The Guardians of the Universe must have a terrible HR department if a Green Lantern is allowed to treat a trainee the way Hal Jordan treats John Stewart on HBO‘s Lanterns. Constantly belittled and insulted, kept in the dark about vital information, forced to perform tasks that are demeaning or dangerous with little to no bearing on his actual job as the next Green Lantern, John takes nothing but grief from this guy, and has nothing but grief to show for it. I get that John is a chain-of-command guy — we’ve seen how he was raised — but this isn’t Pete Hegseth’s military. You’re still allowed to complain about abuse.
After tossing a bucket of cold water on him to wake him up (you see what I’m saying? it never ends with this asshole!), Hal tells John it’s time to learn to fly, without any further instructions of note. John manages to conjure an emerald-green bird, which somehow continues to follow him around even after he takes off Hal’s ring and travels halfway across the country from it. You can tell from Hal acting like this is no big deal that it is, in fact, a big deal.
John’s big job this week is to go get Hal’s actual, physical Green Lantern from his mansion in Coast City (one of the DC Universe’s many fictional locales, like Gotham City and Metropolis). Hal keeps it in a cool safe that contains a pocket dimension. Hal also has a pet carnivorous extraterrestrial plant like something out of Alien: Earth that he makes John feed without telling him what it is first. The guy cannot not be a jerk to poor John.
He’s lucky John’s as loyal a guy as he turns out to be. John gets jacked by a gang of aliens, the same kind who were shot at the football game in Rushville, Nebraska. Their leader (played by character actor Paul Ben-Victor, a “hey, it’s that guy!” hall of famer) says they’re on Earth in search of a Manhunter. John, naturally, has no idea what they’re talking about, because that would have required his teacher to actually teach him something.
The alien leader explains that Manhunters predated the Green Lanterns, and were far more extreme in their pursuit of “justice.” Infiltrating a troubled galaxy by perfectly mimicking its inhabitants, the synthetic Manhunters wiped out entire alien races, including his own. He and his fellow survivors use some kind of device to Clockwork Orange the “holocaust” their planet experienced directly into John’s brain to make him understand what they’re up against, and how it feels to have your world destroyed by this monster.
The aliens believe the Guardians of the Universe, the Green Lanterns’ bosses, secretly saved and hid the Manhunter that killed their people. Putting two and two together, John concludes that Abin Sur, the Green Lantern who died in a ship crash and passed on his ring, must have been transporting the Manhunter for safekeeping on Earth. Now it’s in Rushville, and it knows the aliens are onto it. Unless John and Hal find it and stop it, the aliens will blow half of Nebraska to kingdom come in order to kill it, lest it cause even more carnage itself. They tell John not to let Hal know about any of this, since it’s possible he’s in on it.
Considering the Hal we know, that’s unlikely. He spends the episode disrupting town meetings and generally making a nuisance of himself for Sheriff Kerry, for whom he has an obvious thing, even if it’s not quite obvious to Hal himself yet. He also becomes something of a grave-robber, hauling the alien corpses out of the morgue dicks-to-the-wind to test a theory. Sure enough, the “metal detectors” installed at the football stadium by Kerry’s father-in-law, William Macon, were designed to detect aliens, not metal. That’s how they ID’d their targets.
This makes Hal even more curious about William Macon himself. But when he walks onto the big man’s property demanding answers about this incredibly sophisticated technology (Hal says he’s never seen it anywhere else in the galaxy) and Macon’s mysterious benefactor, he gets shot through the shoulder for his efforts.
In the hospital, he and Kerry apologize to one another for stomping all over each other’s respective jurisdictions. Kerry reveals she’s originally from Gotham City (Kelly Macdonald is gonna have to explain that Midwestern accent, then)…and Hal wonders why he’s literally the only patient in a hospital brimming with brand-new equipment.
John returns to find his reluctant mentor banged up but out of the hospital. He delivers not only the ring-recharging Lantern that Hal asked for, but the uniform he expressly did not.
Surprisingly, considering their rapport, John immediately comes clean about his erstwhile alien abduction, how they’re searching for a Manhunter and believe it’s in Rushville. (I believe it’s Zoe, Macon’s incongruously cool and not-blonde wife; that would explain his defensiveness about aliens.) He also mentions that the aliens said his seemingly permanent bird construct was so sophisticated it was practically impossible…then crushes it into pixie dust in his hands. I guess he’s a guy who doesn’t get too attached.
Afterwards, Hal suits up (hooray!) and travels to a remote pocket-dimension prison. There, he finds Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), the rogue Green Lantern who attempted a coup, killed a Guardian, and was taken down by Jordan himself. (Kerry tells Hal he talked about Sinestro in his sleep.) When he demands to hear everything Sinestro knows about Manhunters, the prisoner calls them the second-greatest threat Hal is facing…then asks about John Stewart.
As someone who’s read a fair number of Green Lantern comics, it’s difficult for me to say whether a great big introduction for SINESTRO!!! means anything to anyone not familiar with the character and mythos already. But his presentation as “Hannibal Lecktor” to Hal Jordan’s Will Graham in (appropriately) Michael Mann’s Manhunter — the imprisoned killer whose capture both made this lawman’s reputation and broke his spirit — creates an instantly recognizable and compelling dynamic regardless. It’s not terribly original (neither is the Spider-Man 2 powers-on-the-fritz flying attempt by John) but it gets the job done.
Meanwhile, the core cast continues to exude charisma from every pore. Does it help that Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, Kelly Macdonald, and Poorna Jagannathan are all really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking? Yes, but they also all have an easy, convincing chemistry. This is true even of Chandler and Pierre as Jordan and Stewart, whose relationship feels like the former finding out just how far he can push things before the latter finally snaps. As always, I’m hoping a giant green fist is involved.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.