A week ago I told you Hal Jordan was coming back. Nine out of ten of you who took a side said the same thing. The show said no to all of us.

So that one’s on me.

What the internet’s mad about this morning is the suit. Eight episodes and the man never puts it on, and I wanted it too.

But John Stewart has been refusing the suit since 1971.

I’ve watched the finale twice now, and where I keep landing is disappointed, yet satisfied. A whole bunch of stuff I wanted didn’t happen, and what did happen mostly worked. I came out of this finale with two answers, and they belong to two different people. The fan in me has one. The producer in me has the other.

What the Fan Saw

Let me start with the fan, because the fan is the easy part.

The scene I keep going back to is the car. Noah’s sitting there, and he says he’s afraid his programming is going to happen. John sits down next to him and says, more or less, yeah, I felt the same thing about mine. When I heard that I went, that’s it. That’s what this whole show has been talking about. Noah’s a Manhunter, built to do one thing. John’s a soldier, raised to do one thing. Both of them got handed a program by somebody who loved them, and the whole question of the season is whether you get to say no to it.

Then Hal. The copy. He’s been calling John “trainee” for weeks. Chris Mundy said the copy never once called him “Junior.” Not one time, until the last line. “I love you too, Junior.” Then John charges the ring, and the charge is what erases him. He has to let go of the last Hal to become the next Lantern. That works on me. That just works.

Guy Gardner shows up, and John tells him to get rid of the gold tooth. “You take the stars, I’ll take the dirt.” That was fun. That was a guy who’s been told what to do his whole life finally getting to say it back.

And Kerry.

I’ve already seen people asking how she did it, how she got the jump on him, how she could be that calm afterward and ask John whether Noah’s going to be okay. If you’re asking that, you’ve clearly never been a parent. Hal walks up and tells her he knows what her son is, and he wants to run. She’s terrified, and what she does is a reflex. That’s the killer instinct of a mom, boom, out, done, and then, oh my God, what did I do. Say what you want about her, that’s the most human thing in the hour.

And Earl got a home with the Stewarts. Somebody had to say it.

Now the stuff I didn’t get. I wanted a funeral. I wanted a real hero’s funeral for Hal Jordan, so bad. I didn’t get it. And I’ll say it again: not getting the thing you wanted isn’t a note on the episode.

Here’s what I think people are missing about Hal. Some of you said he just got shot and we moved on. We didn’t move on. We spent a whole season on the fact that he got shot. That’s the inciting event, and believe it or not, that’s more weight than most shows ever give the thing that starts the story. Damon Lindelof said from the very early days of the room they didn’t want it to be a fake-out, and they held to it.

The Wrong Complaint

But the fan isn’t who’s writing the comments this morning. The comments are about three things. No suit. Somebody went and changed the oath. And the lantern’s got yellow in it. The books have an answer for every one of them.

The suit. You can call it the show chickening out on the costume, and I get it, I wanted the moment too. But go back to John Stewart’s first appearance: Green Lantern #87, December 1971, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams. Hal hands him the uniform. John takes it, and on that very first page he refuses the mask. Says he’s got nothing to hide. Fifty-four years ago, John Stewart was already editing the costume on day one. That’s the show going back to his first page.

The oath. You can call it a rewrite of the most famous four lines in comics. “In brightest day, in darkest night.” But Lanterns have been writing their own oaths for as long as there have been Lanterns. Alan Scott, the first Green Lantern, All-American Comics #16, July 1940, started with a completely different one, about shedding light on dark evil. And my favorite: Rot Lop Fan, Green Lantern Corps Annual #3, 1987, Alan Moore. He’s a Lantern who can’t see light at all. Brightest day means nothing to him. So he writes his own. “In loudest din.”

Nietzsche for Speed put this in the chat during the livestream and said it better than I did: “In the comics other lanterns have their own personal oaths too. Hal became kind of the norm because of his legend.” That’s exactly right. The standard oath is Hal’s oath. John isn’t Hal.

The yellow. This one goes all the way back. Showcase #22, 1959. Abin Sur, dying, hands Hal the ring and tells him it’s useless against anything yellow, because there’s an impurity in the battery. That’s in Hal Jordan’s very first story. Forty-five years later, Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver turned that impurity into Parallax in Green Lantern: Rebirth. Fear, living inside the light. And the rule Rebirth gave us is that a Lantern who can overcome great fear can beat the yellow.

After episode seven I said sooner or later a ring in this show was going to say the sentence. “You have the ability to overcome great fear.” And a ring did get an oath. In John’s mouth. And the word isn’t “overcome.” It’s “embrace.” “I’ll embrace my fear, I’ll do what’s right.”

That’s the one real canon move in this whole hour. The show built a lantern out of a place where fear is the water, handed it to the one man who’s spent eight episodes being told what to be, and let him say yes to the fear instead of fighting it. Tom King said it flat out: “John is not 100% a Green Lantern anymore.” He chose this one.

DetectiveBUTZ, in the livestream chat, called the yellow streaks kintsugi, the Japanese pottery where you fix the crack with gold. That’s the gold in the crack. I don’t know yet if it’s a bomb or a scar, and I don’t think the show does either. But somebody in that room chose it.

So the three things everybody’s mad about are three things the comics already did. Which means the complaint everybody has is the wrong complaint. The right one needs a different chair.

(I’ve got more on the yellow, and on how many times the books have killed Hal Jordan and how long they let it stick. 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.)

Where the Climax Went

Okay. The producer.

If you’ve been on this channel for any amount of time, you know I’m a little obsessive about penultimate episodes. A penultimate episode only has two jobs, and there’s no exception to this. Either it’s the climax, and the finale is the fallout, where you get to watch everybody deal with what just happened. Or it’s the runway, and the finale is the climax.

Episode seven looked like a runway. It built the island, it built Sinestro, it built the fear, it built the confession in the boat, and everything in it said the big thing is next week. Then the big thing never came. The finale is three acts of buildup to a climax that isn’t in it. By my own rule, this was neither.

You can say they never wanted an action finale, and Chris Mundy said exactly that this week: “There was never a version of the finale that was more action-oriented.” Fine. I believe him. But I’m not asking for a fight. I’m asking where the peak is, and this one is still climbing when the credits roll.

The parts of Hal’s story they added here should’ve been in last week’s episode. Put the backstory in seven, and you’ve got room in eight for everything they revealed. Instead the finale has to stop and explain, and Mark Zutkoff put it in a Super Chat before I could: a lot of tell, not show, talking head after talking head. I’m with Mark. That’s never a good thing, and there’s a lot of it here.

The show is shot beautifully. It looks great all season, and it looks great here. But the flying. Guy Gardner lands, and that’s practical, on a crane, and it reads like Nathan Fillion on a hook. Then John goes up, and he goes from standing normal to this position that feels awkward, like his body’s being pulled up by something. Kyle Chandler had a smoothness to it earlier in the season that this just doesn’t have. I can’t tell you they ran out of money. I can tell you that’s what it looks like. And John’s mom, Bernadette: her makeup, they could’ve done better there.

So the producer’s note on this finale is structure. Hollywood keeps doing this. They build the runway beautifully and then forget a landing needs a climax to land from.

The Verdict

Lanterns Episode 8 lands at an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index, and it’s one of those two-score deals, because I’m at war with myself on this one.

The fan in me gives it a 10. Aaron Pierre carries the weight of the whole show on his face in that car. Kyle Chandler gets one line, “Junior,” and makes the whole season pay off. Kelly Macdonald plays a mother who did the worst thing in the world for the only reason that makes sense. And the oath is a choice, which is exactly what John Stewart has never been allowed to make.

The producer in me gives it a 7. A finale with no climax under it, a penultimate episode doing the wrong job, too much of the hour told instead of shown, and a flight that should’ve been the shot of the season and came out stiff.

Put the two together, and that’s the 8.5.

John Stewart stuck the landing. The finale just left him to do it alone.

From the Livestream

During the finale livestream, the Nation sent a hundred and two Super Chats, and twenty went by faster than I could read them. I answered every one in the video. A few that sharpened the argument:

Kelvington: “I was 100% wrong, you were 100% correct and I’m big enough man to admit it.” That right there is the Nation. Saying you got it wrong out loud is harder than getting it right, and I just did the same thing about Hal.

Pat Martin: “I feel like they hand waved John’s family.” Fair, and it’s the same note I’ve got on the whole hour. The reunion is one of the things the finale told us instead of showing us.

Rob Buck loved John telling the Guardians, basically, I took care of your Manhunter problem, you’re going to let me have this ring. Chris Mundy said it himself: John is more or less blackmailing the Guardians right now. That’s a heck of a way to start a career.

Eric Meyer read Noah lying about killing Hal as his programming trying to push John to kill him. I read it the other way, as Noah breaking his programming. But if Eric’s right, that car scene gets a whole lot darker.

Carlos Freytes: “IMO the moral was that our folks give their traumas to us, but they’re also doing their best to protect us from them. It’s on us to overcome them.” That’s the car scene in one sentence.

And Jacob Hall asked whether a revived Hal comes back as Parallax. I think they’ve got Parallax on the board, but I think it’s for John this time, not Hal. In the comics it was always Hal who carried that. This show handed John the lantern with the yellow in it.

Your turn, and I want the real argument. Was episode five the climax of this season, and the last two hours were the fallout? Or did Lanterns build a runway and never take off? Your answer probably tells you whether you loved this finale or just liked it. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.