Lanterns Episode 2 Review: “Trust Fall” Buries A Great Ending Under A Pile Of Lore

SPOILER WARNING: This review gets into everything from “Lanterns” Episode 2, “Trust Fall,” including the Sinestro scene at the end. If you haven’t watched yet, go watch first.

The pilot worked because it kept things small. A murder on a football field, a sheriff who didn’t care about rings, two guys stuck in a jail cell together. “Trust Fall” throws that model out in the first ten minutes and splits Hal and John up for almost the entire hour. That’s the right instinct. It’s also the episode where the show has to prove it can handle actual Green Lantern mythology instead of just gesturing at it, and that’s where things get shakier.

TL;DR (For The Skippers)

• Hal wakes John up with a bucket of water for a flying lesson that goes nowhere, then ships him back to Coast City for the power battery while Hal works Rushville solo
• John can’t fly, but accidentally manifests a small green bird construct that keeps existing even after Hal takes the ring back
• Hal discovers the “metal detectors” around Rushville are actually alien detectors, steals all four dead aliens from the morgue, and gets shot confronting rancher William Macon (Garret Dillahunt) at his ranch
• John finds Hal’s Coast City mansion empty except for a Green Lantern suit closet and a carnivorous plant named Earl, then gets snatched off the driveway by an alien crew led by a guy named Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor)
• Antaan drops the big lore bomb: before the Green Lantern Corps, the Guardians built shapeshifting killing machines called Manhunters, one wiped out Antaan’s homeworld, and it’s been hiding in Rushville since Abin Sur died trying to stop it, which also explains how Hal got the ring
• Antaan gives Earth 48 hours to find it or he blows up half of Nebraska
• Hal secretly suits up for the first time and flies out to confront his imprisoned former mentor Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), who immediately turns the conversation to John Stewart instead

The Review

The cold open tells you exactly what kind of teacher Hal is going to be. He dumps a bucket of water on John, drags him outside, and tells him flying is “supposed to be instinctual,” which is a nice way of saying Hal has no idea how to actually teach anything. John can’t get off the ground. What he does instead is manifest a small green bird out of the ring, and the detail that matters is that the bird sticks around even after Hal takes the ring back. Hal doesn’t say a word about it. He just books John a commercial flight to Coast City to grab the power battery and tells him to keep the bird alive, which is the closest thing to a compliment this version of Hal is capable of giving.

Splitting them up is the smartest structural choice the show has made so far, because it lets both actors work without playing off each other’s rhythms. Left alone in Rushville, Hal goes full loose cannon. He clocks that the metal detectors scattered around town, including one at the local American Legion, aren’t actually looking for metal. He steals a body from the morgue to confirm they’re alien detectors. Then he steals all four bodies, gets pulled over by Sheriff Kerry Kane, and talks her into escorting him out to William Macon’s ranch anyway. Macon cites his NDA, refuses to explain who’s funding the armed guards on his property, and has Hal shot by a sniper for his trouble. None of this makes Hal look competent. It makes him look like a guy who’s been coasting on a magic ring for so long that he’s forgotten what it feels like to need one, and Chandler plays that recklessness like it’s the whole point of the character.

The hospital scene afterward is where the episode plants its creepiest flag. Kerry, sitting at Hal’s bedside, asks him about “Sinestro,” a name he apparently muttered in his sleep, and casually recites the public backstory of a coup that happened in outer space like it’s something she Googled on her lunch break. Hal brushes past it, but the show clearly wants us sitting with the question of how anyone in Rushville would know that. It gets weirder when Hal notices the sign-out sheet at the hospital is blank except for his own name, sitting in a building full of expensive equipment nobody seems to use. We also learn Kerry is originally from Gotham, which is either a throwaway detail or the second clue in an episode already stacking them. Either way, “Lanterns” is quietly building a case that something is off about this entire town, not just the football field.

John’s half of the episode is where the show finally lets its comic book roots show, for better and for worse. Hal’s Coast City mansion is enormous and empty, a gift from some grateful millionaire Hal claims to actually live in, and the show gives John a genuinely good quiet moment where he finds Hal’s old Green Lantern suit in the closet and holds it up against himself. He retrieves the power battery from a pocket dimension guarded by the password “Mogo doesn’t socialize,” which is a deep-cut reference for anyone who wants one and a total non-event for anyone who doesn’t. He also feeds Earl, a carnivorous alien plant Hal apparently keeps in a greenhouse, which is the episode’s one bit of pure comic relief. Then John walks out the front door and gets thrown into a truck by a crew of suspiciously strong men, and the show cuts loose with an honest-to-God highway chase that’s the best action beat of the hour.

What’s waiting on the other end of that chase is a full lore dump, and it’s the part of the episode that struggles most. Antaan straps John into some kind of psychic exposition device and walks him through it: the Guardians built the Manhunters before the Green Lantern Corps existed, the Manhunters were shapeshifters, and one of them wiped out Antaan’s entire homeworld before a Green Lantern, almost certainly Abin Sur, was sent to hunt it down. That Manhunter has apparently been hiding in Rushville ever since, which also means it’s the thing that killed Abin Sur, which is how Hal ended up with the ring in the first place. It’s a lot of information delivered in one sitting, and Antaan’s ultimatum, find the Manhunter in 48 hours or he levels half of Nebraska, lands more like a plot mechanism than an actual threat. The pilot earned its cosmic stakes by hiding them inside a small-town murder mystery. This is the show just telling you the stakes outright, and it’s noticeably less effective.

The Zoe subplot gets a small, sharp beat of its own. John runs into her at a diner on his way back into town, and the show finally confirms what the pilot only hinted at: they slept together before he knew she was married to William Macon. It’s a small scene, but it does real work. Kerry, we learn, is married to William’s son Billy, which means the sheriff investigating this entire mess is also married into the family sitting at the center of it, and the woman John has history with is that same family’s matriarch. That’s a genuinely messy web for a small town, and it makes the political material from the pilot feel less like a one-episode idea and more like the show’s actual engine.

Back at the motel, John tells Hal everything Antaan said, despite being explicitly told not to. “I report to you,” is all the explanation he gives, and it’s a good enough line to paper over how convenient the timing is. Hal connects the dots about Abin Sur immediately, but he can’t manage to say anything encouraging about John’s construct even after Antaan apparently called it more advanced than anything Hal himself has ever pulled off. John asks him to engage with it, Hal deflects, and John crushes the bird out of spite. It’s a small moment and Pierre sells it well, but it’s also a little too on the nose about what this show thinks Hal’s whole deal is.

Then the episode ends on its best scene by a wide margin. Hal suits up in full Green Lantern gear for the first time on screen and flies to an icy prison to see Sinestro, and the show finally slows down long enough to let two actors just talk. Sinestro doesn’t bite on the Manhunter question at all. Instead, he asks about John Stewart and tells Hal that if a Manhunter really is loose, it’s only the second-greatest threat he’s currently facing. It’s a genuinely great final beat, and it makes the episode’s back half feel like it was worth the exposition tax.

“Trust Fall” is a table-setting episode wearing an action episode’s clothes, and it mostly gets away with it because Chandler and Pierre are doing such different, specific work when they’re not sharing a scene. The Antaan stuff is clunky in a way the pilot never was, trading the show’s grounded procedural instincts for a straight lore download. But the Macon family web is getting genuinely tangled, the hospital stuff is quietly unsettling, and that closing Sinestro scene is the best writing the show has done yet.

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 2 is YOUR CALL, leaning toward Press X on the strength of that ending.

Looking Ahead

Episode 3 has a lot to answer for. Is the Manhunter already walking around Rushville disguised as someone we’ve met? Why is the hospital sitting empty with nobody signed in but Hal? What does it mean that the sheriff investigating this whole mess is married into the Macon family, and how long before John’s history with Zoe blows that up from the inside? And now that Sinestro has put John Stewart’s name in the room, the show owes us some idea of why. The pilot proved “Lanterns” could tell a grounded mystery. This episode proved it’s willing to go full cosmic when it wants to. Episode 3 needs to prove it can do both at the same time.

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AJ Hanson

AJ Hanson has been part of games media since 2011, writing, streaming, and ranting about the industry long before it was his job. He runs the Galaxy’s Edge Discord, the go-to community for fans of Disney’s Star Wars parks, and works as Marketing Director for the Virtual Cantina Network, helping produce shows, interviews, and fan events. A lifelong Star Wars fan and unapologetic nerd, AJ’s focus has always been on building spaces where people can connect, argue, and celebrate the things they love without all the corporate gloss.