Hal Jordan wrote his own eulogy, and he wrote it for a crowd.

He planned on the whole world showing up. Dignitaries, visitors from other planets, all of them lined up to say goodbye to Green Lantern. Three people came. John Stewart, Kerry Kane, and Carol Ferris, and Carol is the one who hands John the paper and asks him to read it.

So John stands at the grave and reads a dead man’s bravado out loud, and it ends on one line. I hope I mattered.

That is the line everybody is carrying out of this episode. And I think everyone misread Hal Jordan’s last words.

The Reset and What It Asks You to Swallow

This episode resets the board, and it is not a reset of the story. It is a reset of expectations.

Five episodes in 2016, then a hard cut to 2026, where everybody is older, everybody has moved, and the show hands you a new town to read. Structurally the reset works. It does the job of establishing who these people are now.

The problem is what it does to you as a viewer. It asks you to set down everything the first five episodes told you and start guessing from zero. I do not think you should. The only place worth starting from is what we already know, and the more I held this hour up against the first five, the more that eulogy stopped reading the way everybody is reading it.

On the heels of everything that happened in Rushville, the show puts John in Midway and commits him to a business venture with his brother. Stewart Brothers, him and Marcus. It is a big endeavor. He tells a city board he was on the wrong path a few years back, thought he was going the right way, and it ended up leading him back to his brother. His opening pitch mentions Superman and a giant starfish, which is the closest this show has come to the connection with the wider DCU I have wanted for a long time.

The point of all that is to illustrate the fall off, to show you how Rushville changed this man. I do not necessarily know that I believe it.

I wanted to see John as an architect. I really did. And this idea that he is more invested in his brother than ever? Based on everything we have seen, the last thing I would expect him to do is go reconcile with his family. I would have figured he grew up past them. Instead they show us somebody who has acclimated to his family’s presence, and I do not think the show is doing the best it can with him. Then look how fast he turns his back on his brother’s deal for whatever this is. I can already hear the line coming. The hologram asks him why he is doing this, and John says, I am doing what Hal would have done. I am following my gut.

Then Guy Gardner walks in, and the show answers the question everybody has had since Superman. Hal’s ring was decommissioned, and the Guardians gave Guy a new one. That one I will take, because it is a fact the show can put on screen. So is Guy telling John he will not help solve Hal’s murder because it is bad optics, which is the title of the episode, and which is exactly why he is not at the funeral either.

Guy was okay. The problem is that he is so blatantly not the restrained Green Lantern we get from Hal, or even from John at this point, and he does not add up either. In that café, Hal cracks about the gym teacher flying things around in a bubble. But we have already seen Guy make more sophisticated constructs than that, ones in the shape of a hand. So I have a hard time with some of that characterization. This show is so restrained, and he is so over the top.

But the reset keeps asking for more faith than that. The biggest thing it asks you to accept is a reading of Hal.

The Misread

Justin Britt-Gibson, one of the writers on this show, said what he wants you to take from that funeral. Look what the ring did to Hal Jordan. It made him so possessive. It made him so selfish.

You can read the eulogy that way if you want. The planned-for crowd, the dignitaries, the aliens, a man who assumed the whole galaxy would stop for his funeral. That is there on the page. Kelly Macdonald said it in the behind-the-scenes featurette. It feels like he is stunting at the gravesite. She is right, that is the bravado, and it is the part the writers are laying on you to make everything land.

Then there is the last line. In the after show, Chris Mundy says Damon Lindelof wrote it. I hope I mattered. Okay. That is a dunk, but it is not one I think is worth anything, because so what? It reads odd to me, and it is sitting on top of the part that actually matters.

Get past all of it, and what you are left with is rawness. A hero who was alone. A man who says he had a hard time getting through everything, a hard time communicating, a hard time staying on the ground, because it was easier to just get up and fly away.

The mask he put on was a brave front, and it was for everybody else. The truth is that at night he went home alone. I think he was scared of something. He was scared of being alone, but he knew the job could only be done one way, and that is alone. How do you do one while feeling the other? It is a tough dichotomy to swallow. They did a pretty good job giving him that, and Kyle Chandler does an amazing job playing it.

Now hold that against what we already know. This is the Hal who went back to Rushville, the town that wanted him gone, and knocked on doors trying to make amends. Most of them told him no. Kerry tells John that Hal came back for her. She says he wrote her letters for years before he ever moved there. That paints a slightly different picture than possessive and selfish. And in that same featurette, Mundy says killing Hal was, for them, a way to deepen Hal, even though he was not going forward. Deepen. That is the man running the show telling you where to look.

So that is the misread. Read the letter inside this one hour and you get a sad line, or a selfish man. Read it against the five episodes that came before it, and it is a hero’s letter.

The Work, and Why I Am Not Mad About It

I know the loudest crowd right now says this show is propping John up at Hal’s expense. Let’s be real here. John was always propped up at Hal’s expense.

Go back to John’s very first appearance, Green Lantern number 87, December 1971, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams. The Guardians pick John, Hal objects, and the whole book frames Hal as the one in the wrong. People today read a lot into that, and I adamantly disagree with that read. I think Hal has always been what culture needed him to be. And right now, culture needs Hal Jordan to be dead.

In wrestling, you would call that a work. They are having Hal Jordan put John over. I do feel some of that going on. But at the end of the day, if it serves the story and it makes logical sense, I can flow with it a little bit. A lot of it is going to depend on how they represent him in that hologram next week. That is going to decide how all of this comes across.

(I have got more on Carol Ferris and everything that name carries, and I go a good bit deeper on it in this week’s sidebar video for members. If that is your thing, I hope you will join me over there.)

The Lens, Applied

The lens is the right one, and the show proves it by using it on itself.

When Hal and John sit down in that café, they sit in the same booth John sat in with Zoe. Then the episode cuts to John walking up to Hal’s body on the football field, and it is the exact moment from the pilot, the first image this series ever gave us, except now you know what happened that afternoon. John broke his nose. Which means John walked up to that body already knowing Hal did not have the ring on him.

You are thinking, you built a whole video on that missing ring. I did. Back in Lanterns Just Made John Stewart the Prime Suspect, I called it the clue the whole season stands on. All of our guesses that Hal had the ring on him, mine included, were wrong, and the show told us so by going back to its own first frame. The episode that tells you to start over keeps looking over its shoulder.

So John broke Hal’s nose that afternoon, and he does not tell the sheriff. The reset wants you to sit with that as a question mark. Use what you know and it is not much of one. He is hated by that town. Everybody would assume that if you punched Hal, then you are the guy. There are a lot of valid reasons you do not tell people things.

Kerry, on the other hand, tells John something out of the gate. She was, for lack of a better way to put it, his girlfriend. His buttercup, I guess. I think she puts that on the table first so she can help dispel any thought that she might be guilty of something.

And the ring was never stolen. The Guardians gave it to him. He was Green Lantern for like five minutes. He tells Guy flat out, everything you have is because I did not take it. Now this whole situation, a decommissioned ring, a new one forged for Guy, a dead man buried in the old one, is forcing us to rethink our understanding of Green Lantern lore. I am okay with that. That is the show earning something new out of what it already built.

Where the Speculation Begins

Hal had a storage unit, and in it there is a vault that would only ever answer to Hal’s voice. If I were John, I would absolutely do everything I could to get into that stupid vault, because there is more to all this. I think he is smart enough that he believes there is a lantern in there. That is why he digs up the grave and takes the ring. That is the one thing that can still talk like Hal. Get the lantern, and maybe we finally see him in a costume.

Guy lets it slip that somebody broke Sinestro out of space Azkaban, which is Guy Gardner, not original in the least. I think that is the road. Somewhere down it, John runs into Sinestro.

Then there are the phone calls. This whole hour runs on them. His mom calls, Kerry calls, Hal asks him to keep the visit off the record, and John blows his brother’s pitch on the phone while he is digging up a grave. The phone calls are flagging something, and I do not know what yet. Here is a receipt, though. The credits list the actors who play young Bernadette and John’s father as voices in this episode. So the first time Lianna, or whoever it is, shows up doing his parents’ voices over a phone, that is going to be weird, and I think the show has been setting it up all hour.

Then there is what the autopsy gives you. One shot, from the front, up close, and no sign Hal fought it. That is what we know, and that is where any theory about who did this has to start.

So start there. I still think Noah did it. Back in Why I’m Not Celebrating the Best Lanterns Yet, I told you I think Noah was the goal all along, the thing Zoe built that whole town to protect. Put that next to the autopsy. Hal does not fight. I think that is because he knows it is Noah, and he loves Kerry, and he decides the best way to go out is this way.

Think about the man knocking on every door in that town looking for redemption. That is a man who believes he deserves what is coming. If Hal did not fight, that only lends credence to the fact that it is Noah, and that Hal felt like he deserved it. I do not know how to feel about that. But it is the only math that keeps showing up on the other side of the equal sign.

And Hal. Is he actually dead? I think clone or fake Hal is still up in the air. There is every possibility he is really gone, and I tend not to want to lean that way, because it feels lazy to me. But at the same time, Zoe was the Manhunter, whether or not she is the threat moving forward. So it is about figuring out where those lines lie, and that is the speculation that is worth doing, the kind that starts from what the show already told us.

The Verdict

Lanterns Episode 6 lands at a 7.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. As craft, this is still the show I have been watching. It is filmed fine. The town still looks small, it still fits the True Detective setup, and nothing got poorer. Kyle Chandler makes you feel that man on the page even after he is gone, and the reset does its structural job of telling you who these people are now.

What holds it back is what the reset does to expectations. The family, the brother, the business, all of it is contrived in a way I am having to add meaning to. It leaves you forced to come up with things and invent things, and as the first episode of the final arc, it has laid out an awful lot that will need to be reconciled before the finale.

Take away the bravado, and Hal Jordan’s last words are a man admitting the job could only be done alone, and doing it anyway.

Your turn. Read that eulogy again and tell me which Hal you heard: the possessive, selfish man the writer says is in there, or the one I am hearing, a hero who went home alone every night. And if you think I am wrong, tell me what on screen says so. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.