Here is my write up on the first four episodes of Lanterns.

I was very excited to watch the final episode of Lanterns and was thinking of doing a write up covering the final four episodes like I did the first four. The problem is that the final episode landed with such a thud I don’t really see the point. And yes, this is a recap of the episode so I’m going to talk about it. If you haven’t watched it yet stop reading.

I’ll first say this: I left the episode originally feeling good because the acting is so top notch. Kelly Macdonald is absolutely incredible. Aaron Pierre is rock solid. Kyle Chandler is of course fantastic all throughout. The kid who plays Noah does a serviceable job. The blonde waitress is still terrible. Can’t win them all. But I loved the acting. And the first 10 minutes.

We went into this episode with a lot of theories. Almost everything I heard podcasts and people on social media discuss either happened or was part of the dialogue. I heard people talk about all the “Noah being President” stuff would start with him going to Navy. We knew the shoes walking in after Hal had the little circle that tells you he was in the skin regeneration machine were Noah’s.

They played with the idea that he committed suicide in episode seven only to end on them telling you Hal wouldn’t. Episode seven was a work of art. The way it expresses the fact that the Jordan Boy Legacy is essentially suicide and it’s something Hal Jordan knows he has and his fearlessness is about knowing his family history of suicide and living through it is really quite poignant.

Hal in that episode says that Sherriff Kerry killed him. In this episode, Noah takes responsibility only for John Stewart to have his Columbo moment to reveal that no, Noah was just trying to protect his mother. Kerry admits to what she did. Not only did she shoot Hal, she called the one man who could solve the mystery of who shot Hal. A cop basically ensuring her guilt would be revealed.

Only that doesn’t happen.

The biggest issue with the episode is that it tries to tie all the loose ends, tries to explain everything, gets to the “detective” part of the show to reveal the killer and the motive and the plot, and then just… drops it.

You’re not Lord Yoshii Toranaga

It’s my feeling that the writers of Lanterns watched the Shogun miniseries, a miniseries which (please watch it I’ll try to keep this as spoiler free as possible) convinces you there’s going to be a massive war breaking out at the end and instead it’s two people looking over the water sitting and discussing what did happen, why things went the way they did, how things were manipulated, and how things will be. It’s the ultimate tell not show episode and in doing absolutely everything that’s considered to be anti-entertainment? Shogun lands. It’s one of my favourite episodes of TV ever. It lets you see why the character is so intelligent. It’s threaded perfectly.

Lanterns, after seven extremely good (arguably great) episodes, does not land. Not because we didn’t get some big intergalactic war or anything. More because it just says stuff without showing it.

Apparently Noah is the one who breaks Sinestro out of prison… somehow. Apparently not only did he finds all the tech of his “grandmother” but he knows how to use it and he knows how to break a space criminal out of maximum security space prison. And nobody is chasing him. This unfortunately doesn’t explain why Sinestro knew about John, which we thought was because there may have been a Guardian assisting him. Nope! Throw that whole theory out. Guess we didn’t consider the writers not following up on their own work.

So Noah breaks Sinestro out, puts him on a decimated planet to build him a lantern so he can become a Lantern Corps. Sinestro makes a Green Lantern charger but it’s supposed to use the yellow energy of Fear. This, by the way, is barely touched upon again. Even when John uses the lantern at the end of the episode there’s no oh he must be a Yellow Lantern or oh no he’s using both, it’s just, yeah he’s a Green Lantern now shut up.

Sinestro tries to play both sides which is to be expected from a mustache twirling villain (at least I’d assume he’d be twirling it if he wasn’t getting waterboarded) and talks about a charged ring being able to bring back Hal. Is he lying? Is he telling the truth? Don’t worry about it.

John leaves the decimated planet refusing to charge the ring and immediately gets his ass kicked by Noah. Noah takes the ring and the lantern and makes John drive. This immediately had me thinking maybe John learned something from all those times Hal crashed the car on him. Nope. It’s just a nice drive.

Noah and John have a conversation and it ends with Noah handing John the ring and telling him to one day kill him. Let him play the football game and be a hero. But don’t let him know it’s coming. He doesn’t want to be a bad guy and do all the bad things but knows one day he can’t fight his programming. Interesting wrinkle. Not much time left in the episode. I was kind of hoping he threw that touchdown pass only to cut to John up in the stands with the sniper rifle just popping him in the helmet. Then again, that might lead to a world war.

Popping a white high school QB in Nebraska I think would be worse than killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria of Austria.

— Aaron Wrotkowski (@aaron.wrotkowski.ca) 2026-10-06T00:01:39.166Z

Instead he does the Columbo with Kerry. Hal went to Kerry about Noah being a Manhunter. Kerry freaked out that Hal was going to expose it and put Noah in danger and shot him in the head.

Why John Stewart checked Hal’s hand for a ring in the pilot episode is unexplained. I guess he just wanted to look. So Kerry, who was at the prison with a six pack of beer for Hal to get out, and dates him and tries to defend him to Rushville, is the one who pops him and will apparently turn herself in. Okay.

We then get what was the most frustrating scene of the whole episode. Guy Gardner shows up. He sees John with the ring. Guy is a Green Lantern. I thought Guy could sense the power of the ring, that the ring the Guardians made for him wasn’t as strong. He could feel that John was an immense threat, so when John is browbeating him that’s why he doesn’t fight back. He basically looks like a complete wimp, a total coward. He takes off. That’s when I find out THE RING WASN’T EVEN CHARGED YET. So Guy Gardner let a dude with an almost dead ring claiming to have a lantern basically emasculate him. What are we even doing here?

John has a new Oath which mentions embracing his fear, which I guess relates to the Fear that the new lantern uses. But doesn’t that make him a Yellow Lantern? I’m no comic book nerd, but isn’t that how these things work? He can’t just a Green Lantern with gold tint, right?

Peacemaker Season Two All Over Again

One more quibble. When the Halogram returns, he brings up the fact he thinks John is taking a serious risk allowing the Manhunter to live. And then like right after he tells John he’s going to be better at this than he ever was. How are you criticizing his decisions but then also saying he’s going to be great at it? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WRITING ON THIS SHOW!?

Maybe I was just in a trance with the great acting throughout but I really thought this was going somewhere better. I thought Sinestro was going to be more than just a guy trying to get everyone to do his eeeeevil bidding. I thought the Manhunter story would actually get resolved. I thought even if this ended up the last of Hal (which I doubt) he’d get a better conclusion.

Billy got a big hug first from Noah though. Hell yeah Billy. Good job.

I’m not saying the show was as good as say TASK which I watched last year. But I do think up to episode seven it was fantastic television. They really were setting up something that could have been the best superhero TV show. Period. Period! Better than Peacemaker (which funny enough also had a bad landing in their second season finale), better than any of the crap Marvel has done, it could have been the apex. This episode was such a bummer.

This isn’t one of those things where I’m pissed the show didn’t do what I wanted it to do. I was completely okay with everything up to this point. What does bother me is they put so much time into the Guardians being important. Not just important, but the Guardians getting it often wrong. They didn’t trust Hal after Sinestro killed one of their own. They tried to replace him with John and when John rejected the ring they went with Guy.

A big thing I talked about in my Lanterns After Four is that Hal, despite his hubris in thinking he could stop the Manhunter and keep the ring, he was the only one in town not being manipulated by the Manhunter. Even John, to the very end, gets manipulated by a Manhunter.

Literal quote from Hal:

“They find a path to power every time, and if they identify a threat to that power, they’ll manipulate that threat into believing anything they want them to. Remind you anyone we know?”

What does the Manhunter, now Noah, do to John Stewart at the end of the episode?

MANIPULATE HIM INTO THINKING HE’S A GOOD KID WHO WON’T TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

Even the request to kill him feels like Noah saying what John wants to hear. See he can’t be so bad, I can relate to him, he’s fighting his programming! This would have been a great time for the writers to play in everything Hal had told John about his upbringing and the Jordan Boys Legacy. Nah. John gets manipulated.

This is where I gotta pull that other quote from John, now from this episode.

“I know you’ll be better at this job than I ever was.”

God damn Halogram, you do not have dead Hal’s intuition.

Surf’s Up Dude

The worst part of this all? With the stupid fucking Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros Discovery getting a green light that means there’s a good chance we never get a season two. David Ellison is likely going to decide that a black Green Lantern doesn’t represent the Republican Party of America and reboot the whole series so some dipshit like Zachary Levi can be Green Lantern. What a stupid world we live in.

I thought this could absolutely launch a film if they found a way to bring back Hal and got John the ring. Sinestro the villain. Could they still do it? Maybe have Sinestro and Noah the Manhunter? They find a way to bring back Hal and you got Hal, John, and Guy?

You could, but I don’t have anywhere near the same level of faith in it.

In closing, I just want to once again express that episode five, six, and seven were great. I enjoyed them a lot. Seven is easily my favourite episode of TV this year. Everything with Hal’s father, the speech about letting go, and Hal going to get the baseball back? That was really great writing, and set me up to thinking this show was going to soar into space and touch the stars. Instead it got us all the way into the sky and crashed down. Intentionally not accidentally, kinda like Martin Jordan’s fighter jet. Poor taste I know.

Overall? I still liked the show. You can’t hate it just because it ended poorly. You have to consider everything involved. I would still encourage someone to watch it. I just can’t help but wonder why this is now two shows overseen by James Gunn (Lanterns and Peacemaker season two) that had absolutely flat endings. Makes me worry about investing too much in The People v. Gorilla Grodd.

And yes. You can call it Surf Dracula. It definitely Surf Dracula’d. Also, why won’t someone just make Surf Dracula? It’s not a copyright thing. Give me Surf Dracula! You know what, give me $100,000 and I’ll write it. It’ll be awesome. I’m gonna do seven episodes of Dracula surfing and then episode eight will end the season with him going, “And that’s how I got my surfboard” and everyone will go absolutely crazy go nuts.

VAMP’S UP: Surfer Kelly Pedlow catches a wave in Newport Beach during annual Halloween costume surfing contest, published by Laylan Connelly of Orange County Register, October 31, 2007.

Since I’m bad at ending things like this (NOT AS BAD AS JAMES GUNN HAHAHA sorry) I just want to say the first 10 minutes gave me so much hope. They literally started the episode like we were watching a romantic dramedy about a woman who left her dopey husband to hook up with a formerly incarcerated world renown superhero who her entire town hated but couldn’t do much about because she was the sherriff. I was like wow, that takes so much courage to do on this final episode. And they have so much chemistry! I love it! And then the episode started at 11:20 and now we’re here.

Surf on, Dracula.