There is a man on a roof with a rifle.
He has a scope on a woman he had dinner with. A woman who pulled him out of a burning car about four hours ago and grew his skin back on him with her own blood. She is standing over the guy who put him in that car and she is about to finish him. And he says, “I see you, Zoe.”
Then he puts a bullet in her head. Then he climbs down off that roof, walks across a town that is still on fire, kneels down next to her, and cuts her heart out of her chest, because a Manhunter’s heart turns to crystal when it dies and he needs the crystal because he needs to prove he did it. To somebody.
What’s up, my know-it-alls.
This hour got a standing ovation before midnight and I get it. I do. Because the move it made is the move that is hard to argue with in public. It set up a hero ending. The kid finally gets the ring, the training pays off, the music comes up. And then it looked at you and said no. It took the ending off the table and the whole room stood up, because refusing the ending is brave now.
I am sitting here with a problem. I am watching a superhero show, and I have been around long enough to know the difference between a show that subverts something because the subversion is truer and a show that subverts something because it knows you will clap.
So I went back through it twice. The second time I stopped watching the guy on the roof, and I started watching a kid who is standing in two scenes tonight that nobody is talking about.
The Year That Is Not on the Grid
The title card says 2007, and I sat up, because this show does not do 2007.
This show runs on a ten year clock. 1986, Hal takes the ring off a dying Abin Sur. 1996, he goes public. 2006, he makes his last backup. 2016, which is where we have been living. 2026, where somebody finds his body. Every anchor exactly ten years apart. Very clean.
2007 is off the grid. It is the only thing in this series that is.
And what is in it is a teenager whose car broke down in the wrong town. Her father talked to somebody he should not have talked to, and two men followed her across state lines. That is Gotham City spilling out into Nebraska, and the show does not announce it. It just lets you notice the accent on the trouble.
Zoe walks in, kills one of them, and takes the other one completely apart. And the diner owner does not look up. There is a corpse sitting at his counter and the man does not look up.
They want proof, so the finger comes off and goes back with them, so somebody far away gets told this girl is dead. And then Zoe says to her, “Let’s go grow you a new finger.”
One day, she says. I’m gonna need you.
A rescue ends. That one never does. What she handed that girl was a loan, and the interest on her is her whole life.
Now go look at Rushville with that in your hand. A whole town armed in the streets, ready to shoot a Green Lantern out of the sky for her. That town owes her. Every one of them owes her a year, or a finger, or a husband who should have been dead of cancer and was not. She spent thirty years building that place one debt at a time.
She Killed Abin Sur, and They Played It Under a Skin Graft
The loan is not the biggest thing she says out loud tonight. She says the biggest one ninety seconds later, in a hospital room, and she says it like it is nothing.
I killed Abin Sur.
- He caught her. He told her she was going to be executed, and she put him down, and he made it as far as a crash site about twenty miles outside of town.
The show does not stop for it.
Abin Sur dying is the reason there is a Hal Jordan. That is the first thing in the comics, in the movie, in every version of this anybody has ever told. A dying lantern comes down and the ring goes looking for the nearest man without fear. So if she is the one who put him in the dirt, then Hal Jordan does not get that ring by accident. Hal Jordan has that ring because of her.
This show has now made the Manhunter the origin of its own Green Lantern, and it did it in a subordinate clause.
In the comics that seat has changed hands before. It was originally an alien called Legion for a long time, then Geoff Johns came through with Secret Origin and handed the job to Atrocitus, which is where most people’s heads go now. So the seat is allowed to change hands. That is fine.
What I cannot get past is the staging. You have a card in your hand that rewrites your lead character’s entire existence, and you play it face down in the middle of a scene about a skin graft, and then go back to the gunfight. That is a choice. Somebody made it. And the show got a standing ovation for a different scene entirely.
The Rule the Show Wrote, and the Rifle It Needed
Which brings me back to the roof, except there is a rule in the way, and the show wrote the rule itself.
Hal, earlier, is genuinely offended. John suggests the plan ends with Zoe dead and Hal snaps at him that lanterns do not kill. “For someone so desperate for the ring, you clearly missed the fine print. We don’t kill.”
He is right, and I think that is the hardware talking. The ring will not do it. The prohibition is real, it is in the book, and it means we are sitting in the era before the Sinestro Corps War, before the Corps voted itself permission. This show knows exactly where on the shelf it lives and it does not stop to tell you.
So follow the rule forward. If the ring cannot kill her, and she has to die tonight, then the show has written itself into a corner with one way out. A rifle.
That is how you end up with the hero of our Green Lantern show lying on a roof with a deer gun, breaking an oath he never actually got to say out loud.
It is the most honest thing in the hour. It is also a show solving a rule it wrote by handing the kid a weapon the rule does not cover.
They Charged Hal for the Wrong Thing
Nobody is arguing about the rifle tonight. They are arguing about the other guy.
The read the show wants, and the read the people who made it have been giving out loud in the press, is that Hal Jordan lost the plot. That he is a broken man. Director Gita Vatsan Patel talked about John walking through the ruins and deciding he is not becoming the person he has been, which is a beautiful thing to say about John, and underneath it is a claim about Hal. That Hal forgot what the ring is for.
So I went back and watched Hal for an hour instead of watching John.
Hal lies. He tells Antin the Manhunter is Will Macon. “And how were you able to identify this Macon?” “We were sent to his decoy, and he spilled his guts. Figuratively. Mostly.” He does it to buy himself room. And Antin goes to the ranch, and tests the man with questions about a life he did not live, and cuts his heart out of his chest, and it does not crystallize, because it is a human heart. Because Will Macon was a human being.
Will Macon is dead because Hal Jordan lied, and then the sky over the town opens up and starts burning people alive. That is on him.
And if you have ever made the wrong call at work and then stayed all night trying to unmake it, you already know what the next hour of this show is.
He does not leave. The sheriff has already emptied a gun at him and told him the single best thing he could do for everybody is go. “Please, just let it go. We had peace before you showed up. We can have it again if you leave.” The whole street wants him dead, and he stays.
Then, with the ring almost dry, he goes to charge it. Going to charge it is not running. Charging a ring is arguably the most boring sentence in this entire genre and it means exactly one thing: you intend to come back and keep doing it.
And when the lasers come down on the motel, he puts what is left of a dying ring up over the both of them. Over himself, and over the man who is at that moment in the middle of beating him unconscious.
A man who forgot what the ring is for puts it down. This man cannot put it down. He held a roof over a town that hates him, a town he helped set on fire, and then went to plug in so he could go back and do it again.
I hate to break it to you. Dress it up however you want. That is a man who remembers so hard he cannot stop, and it is wrecking everything he touches. That is a real flaw. It is a bigger one, and it is arguably a much better show.
Ninety Seconds at the Ranch
What happens out at the ranch is about ninety seconds long and I have watched it four times.
Antin has already decided Will Macon is the Manhunter, so he does not shoot him. He interrogates him, and the interrogation is a test, and the test is made of things only one specific person could know.
“What were our children’s names?”
Macon has been coached. You can see the coaching. He has answers loaded for most of it. And the answer that comes back on that one is, we couldn’t have children.
Antin and Zoe were together long enough and close enough that there is a first thing and a last thing and a conversation about children. That is a marriage that ended. And it tells you the show wanted you holding those four words.
Then Antin says the thing that costs Will Macon his life. He says the Manhunter would never have bothered having the conversation at all. She would have killed him in the doorway.
That is how he knows he has the wrong one. And he cuts anyway.
I had my whole hand on the table for a crystal in that second. I thought that was the reveal, right there in the office, three quarters of the way through. It was not. And the show refusing me that is better construction than the version I had in my head.
A Resignation Letter Addressed to a Guardian
The one that does crystallize goes somewhere, and who it gets handed to is the part I cannot leave alone.
Last week I told you the thing bothering me was not Zoe. It was the Guardian. Lianna tells John that Hal’s reports say he cannot wield the power anymore. Hal is not reporting to anybody. Hal has not reported to anybody in years. So that statement could not be true when she said it, and she said it anyway, to a kid who had been waiting his entire life for permission.
Tonight he does the job that lie set up. He kills her. He cuts the crystal out of her chest, he carries it into a bar, and he puts it in front of the person who sent him.
She looks at it and says, “Even we make mistakes. All we can do is to correct them.”
That is a woman calling a genocide a filing error.
He calls the heart her sins and consequences, which tells you he knows exactly what he is holding. And then he tells her he does not want the ring, and he says the reason is Hal. That having it broke him.
Everybody is reading that as John growing up. Realizing he wanted it too badly. Choosing to be his own man.
I do not think he put down the ring. I think he looked at the woman across the table, with a heart he cut out sitting between them, and understood for the first time whose errand he had been running his whole life. The ring is her hand. You do not take the hand.
Put that away. It is a resignation letter, and it is addressed to her.
And that still is not the biggest thing this episode did tonight.
The Kid in the Middle of the Frame
This show plays fair. That is the face-up mystery. Every clue is on camera, nothing gets hidden and sprung on you later, and you can work the case in real time if you are paying attention.
But a face-up mystery misdirects by showing you something. Put a man on a roof with a rifle in the middle of the frame and you will stop looking at whatever else is standing in it.
Twice in this hour, with the sky coming down, the show stops for a kid.
Kerry, walking into town to face a Green Lantern with a service pistol, will not let Billy come with her. He wants to go. She tells him no, and the reason is Noah. Stay with Noah.
And Zoe, with sirens up and an entire town arming for a war outside, stops. She finds Noah. She asks him whether he remembers everything she told him. “No matter what happens, don’t forget everything I’ve told you. You promise?” “I promise.”
That is the last thing she ever says to him.
You do not spend screen time like that in the middle of an apocalypse for texture.
Now put the line from the ranch back in your hand. We couldn’t have children. You do not build a whole argument about how Antin and Zoe could not have children unless the point is that they were able to have children.
Then look at Kerry screaming at Hal Jordan while she is shooting at him. “I owe her. You can never understand what she gave me.”
Noah Macon is the only being in Rushville more important to Zoe than her own life, a life she was willing to spend before she would spend his. I think she succeeded in making another Manhunter. I think Noah is the one coming to replace them. I think Noah was the goal, and everything else, the ranch, the town, the thirty years of loans, was the nest she built to do it in.
Go look at where they find Hal Jordan’s body in 2026. A football field. Go listen to what Kerry says about Noah in that same stretch of 2026. He’s tall now. He’s the quarterback.
And then go back to the very first hour of this show and watch John Stewart teach that boy to throw. “Stop aiming. Close your eyes. See the ball go through the hole.”
That is how you make a construct.
This Was Not a Finale
Whatever this was tonight, it was not a finale, and people are going to spend all week calling it one anyway. It is the end of a storyline.
Three points in time. We left the far past. Tonight we left what this show has been calling the present. Next week is the future, and that is where the picture we have been handed starts to resolve.
Which means the center of this thing is currently missing. We do not know what the fallout was, or what the Guardians did with that crystal. Nobody has shown us what ten years in that town does to a woman who owes a dead alien everything, or to a boy who was told to remember.
Everybody is going to assume that is how Guy Gardner ends up with the ring, and that is a fine assumption. It is probably right. It is different from the comics, and that is fine too. It is always different, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I will be straight with you. I do not know yet whether that hole is the plan or the problem, and I am not going to know until next week, and I am fine sitting in that for seven days.
But the last shot is a ring sitting alone on a bar table, and the ring on that table is not the ring we have seen on Guy Gardner. Somebody in the production designed those two things to not match, and then put one of them in the last frame of the episode.
The Verdict
Lanterns Episode 5 lands at an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
This is the best hour the show has made, and I have got my hand halfway up, and I cannot get it the rest of the way.
The craft is not in question. That 2007 open is probably the most efficient piece of writing in the series. The motel fight is two men and no heroes, shot like a divorce. Nobody’s performance drops for a second.
What I am taking off is the spending. You have a reveal that rewrites how your lead got his ring and you play it under a scene about a skin graft. You have a boy standing in the middle of the frame twice while the world ends and you let him go by. And then you build your whole ending out of a refusal, which is the one move in this business that gets applauded automatically, and you let the applause cover the fact that the two biggest things you did tonight, you did quietly and then walked away from.
Great hour, slightly embarrassed by its own best ideas.
They put a Green Lantern’s body on a high school football field ten years after this, and tonight they showed you the woman who made the quarterback.
Your turn, and I want a real answer on this one. Kerry Kane says “you could never understand what she gave me,” and the episode never tells you what it was. Tell me what you think she meant, and tell me what tipped you, because I have got a position on it and I want to know if I am out here on my own. And if you clocked something in that hospital scene that I did not, put it down. Best catch goes on screen. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
