Hal Jordan has had the opposite trajectory. After serving time in prison for what happened, a sentence he served without mentioning John’s name, Hal moved to Rushville in a failed attempt to atone for his crimes. He offers to do good works for the citizens, and kindles a romance with Sheriff Kerry, now divorced from Billy. Hal asks John to meet one last time, hoping for some sort of recognition from the other guilty party, but John refuses. The next thing John knows, he’s been called back to Rushville to help Kerry with Hal’s murder.
Despite the fact that “Bad Optics,” directed by Stephen Williams and written by Justin Britt-Gibson and Damon Lindelof, finally gets back to the dead Hal Jordan that we saw at the end of episode 1, it doesn’t really address the mystery. There’s some talk about possible suspects, with John immediately ruling out Kerry. But instead, the episode wants to let John face the past he left behind. That ranges from preparing for Hal’s funeral with the help of current Green Lantern Guy Gardner, played by a returning and more foul-mouthed Nathan Fillion, and being blackmailed by Maggie (Hannah Christine Shetler), the little girl who watched John steal Hal’s ring in 2016.
“Bad Optics” lets Lanterns get back to doing what it does best, examining a person overburdened by responsibility. John wants to believe that he’s put his Green Lantern days behind him and that he’s happier for it. He wants to believe that he did nothing wrong in 2016, that all those people died because Hal made a mistake. But Hal’s murder forces him to see the truth.
The focus on John’s journey gives Aaron Pierre room to do his best work yet as a man who can’t acknowledge his own feelings. Pierre puts just a little too much energy into John’s pitches to clients and to the way he teases with Kerry and Noah (now played by Shea Pritchard) at dinner. With just a bob of his head, he transitions John from false friendliness when encountering Billy to rage, sucker-punching him and other angry Rushville residents. And Pierre goes dead-eyed when John talks with his brothers, trying to pretend that he cares about his next client as much as he ever cared about the ring.
Outside of the final moment, in which John gets enough charge from Hal’s ring to revive the Hal-o-Gram, Kyle Chandler only appears in one scene as a living person. But that’s all he needs to make his presence known through the rest of the episode. Chandler has done incredible work on this show to make Hal an arrogant jerk who deserves a punch in the face and the most charming, charismatic man on the face of the planet. He retains both those qualities during his reunion with John, but Chandler also adds a level of sadness and regret. He knows that he messed up, but he knows that John messed up, too. He hopes that the recognition will be enough for John to extend the grace he cannot extend himself, to prove that—as he wrote about himself in his own eulogy—he mattered.
The pathos in Hal works to make the audience believe everything that Kerry says about his actions in the past six years. It also adds strength to John’s redemption story as he makes his way back to the ring. Hal may have been less worthy than John, but he’s had the bravery to try to make things right, something John’s still too scared to do. Even better, the episode doesn’t use superpowers to undo the mess that the two men made, and instead treats the ring as a standard that they both failed to uphold.
