pitch is that Hal got the job because he doesn't feel fear. Cut to Hal recreating a William Tell apple trick with an actual arrow to prove he's fearless, and you already know the kind of guy this show thinks Hal Jordan is: reckless, charming, a little bit of a mess. Then it jumps to 2016 Nebraska, where Hal is supposedly training John to take over the ring someday, and the show spends the rest of the hour proving that "training" is generous. The case itself starts small. Four dead aliens turn up on a high school football field, and Hal and John get pulled into Rushville, a real Sheridan County, Nebraska town the show borrows for its setting instead of inventing something fictional. That grounding matters. Kelly Macdonald's Sheriff Kerry isn't playing comic relief, she's playing an actual local law enforcement officer who has to deal with the fact that one of the men she's arrested is claiming to be a literal superhero, and the other one is trying to charm his way out of processing. The jail scene, with Hal locked in what's basically a broom closet and John working Kerry for a release, is the clearest signal of what this show wants to be. It's not chasing spectacle. It's chasing character work, and it trusts Macdonald, Pierre, and Chandler to carry it. That trust pays off almost immediately with the interrogation. The captive alien, played completely straight in human form, gets unmasked not through some ring-powered lie detector but through Nebraska football trivia and a Harry Potter pop quiz, plus a little rural political grumbling for good measure. It's a genuinely clever way to root an "is this guy secretly an alien" scene in something recognizably human instead of hand-waved sci-fi logic. Then the alien detonates a bomb wired into his own skeleton, and Hal has to smother the blast with the ring in real time, which is about as close to traditional superhero action as the pilot gets. Everything else stays grounded, even when the show is technically talking about interstellar colonizers. The Macon family thread is where the show shows its hand about what kind of story it actually wants to tell. William Macon, a rich rancher scared of losing his land, reads almost like Great Replacement Theory with aliens standing in for the usual targets, and it's not subtle once you clock it. His wife Zoe complicates things further by having history with John that Macon doesn't know about yet. None of that resolves in episode one. It's planted, and it's clearly going to matter, especially with Sinestro confirmed as a former Lantern gone rogue lurking somewhere in the season's cosmic-stakes column. Then there's the ending, which is the real reason this premiere works as well as it does. The show jumps a full decade forward to 2026. John, now estranged from Hal for years, gets a message through what he calls a "Halogram," a backed-up consciousness attached to the ring, warning about hail in Rushville. He passes the message along, Hal takes off immediately, and six hours later John arrives in the same town to find a shooting scene at the same football field where this all started. The final image is Hal's body in the snow, ring missing, bullet in his forehead. Ten minutes earlier the show was a slow-burn mystery about small-town aliens. By the end it's a "who killed Green Lantern" murder investigation with the trainee as the lead suspect's closest friend and the person least equipped to be objective about it.

Chandler and Pierre are the reason none of this feels like whiplash. Chandler plays Hal as exactly the guy the 1996 setup promised: a flyboy who got handed the most powerful weapon in the universe and never fully grew into the responsibility of it. Pierre is the opposite number, quiet, controlled, clearly the more qualified of the two, and clearly aware of it. The show doesn't need to spell out the DEI-coded subtext of a less-prepared white guy getting the job over a Black candidate who trained his whole life for it. It's right there in the blocking and the dialogue, and the show is smart enough to let it sit instead of turning it into a speech. Is the pilot a little overloaded? Yes. Three timelines, a full ensemble introduction, a murder mystery, a family drama, and a twist ending is a lot to stack into one hour, and there are stretches where the show is clearly betting you'll stick around to get paid off later rather than fully explaining itself now. But it never feels like it's flailing. It feels like a show that knows exactly where it's going and is confident enough to make you wait for it. We rate everything on the following scale:

• PRESS X — this is worth your time, don't skip it
• YOUR CALL — mixed bag, skip-or-watch is a toss-up
• SKIP IT — exactly what it sounds like

"Lanterns" Episode 1 is a definite PRESS X. If HBO can keep this balance of small-town mystery and cosmic dread without the mystery box swallowing the character work, "Lanterns" might be the DCU project that actually earns its Sunday night slot.

Looking Ahead

The premiere leaves a lot on the table for episode two to start paying off: what actually happened to Hal in the ten years between the two timelines, what Sinestro's role is going to be, whether the Macon family secrets get John in real trouble, and what exactly a Green Lantern funeral looks like when the murder weapon might be a fellow Lantern. "Lanterns" earned the benefit of the doubt in its first hour. Now it has to prove it can pay off a mystery instead of just building a good-looking one. If you like this and want to see more of our TV and movie review content, click right here to do just that!