Spoilers for Lanterns Episode 7 follow, including discussion of suicide.
Lanterns just dropped one of its heaviest Hal Jordan reveals yet, and suddenly the mystery surrounding his death looks a whole lot more complicated.
For most of the season, the series has kept Hal’s apparent murder simmering while John Stewart and Hal focused on the larger Manhunter mystery. As you know, the premiere ended with the bombshell that Hal Jordan was dead.
Naturally, fans started looking for loopholes. Could the body be an alien duplicate? There’s also the popular theory that the dead Hal is some kind of clone. Episode 7 doesn’t confirm or kill those theories. Instead, it introduces a disturbing piece of Hal’s family history that completely changes what we know about Martin Jordan and potentially reframes Hal’s death.
The episode takes us back to Hal’s younger years and gives us a better look at his relationship with his father. We see where some of Hal’s stubbornness and attitude came from, but there’s a much darker part of Martin’s story that Hal has carried with him ever since.
While speaking to John Stewart through the construct created by his Power Ring, Hal reveals that his father’s death wasn’t the accident everyone believed it to be.
Martin died while working as a test pilot, which lines up with Hal’s traditional DC Comics origin. However, this version of Hal knows there was more to it. A month before Martin died, he told his son about a safe in their home and instructed him to open it if anything happened to him.
Inside was a note. Martin had been struggling with depression and believed his family would be better off without him. His condition was getting worse, and he could no longer hide what was happening. Hal then reveals that Martin’s father went through the same thing.
The family even had a name for this generational cycle of depression: “The Jordan Boys Legacy.” It leads to an incredibly heavy admission from Hal about the way he sees himself and possibly even why he was chosen to become a Green Lantern:
“I’m not fearless because I’m brave; I’m fearless because I’m broken.”
That’s a major departure from DC Comics canon. Martin Jordan has traditionally died in a test-piloting accident, an event witnessed by a young Hal that profoundly shaped the person he became. The comics haven’t treated Martin’s death as a concealed suicide, so Lanterns is making a substantial change to the Jordan family history.
More importantly, the series may be using Martin’s story to make us question everything surrounding Hal’s own death.
After learning that Hal is dead, John discovers a key decorated with a bird that eventually leads him toward a hidden box. Once Episode 7 reveals what happened with Martin, the parallel becomes hard to ignore.
Hal’s father left his son a key to something containing a final message. Now Hal appears to have left something behind for John.
The implication is grim. Lanterns wants us to at least consider the possibility that Hal repeated the same cycle as his father. Except the evidence surrounding his death doesn’t neatly support that explanation.
Hal died from a single gunshot wound to the forehead. While suicide by that method isn’t impossible, the circumstances can also fit someone being deliberately shot by another person. There’s still plenty about his death that doesn’t add up.
Then there’s what Hal and John ultimately find at the end of this trail. Sinestro, who is out of captivity and hiding on a dead planet, which certainly doesn’t make the situation any less suspicious.
Episode 7 could be steering us toward the simplest and saddest explanation for Hal’s fate, only to pull the rug out in the finale.
It could also be giving us genuine insight into Hal’s state of mind while keeping the actual circumstances of his death separate from his family history. The clone and alien-copy theories aren’t necessarily dead either.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, this was a heavy episode for Hal Jordan. I’m also surprised by how much the changes are working for me. This isn’t the exact Hal Jordan or family history that comic readers know, but Lanterns has found an interesting way into the character.
Hal’s bravado, fearlessness, stubborn personality, and willingness to throw himself into danger now carry some additional weight.
Changing established comic book history can easily go sideways, especially with a character as important as Hal. In this case, I’m open to what Lanterns is doing. The series isn’t simply changing Martin Jordan’s death for shock value. It’s using that history to explore what drives Hal while tying it directly into the season’s central mystery.
Now the big question heading into the finale is whether “The Jordan Boys Legacy” actually explains Hal Jordan’s fate, or whether Lanterns just handed us its most convincing misdirection yet.
With Sinestro waiting at the end of the trail and the circumstances of that gunshot still unresolved, I’m betting there’s more to Hal’s death than Episode 7 wants us to believe.
