Spoilers for the whole season. All eight.

695 of you named a killer before Sunday. 353 said Kerry.

That’s no landslide. That’s a coin flip. Half of you looked at the sheriff and said no way, and half of you looked at the same sheriff and said, that’s her.

And one of you said it on September 7th, the day after episode four.

“Episode is 12/10 episode. Loved it. Calling my shot: the sheriff Kerry Kane shoots Hal Jordan. Poor man can’t use his gut due to his crush.” @disconnected5495

Four episodes early. Zero likes. Nobody noticed.

So here’s the question I’ve been carrying since Monday. I called this a face-up mystery all season. Every card on the table, nothing hidden, you just had to read them.

Was I right? Or did the show palm one?

The Nation asked whether Lanterns played it straight, and who in this room read it first. So let’s open the file.

The Cards on the Table

Here’s what face-up means, because I want to be exact about the claim before I grade it.

A face-up mystery is one where the answer is on screen before the reveal, in a form a careful viewer can read. Not a vibe. A clue. Something you can actually point at.

So let’s point.

Episode five. Kerry empties a clip into Hal and the ring stops every round. The show spent an entire scene telling you she’ll shoot him and that only the ring saves him.

Episode six. Hal’s in the bleachers. No ring. No struggle. Sitting down. The only person in Rushville he’d sit down for with his guard off.

“Kerry pulled the trigger. It was foreshadowed in the previous episode. She emptied a clip on Hal, but he protected himself with the ring. Years later, no ring, sitting there in the bleachers without a sign of struggle. She definitely killed him. Without a doubt.” @TeddyG-m7z

That’s September 21st, two episodes before the show said it. And look at what Teddy did there. He didn’t guess. He put episode five next to episode six and read them as one sentence.

That’s the whole method. That’s what face-up means.

The Kid and the Wife

And it’s not just the murder.

Noah. 650 of you took a position on what the kid was, and 613 said Manhunter. That’s 94 percent. You can call it a twist. I call it checking to see if we’re asleep at the wheel.

Zoe was harder. 118 of you called it before episode four, and only 21 had her. Teddy again, August 24th, after episode two, and he gave you the reason.

“Screenwriting 101 tells us we’ve already met the suspect, and I know who it is, the rancher’s wife, Zoe. She’s quite intuitive for a trophy wife and happens to be around John at some crucial points in his journey.” @TeddyG-m7z

Screenwriting 101 indeed, my friend. He reads the show the way I read the show, and he beat me to it.

So that’s three of the four big cards on the table. The sheriff, the kid, the wife.

Now the fourth. Hal stays dead.

342 of you took a position on that. 28 said dead and staying dead. Twenty-eight. Nine in ten of you who took a side said he was coming back, and I was with those nine. I said it on camera two weeks ago. I told you Hal was coming back.

He didn’t. The people who wrote it said bringing him back would have been cheap, and after Sunday, I believe them.

So was that card face up? Yes, and this is the part that stings. The show never once told you Hal was coming back. We told each other. Every clue pointed at a dead man, and nine in ten of us decided the clues were lying because we wanted them to be.

Teddy’s not in that 28 either, by the way. Nobody’s perfect.

The Card They Hid

Here’s the card I think they actually hid, and it isn’t the one everybody’s arguing about.

The conception.

Kerry’s ex-husband had nothing to do with Noah. We learn that in the finale, in a line: “the miracle baby.” The kid was made.

Some of you asked that question back in the first half of the season, and I said what I’d say to anybody. If the show doesn’t give you information, you can’t suddenly assume all kinds of things. I stand by that as a way to watch television. But it means the show kept a card off the table and then played it in the last hand.

There’s nothing face-up about that. A reveal with no setup is a different kind of writing, and I think it’s the one place the season broke its own contract with you.

James Gunn has said this links to the Peacemaker finale and to the bigger thing this whole slate is building toward. I don’t know how I feel about that yet, and I’m not going to pretend I do.

So, face up? Three cards of four, yes. The fourth was sitting in the dealer’s sleeve.

And for those of you playing at home, the dealer’s sleeve has a history. I put it on your reading list back in August, the week this show premiered. Millennium #1 through #8, January and February 1988, Englehart and Staton. Manhunter sleeper agents embedded in ordinary human lives for decades, neighbors and family, and nobody noticed. The show didn’t invent that card. It just dealt it late.

Five Reads for Season 2

Last Friday I put five reads on the record about what that writers room means for Season 2. The finale changes a few of them. So let’s lay them out again, with the finale on the table.

One: it’s John’s show. The finale doubled down. He takes neither offer and both objects. He walks away from the Corps and from Sinestro, and he keeps the ring and the lantern. The last image of the season is John alone, deciding. Whatever Season 2 is, it starts from that frame.

Two: the universe gets bigger. The finale didn’t go there. The Guardians stayed in the corners and the sky stayed small. That read is still waiting on a Season 2 to answer it.

Three: Sinestro gets a point of view. Half right, and I think the half that’s right is going to be bigger than the read. There’s no yellow ring. I would have bet money on an actual yellow ring, and I’d have lost.

But look at what we got instead. John’s ring is tainted now. Tainted by fear. Tainted by yellow. Forget whether we get a Season 2 for a second. That one detail opens an entire other series of events.

Parallax and the Yellow Ring

So where’s the precedent?

The yellow impurity goes back to the very first Hal Jordan story, Showcase #22, 1959. What it means is Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver, Green Lantern: Rebirth, 2004. The impurity is Parallax. Fear living in the battery.

A ring tainted by yellow is the road to Parallax. Period, full stop. There’s no way around that.

Now, mind you, a Hollywood writer might be borrowing a comic book device to seed something in his own story. Marvel does that for a living. So I’m not holding anybody prisoner to it. But that’s the direction I’m coming from.

And Sinestro himself. I said this on the stream with Comics Explained: there’s every possibility he swims that lake of fear to get off that little island, because he’s going to be that desperate, and that breaks him. He’s already a villain, but he was a manageable villain. He goes from Hannibal Lecter to the Red Skull.

What do I mean by that? Lecter is evil by nature, plotting, manipulative. The Red Skull wanted cosmic power to reshape reality. I think that’s the level he’s at when he comes out of that lake. Far worse than he went in.

Four: somebody in charge isn’t clean. Nothing in the finale moved it. That one stays open.

Five: Hal doesn’t stay gone the way you think. This is the one I got half wrong on camera, so I want to be careful with it. The old Hal is gone. The copy stayed, the Hal who can’t lie, because why would he need to? He handed John his father’s line, and then he handed John the choice. Nobody in that room was hired to write the old Hal, and the finale agrees. That read holds, and it holds in the direction @wpmartin526 called it, not the direction I did.

So the finale didn’t grade the five reads. It raised the stakes on three of them. John alone with a tainted ring, and a desperate man on a planet made of fear. That’s the Season 2 room’s problem now.

24,072 Comments: The Rules

Now the part I promised you Monday.

I read 24,072 comments. Every top-level comment and every reply, in all 16 Lanterns videos on this channel. That’s 9,516 of you. And I want to tell you how, because the how is the point.

  • A call only counts if it came before the episode that revealed the answer.
  • One stance per person per claim, wherever you stood last. Changing your mind as the evidence comes in is following the evidence. That’s not cheating.
  • Calling the hard thing is worth more than calling the easy thing.
  • Calling it earlier is worth more than calling it late.
  • Citing something on screen is worth more than a hunch, and a miss costs you.
  • Likes count for nothing. Three of the top five receipts this whole season have zero likes. Nobody saw them at the time. I did.

And one rule above all of them: good faith only. If you were right about the show and wrong about how you talk to people in this room, you’re not on this list. I’m not punishing anybody. That just isn’t what the Know-It-All Nation is.

The Called Shot

Best single prediction of the season.

“Hal burns in a burning house, either trying to save someone or on purpose. He’s injured badly, then healed with the Manhunter tech like John. He finds out Noah is a Manhunter and can’t keep his mouth shut about it, so Kerry kills him in the stands, and Hal understands and ultimately is okay with it. Similar to Abin Sur, the Sinestro storyline is just to set up season two. Hal is going to stay dead.” @theshow0024

One comment, September 28th, the morning after episode seven. Six calls, six right, zero likes. That’s the finale, a week early, in a paragraph. The fire, the healing, the kid, the sheriff, Sinestro as setup, Hal stays dead, even the Abin Sur rhyme.

One swing, a thousand miles. But I said it on the stream and I’ll say it again: I’d rather have a hundred consistent home runs than one that went a thousand miles. So the big one isn’t for one comment. It’s for the record.

Best Detective

Solved the murder, and called at least four different things before the show revealed them, across at least three separate comments.

Third place: @whowantsit983. 27 comments across 13 of the 16 videos, in the room every single week. Four right out of six called, and the two misses were because he kept arguing with himself in public, which is exactly what I want this comment section to do.

Second place: @Slappy27. 13 comments. On August 31st, after episode three, he wrote that the Guardians wouldn’t be able to control John, and that’s why Guy gets the ring, five episodes early. Then on September 22nd:

“Noah’s a Manhunter, but he didn’t kill Hal. Kerry did it. Kerry is employing the same tactic Zoe used on John to manipulate Hal and later John.” @Slappy27

And the line after it, which I think is the best sentence anybody wrote about this show all season:

“The key to the magic trick is controlling where you look so you don’t see what the magician doesn’t want you to see. Noah is what the show wants you to see, but it’s actively diverting suspicion from Kerry.” @Slappy27

That’s a producer sentence, Slappy. That’s the chair.

Lord of the Lanterns

And first.

Four calls, four right. Zoe on August 24th, with a screenwriting argument, two episodes before the show. Kerry on September 21st, with four pieces of on-screen evidence. Noah on the 25th, with a theory of how the machine works that turned out to be way closer than mine. Zero likes on any of it. Nine comments, every one of them reasoning out loud, in good faith, from what was on screen.

“Hal told John not to tell anyone he came to Rushville because Hal knew he’d probably die that night without a fight. Why? It’s because he was going to die for love.” @TeddyG-m7z

Teddy. Lord of the Lanterns, first of his name.

Teddy, I’m talking to you now. You did what I do, and you did it with no camera, no audience, and nobody liking it. That’s the only reason this channel exists. You’re why.

And the one the Nation backed, the most liked right call of the season, with 484 of you behind it:

“I don’t trust Kerry either. I think she probably knows exactly what her son is, and I think if Hal found out, Kerry would do anything to protect him. She shot at Hal point-blank in episode five for the exact reason.” @Sheija

September 21st. Same day as Teddy, same evidence, and 484 people read it and said yes.

The File

You asked whether Lanterns played it straight. Here’s the file, the whole thing.

Three of the four big cards were on the table from the start, and this room read them. Half of you had the killer, nine in ten of you had the kid, 21 of you had the wife before the show did, and one of you had the whole finale a week out.

The card they hid was the one nobody was arguing about: the kid’s conception. That’s the one place the show asked you to accept a reveal it never set up.

And the card I got wrong wasn’t hidden at all. It was face up the whole time. I just wanted it to be another one.

That’s what an autopsy is for. The show gets graded, and so do I. A mystery is only face up if somebody reads it. 353 of you did.

Teddy, Slappy, whowantsit983, theshow0024, Sheija, Disconnected, and every name on the wall: you didn’t just watch this show with me. You read it better than I did, and the file says so.

Your turn. Somebody in that comment section is going to call the next finale a week early with zero likes. Not the theory, the clue: what’s the thing on screen you’d point at? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.