Of course, it doesn’t go as planned, for a variety of reasons. Hal apparently left John to burn alive in the wrecked car and never came back to check on him, giving space for Zoe to arrive and rebuild his charred body using Manhunter tech. Hal also neglects to recharge his ring before rendezvousing with Antaan, so when Antaan and his men start exploding themselves and when the Macon satellites start destroying Rushville from the sky, Hal’s ring has barely enough power to contain some of the blasts. Worse, when Hal does steal away to charge his ring, he gets interrupted by John, who has arrived to take what belongs to him.
Yes, that’s right: while scores of innocent people die in a conflict that John and Hal exacerbated, our heroes duke it out in a hotel room.
Before we get too angry at what has been heretofore a great TV show, let’s get a little context. “Lights Out” is just the fifth part of an eight-episode series, the right time for a surprising fall from grace. Moreover, Lanterns has never been more devoted to the True Detective model, putting its big action set-piece midway through the season instead of at the end. In the first season of that show, the flashy oner in episode four represented the break in the past that required Marty and Rust to reconvene in the present. The fact that Hal is dead in 2026 complicates Lanterns‘s ability to perfectly follow in the footsteps of its HBO big brother, but we can probably guess that there’s more to Hal and John’s actions than what we see on screen.
Finally, there is the fact that John ultimately uses the defeated Hal to draw Zoe into the open so he can kill her with a sniper shot. And in his final exchange with the Guardian, when he gives up the ring he spent his whole life chasing, John admits that he had been on the wrong path, which suggests that his heroic turn actually begins now.
But is that consistent with what this show has been building thus far? For all his arrogance, Hal has been shown to be constantly competent. And while his gut was bound to be wrong eventually, forgetting to charge his ring or letting John burn to death feels like the actions of a different person, not intuition gone wrong. Likewise, John may be disillusioned by his parents’ expectations and drawn to Zoe’s frankness, but he’s repeatedly shown attention and care to regular people, as when he taught Noah how to throw a football. He wouldn’t pause his quest for the ring for a moment to deal with the devastation around him?
Beyond poor character choices, “Lights Out” betrays two other things that have been impressive thus far. We’ve been able to forgive the show’s decision to keep superhero shenanigans on the periphery and let the character-driven mystery play out. But when you have lasers blasting from the sky and aliens blowing up, a path has been opened to fanciful Green Lantern constructs. We do get to see Hal make bubbles and shields and cyclones to deal with the chaos, but he has to rely on infrared goggles to get through a black cloud and he uses fists to deal with most of Macon’s men. If ever there was a time for Lanterns to be a superhero show, this was it.
