The first person to say “great arm, kid” in this episode is Hal Jordan’s father, a couple of months before he kills himself. The second person to say it is Sinestro.
I didn’t catch that on the first watch. I caught it going back through the hour trying to figure out why I wasn’t crying when everybody else was. Because Lanterns just showed you why Hal never let go, and it did it with a baseball.
This is the origin story. It’s definitely the origin story. It’s just not the one I think I wanted, and I need to be careful about what I do with that, because not getting the thing you wanted isn’t a note on the episode.
I had a feeling about the dad. I figured he’d be the guy who doesn’t hear a word the coach says, and that’s who walked in. What I didn’t have was the note. That one’s a real headspinner, and it recontextualizes a lot.
And then something happened that I didn’t expect, which is that it didn’t land on me the way it landed on everybody around me. Kyle Chandler in a boat telling you his father killed himself, and I’m sitting there going, okay, so what’s that for. Not because it’s bad. Because I was listening for a different sentence.
So this whole thing is me trying to work out what I was listening for, and whether I was right to.
The Wrong Sentence
What I know I felt is that the reveal has the trappings of being emotional. A dad, a note, a boy at a grave, a Dylan song. All of that’s real and all of that’s well made. My first thought was that this is the show reaching for tears it hasn’t set up, because the Hal we’ve watched for six episodes is a man who’s been burying this, and now a copy of him is handing it to me in one speech.
Then I went back and watched the boat again, and my first thought was wrong about what the speech even is.
It’s three men and two notes. The grandfather went to the war and didn’t come back and left Martin a note. Martin killed himself, and because he was a test pilot it passed as an accident, and he left Hal a note in a safe under the workbench. Same pain, father to son, and they had a name for it.
So the speech is a family history before it’s a confession. It’s information. And information is what I was listening for, which is exactly why the tears didn’t come.
But then he says the line, and I have to be honest about what it did to me. I’m not fearless because I’m brave. I’m fearless because I’m broken.
That felt tremendously insightful, and it took me a minute to work out why, because it’s coming out of the same speech I just said didn’t move me. I think the reason is who’s saying it. The real Hal is dead, quote unquote. This is a copy from ten years before the front went up for good, and the copy doesn’t need the front. He says the thing the living man spent the whole series not saying, and he says it flat, like a fact about a car.
So that’s my disagreement, and it’s a narrow one. It isn’t that the scene doesn’t work. It’s that people are crying at the note, and the note is the delivery mechanism. The sentence that matters is the one about being broken, and the show could only get that sentence out of a version of Hal who had nothing left to protect.
That’s a smart piece of writing. It’s also a trick, and the trick is aimed at you.
You can call it a retcon, and it is one. Damon Lindelof said this week that when you’re playing with canon you have to treat it like plutonium, and the question they asked in the room was whether Hal Jordan is still Hal Jordan if his dad didn’t die in a test flight. Probably not. So they kept the test pilot and changed how he died, and then they made sure the only Hal who could tell you was one who couldn’t lie.
Why He Never Let Go
The note got me to the question. The baseball is what answered it.
The father’s speech at the airfield is: you can throw it away, you can’t hold onto it forever, it’s exhausting. The kid throws it. The last thing the episode shows you, after Sinestro, is that same kid in his funeral clothes walking back out and picking it up.
My first read of that was loyalty. The dad’s gone, the ball’s what’s left, of course he goes back for it. And you can read it that way. You can read it as grief. You can read it as a kid who just can’t do what his father told him to do. I sat with all three, and the one that held up was the last one, and the reason it held up is last week.
I said it in Everyone Misread Hal Jordan’s Last Words: get past the bravado in that eulogy and what’s left is a man who was scared of being alone and knew the job could only be done one way. Easier to fly than to stay on the ground. I read that as a hero’s letter, most people read it as self-pity, and I didn’t have a great answer for why I heard it differently.
This episode is the answer. “Easier to fly than stay on the ground” is his father’s airfield speech in different words, and neither one of them could do it. The man who did ten years and came back to Rushville to knock on every door in a town that hated him is the kid who went back for the ball. He never put anything down. Not the town, not the job, not the ring, and by the end of this hour, not John.
That last one I got from the credits. The song is Queen, “Father to Son.” Take this letter that I give you, you’ll write it all again before you die. I clocked it live and I almost dismissed it as a needle drop, and then I thought about the key.
Hal’s father handed him a key to a safe and told him it stays between the two of them. Hal left John a key with a bird on it, on his body, where John would be the one to find it. For Hal, John is the kid he’s never going to have, and this episode has him do for John exactly what Martin did for him: leave him the box, and leave him to open it.
That’s the legacy the title’s talking about.
(I’ve got more on the Jordan boys as the comics actually wrote them, and where the show moved the family. I go a good bit deeper on it in this week’s sidebar video for members. If that’s your thing, I hope you’ll join me over there.)
The One Who Overcame Something
The episode changed temperature on me in the back half, and that’s most of why I land where I land on it.
John and the copy go through the portal, and they come out on a planet where everybody killed each other and then themselves. John’s been there before, in his head, back in 2016 when Antaan put those people’s memories in him. And what the show does with that is not what I expected. It puts John in the rain, and the gas gets in him, and he sees his father. Are you afraid, soldier. And a younger John says the quiet part out loud: you never wanted to be a Lantern, you just want to draw your little pictures.
And John puts a gun to his own head.
My first reaction was that it’s the fear gas, that it’s noise. But then the copy drags him out of the water and tells him what he was about to do, and I went, oh dang. That’s deep. That really did work.
And it worked because it wasn’t noise. The gas was the delivery. What came out was John’s. If you’ve been riding with me since the pilot you know I’ve read John’s refusal of the ring as a resignation letter to the Guardians, and this is the first time the show said it in John’s own voice. He was scared they’d know.
Here’s where I have to argue with myself, because there’s a version of this where the copy’s confession counts as the brave thing in the hour. A Hal who finally says it. I don’t think it counts, and the reason is what it cost him. Nothing. He’s dead, he’s a recording, the front’s gone because there’s nothing behind it to protect. John said his version with a gun in his hand on a planet full of people who’d done it.
That’s the difference between admitting fear and overcoming it, and the show knows the difference, because it built a scene around each one.
Which is why the ring coming off is doing the heavy lifting here. It comes off, and Hal stays. The copy says he’s got a little less than an hour of talk time, and as far as I can tell that clock stopped mattering, because John is holding him in the room without the ring. And this Hal does the thing the living one never did. Bravo. Well done, trainee. That’s amazing. And John’s face: Hal never complimented me before, this is just weird.
My audience called this a week ago, that John was going to keep the Halogram going without the ring the way he kept the bird going. I’ve got the receipts and we’ll show them Friday, because that’s what Fridays are for. You were right.
So keep the ring off. Let him power the thing himself. I’ve had a prediction since early in this run and I’m doubling down on it: sooner or later a ring in this show is going to say the sentence. For those of you playing at home, in the books the ring picks you with a line. You have the ability to overcome great fear. Overcome. Which means you had some.
Hal, by his own account, never had the fear to overcome. Broken, his word. John, tonight, in the rain, with a gun to his head, is the one person in this hour who overcame anything. Hal, man, you’re right. He can do something you can’t, and you’ve been telling him that since the bird.
The Xanshi Echo
I have to stop here, because I didn’t see it in the chair and I saw it in the edit.
A dead world with every living thing on it gone, and John Stewart with a gun to his own head. I’ve told you this story on this channel already, back when I put Hal and John on trial against their comic book selves. Cosmic Odyssey, 1988, Starlin and Mignola. John draws the planet Xanshi, tells the Martian Manhunter he doesn’t need help, the bomb is yellow, a world dies, and afterward he puts a gun to his head.
Now, how far does that get me? I don’t know that anybody in that writers’ room was thinking about Xanshi. What I know is that the image is the same image, and that this show has spent seven weeks proving it read the books.
So I’m calling it an echo and not a plan. If the finale makes it a plan, you heard it here.
What It Cost
But the hour costs something, and I have to charge for it.
It’s a penultimate episode that spends most of itself setting a table. Unless this is a cliffhanger, and I don’t think it is, we’re heading toward some long explanation of how Hal Jordan survived. Because we’re getting him back, I’d be surprised if that isn’t where this ends. And I don’t know how you make that leap. I don’t know how you come up with it.
What I do know is what it would cost. If the living Hal walks back in, then the confession in that boat belongs to a copy of a man who never said it, and the show has to decide whether the real one owns it. That’s the thing I’m actually worried about, more than the plausibility.
Then the planet. It’s a practical location, real ground, real light. I know that because the after show showed it. And I don’t know who decided to paint out the horizon, or when, or whether they always meant to build a composite on top of it. What I can judge is the finished image, and the finished image lost its distance. Take away the mountains and the horizon line and your eye has nothing to measure the ground against, so a real desert reads like a stage with a sky projected behind it. That’s a depth-cue problem more than a volume problem, and it was distracting on the first watch. If you’re the person about to type that it looks fake, it does, and it got made to look that way in a room afterward.
And Sinestro, who I owe you from the top. He’s on the island holding a hologram hostage and doesn’t know it’s a hologram. Probably doesn’t know Hal’s dead. Be realistic. Ulrich Thomsen gets a handful of lines and makes you want the finale.
But the line he gets is the father’s line. You must be John Stewart. Great arm, kid. A man standing on a planet where fear is the weather, greeting the son Hal never had with the words Hal’s father used at the airfield. I think that’s a recruiter. The show’s been pitching fear as a power source all hour, the yellow light, the gas, and now the man at the end of it is talking to John like a father talks to a kid with a good arm.
Two men offered John a legacy tonight. The finale’s going to be about which one he takes, and I could be wrong about that.
The Verdict
Lanterns Episode 7 lands at an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Kyle Chandler is playing two men in one body, and the difference is in how he listens. The living Hal lectured John in a café. The copy asks questions, laughs at his own jokes, calls him trainee like it’s a nickname and not a rank, and the first time John does something impressive he lights up instead of filing it. That’s a performance choice. The Kerry scene works because Kelly Macdonald plays the woman who’s steering (romantics don’t brag about being romantic, Tex) and he plays the one who’s asking. And the rain is earned, because five episodes of 2016 built the fear it pulls on.
What costs it is the hour’s shape, most of it spent setting up a finale it can’t show you, a planet that lost its depth in post, and a reveal that carries less weight than the show wants it to, even though the line it produces is the best of the season.
Two fathers told two boys to let go this week. One of them went back for the ball.
Your turn, and I want the real argument. Did that note deepen Hal Jordan, or did it just explain him? Because I think those are different things, and I think the show is betting you won’t notice. And if you called the ring coming off and Hal staying, the conversation lives in the comments on the video above, because Friday I’m putting your names on the table.
