[COLUMN] Lanterns Breaks the Cycle | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the full first season of Lanterns, which just wrapped last night on HBO and is now streaming on HBO Max. It’s an incredible season of television, and comfortably among the best superhero film or television of the 2020s to date. There’s really only one other serious contender. So beware our spoilers. But otherwise, let’s get g-Oan.

It is perhaps the most reductive summary of Lanterns to suggest that it is a show about rings, in that it is quite literally about the struggle between veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and his trainee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) about who will get to wield the ring that serves as the superhero’s power source. As the tagline threatens, “Only one can wear the ring.”

However, part of what elevates Lanterns above so much modern superhero mass media is that the ring is not just a physical object. It is instead an expression of an underlying thematic idea nestled at the heart of the show, a concept that drives so much of the character and action over the course of the eight-episode season. Lanterns is a show about cycles and inheritances, about  the things that are passed down from one generation to another, with the ring itself a literal expression of this idea.

Lanterns is a show about parents and children. The two leads at the center of the series are defined by their relationship to their parents. In the show’s opening moments, Hal does an interview with 60 Minutes, citing the death of his father, test pilot Martin Jordan (Jake B. Miller), as a formative moment on his path to holding the ring. “Every kid’s worst fear is losing a parent,” Hal explains in the televised interview. “Once that happens… there is nothing to fear anymore.”

John has his own contentious relationship with his parents. His father (J. Alphonse Nicholson) had been considered as a candidate to hold the ring, but lost it by admitting that he was afraid. So his mother (Jasmine Cephas Jones) decides to raise John to be the perfect Green Lantern. She commits to raising him without fear. She has John’s father play William Tell with him. She has John walk alone through the city at night. This “training” inflicts incredible emotional damage on John.

Hal is nursing his own wounds. Martin Jordan’s plane crash was not an accident. On going through his father’s things in the wake of the tragedy, Hal discovers a suicide note. “My old man, he was convinced we’d be better off without him,” Hal admits. “Told me all this because my grandfather left him a note, to him, with the same pain – passed down generation to generation, father to son. They called it the Jordan Boys’ Legacy.” This is the heart of Lanterns. Suffering passed down.

This is reflected in the other characters that populate the show. Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) arrived in Rushville as a fugitive from Gotham, being chased by the mob. She was bearing the sins of her father, who had testified against the city’s organized crime community. “Your father was a snitch,” explains the mob enforcer (Monroe Robertson) sent to track her down. “That makes you a snitch by association.”

These inheritances need not be biological in nature. One of the defining relationships on the show is the dynamic between Hal Jordan and his mentor, the disgraced Green Lantern Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen). “Sinestro was Jordan’s teacher,” one of the Guardians of the Universe (Laura Linney) tells John. “A father figure.” Sinestro went rogue, murdered a Guardian. Hal was the one who stopped him. The Guardians are anxious about Hal – “beware his power” – because of that relationship.

Indeed, the central animating plot of Lanterns has Hal and John travelling to Rushville to track down an alien android known as a Manhunter. It turns out that the Manhunters were built by the Guardians. They are, in some senses, the Guardians’ children. The failure of the Manhunters led the Guardians to establish the Green Lanterns. In some senses, perhaps the Lanterns are the successors to the Manhunters. Rings and cycles and inheritances.

There is a sense in Lanterns that the characters are trapped in endless repetitive cycles of violence. So much of what happens in Lanterns is reactive, a response to some perceived past horror. Violence begets violence. Death begets death. For example, the horrific massacre that occurs in Rushville, an attack that murders the town, is spurred by Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor), a survivor of a genocide orchestrated by the Manhunter, bringing his own violence to the rural Nebraskan town.

There is a lingering question in Lanterns about how much freedom an individual has to determine their own course. How much of a person is defined by their own pre-existing relationships and history? This is an interesting theme in the context of an adaptation of a longstanding comic book, and it informs how much of the adaptation is both in conversation with its source material and how much of it offers its own interpretation.

The Manhunter has sought shelter in Rushville under the alias Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan). However, it has also had a child of its own. Kerry carries that child, Noah (Shea Pritchard), to term. Noah is a Manhunter, albeit one engineered by a Manhunter rather than directly created by a Guardian. He carries within him a legacy of genocide and suffering. He is incredibly dangerous. He is also completely innocent. He did not ask for any of this.

This is the central thematic point of the season, the question of whether Noah can be more than the sum of his programming. When Sinestro provides John with a Lantern, the digital ghost of Hal urges John to accept it before confronting Noah. “Use it,” the Halogram urges. “Or he’ll kill you.” John replies, “No, he won’t.” Later, Noah asks John, “Why did you kill my grandma?” John replies, “She was a Manhunter.” Noah responds, “You think that’s a good enough reason to murder someone?”

Noah acknowledges that he carries something of the genocidal Manhunter within himself. “I get these ideas,” Noah admits. “It’s like they’re in me. Like I don’t even think ’em. They just exist.” As Sinestro rather cynically observes, “The boy’s just struggling between his nature and his pedestrian human nurture. Nature always wins. It just takes time.” Kerry concedes some sense of anxiety about what she might have passed down to a biological child, with her “shitty genes.”

There is a broader point being made here. Lanterns is a superhero show, and the superhero genre is in many ways a meditation on American identity. The Manhunter is an expression of an anxiety simmering beneath the American consciousness, as Noah’s grandfather Will Macon (Garret Dillahunt) warned Hal in the first episode. “This land we’re on right now,” Will warned. “It was Kiowa, then Sioux. But across the ocean, boats were coming.”

The past couple of decades have seen an attempt to deal with the legacy of America’s original sins, the genocide of the indigenous population by the settlers and the horrors of slavery. There is a question about the extent to which contemporary America is defined by those atrocities, and how willing (or unwilling) the country is to grapple with that trauma, which is necessary to move past it. These anxieties are part of the American story, and it makes sense they informed Damon Lindelof’s last superhero show, Watchmen along with James Gunn’s own Peacemaker.

These themes also simmer through Lanterns. Race is central to the show’s understanding of the superhero power fantasy. “Do you understand how unfair it is to ask a Black man in America if he’s afraid?” John’s mother challenges the Guardians. Hal constantly tries to provoke John by making him “angry.” Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillon) wears a gold tooth and calls John “homes.” It is also rather pointed that the Manhunter’s original sin is genocide, with John and Hal visiting a desert world marked by skeletons of a people long erased.

So there is, in Lanterns, a sense of a meditation on the question of inheritance – of what it means to be part of a larger broken structure, and to have to deal with the legacy of the crimes and sins and failures of those who came before. However, Lanterns suggests that such progress is predicated on a willingness to learn, to evolve, to take accountability. The Manhunter builds a portal to the graveyard that she created. After he destroys Rushville, Hal Jordan moves back to make things right.

“She built it so she could visit the place she destroyed,” Sinestro explains of the portal the Manhunter constructed to this dead world. “Why would she do that?” John asks. Sinestro replies, “Same reason Jordan came back to Rushville. Weakness and guilt.” However, maybe guilt isn’t weakness. Maybe it is responsibility. And maybe it is a path to ensure that the next generation might be born free of the sins and shame of those who came before.

At a time when superhero stories can often feel like shallow power fantasies about strong men who should get to do whatever they want because they hold the power to do so, there is something very pointed and very considered in the emphasis that Lanterns places on rehabilitation and redemption. Hal takes responsibility for his part in destroying Rushville. He moves back, humbled. He tries to give back to the community. He tries, in small ways, to make right an enormous wrong.

As such, it makes sense that the first season of Lanterns unfolds across decades: Hal receives the ring in 1986, reveals his identity in 1996, loses it in 2016, and John claims it in 2026. This is a superhero story about time. And, in a genre often stuck in a perpetual present and also pulled towards nostalgia, Lanterns is a story about progress. The choice of 2016 as a disastrous year feels quite deliberate, a moment when it felt like America very strongly rejected the idea of progress.

In the end, both Hal and John decide that Noah should be free to make his own way in the world, to try to be better than what he has inherited from his forebearers. This is mirrored in John’s own arc. Lanterns ends with Johns rejecting the structures imposed upon him. Just as he only really became himself after he left the marines, he also refuses to serve in the army that the Guardians have constructed. John is his own man, his own person, making his own choices on his own terms.

This is the central paternal relationship at the heart of Lanterns. Hal is a mentor to John, just as Sinestro was to him. Throughout the show, Hal refers to John as “Junior”, referencing the fact that he took his father’s name, but also as a way of asserting his own seniority. At the end of Lanterns, just as Noah tries to come into his own, the Halogram is proud to see John become his own man. “My gut tells me you’re gonna be better at this job than I ever was,” Hal tells his trainee. “You’re ready.”

That is, perhaps the best that a parent can ever hope for, that their child might be better than they were and that this generation might finally break free of the cycles of violence and recrimination that govern so much of the world. It is a hopeful ending, and an honest one. In some ways, it recalls the hope at the end of One Battle After Another that the next generation may yet redeem this lost world. Lanterns offers a beacon of light, shining into the future.