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SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 1 premiere of “Lanterns,” now streaming on HBO Max.
What kind of superhero show has the guts to kill off its lead character in the first episode?
Of course,
just because Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) is found dead in the bleachers by John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and town sheriff Kerry (Kelly MacDonald) in the middle of a brutal 2026 winter doesn’t mean audiences won’t get to see Green Lantern in action in future episodes — the show sets up a non-linear structure that jumps among different storylines from the very opening scene, which begins in 1996 and sets up a young John’s connection to taking the Green Lantern mantle.
But clueing audiences in on the fact that the show’s protagonist’s days are numbered is bold for the comic book genre. And it makes for one hell of a cliffhanger for the series premiere.
“Whether it’s the right cliffhanger or not is basically in the hands of the audience now,” “Lanterns” co-creator Damon Lindelof tells Variety. “But one of the very first things that was part of the premise was that this is a murder mystery with Green Lantern solving it, and then you sort of start at, ‘Well, who gets murdered and why are we supposed to care about them?’ The more that we talked about it, the more that it kept coming back to the idea of, ‘What if it was one of them?'”
“Lanterns,” the latest show under James Gunn and Peter Safran’s newly expanded DCU, follows Hal as he is forced to take John under his wing. As the Green Lantern, Hal has the power to create material items through his ring, and acts as an intergalactic space officer protecting humanity from extraterrestrial threats. Things take a dark turn, however, after a series of unexplainable deaths draw Hal and John to a small town in Nebraska.
When Chandler first read the ending of the episode, he “cheered” at Hal’s demise.
“Not just for the storyline and all that, but what a way great way to end the first episode of this show,” Chandler says.
MacDonald, who says Frances McDormand’s Oscar-winning performance in “Fargo” informed the way she played the sheriff just trying to keep her small town from falling apart, dreaded filming the scene when she discovers Hal’s dead body. “Just the thought of what was going to happen, I did not look forward to it. It was quite emotional, seeing him like that,” she says.
Lindelof, who created HBO’s Emmy-winning “Watchmen” TV series that released in 2019 — bringing a grounded approach to it — recognizes the opportunity to subvert audience expectations from what they’ve come to expect in the genre.
“That you basically watched eight episodes and everybody had an adventure, and then at the end of the adventure, it’s just time for the next adventure,” Lindelof says. “So the idea that it would have real emotional stakes [was important]. But most importantly, this is a story about a guy who doesn’t want to give up the ring — and a guy who wants the ring. And it was important for us to message to the audience that we weren’t gonna try to have our cake and eat it too.”
The episode sets up Hal and John’s budding mentor-mentee dynamic in a 2016 timeline, with Hal being a reluctant teacher. The tension between them comes to a head after the two arrive in Nebraska and begin investigating a school shooting that Hal believes is a front for aliens.
“There’s a moment where we’re in the stands and we were literally this close. And it was a moment very early in their dynamic. Everything in John wants to just rumble in that moment, but he can’t and Hal knows he can’t,” Pierre says. “It was just so fun.”
“It’s like making fun of the animals at the zoo behind the plate of glass,” Chandler adds with a laugh. “He’s can’t touch me, but I can do what I want!”
Chandler says Hal has a deep respect for John from the beginning, even if it’s unspoken. “I knew that he could literally grab my neck and snap it,” he says.
Seeing Chandler sit up on a pair of bleachers overlooking a football field may give viewers who were introduced to the Emmy-winning actor with “Friday Night Lights” a feeling of déjà vu. Chandler felt those memories for the series that turns 20 this fall.
“There’s no doubt when I walked out there, it was a lot of different thoughts and emotions going through me,” Chandler says — although he never asked the writers if the callback was intentional.
Overall, Pierre commends the “Lanterns” writers’ room, and is excited to see how the show’s weekly release model will play into the conversations fans have online.
“They leave you — ‘want’ doesn’t even feel like a strong enough word. It’s needing to know what happens next,” Pierre says, teasingly. “I imagine there are going to be a few weeks where audiences are, in the healthiest, most excitable way, furious that they don’t know what is coming next.”
