Right off the bat, “The Jordan Boys” works to address that admission and restructure the show. We open in 1975, where a young Hal (Henry Samiri) has angered his baseball coach by refusing to give up his pitching position amidst a no-hitter. His father Martin (Jake B. Miller) arrives to back up his son by fighting with the coach, and then taking him to an airfield to share a few life lessons. Although slightly overcooked (that coach is way too angry, even by the standards of television depictions of ’70s gym teachers), the scene elegantly demonstrates how Hal inherited the charms and struggles of his father. Furthermore, Hal inherited the ability to use the former to hide the latter.
As the Hal-o-Gram travels through Rushville with John and realizes the foibles of his older self, that lesson becomes increasingly clear. It leads to the revelation that Hal makes late in the episode, after John has already been exposed to the fear toxin that killed Antaan’s people. Not only does Hal admit that Martin committed suicide, but that his lack of fear is in fact a deep-seated terror that he too will succumb to the legacy left by the men in his life.
Put another way, Hal recognizes that what people understand as heroic bravery is in fact cowardice on a profound level, one that refuses to acknowledge desperate vulnerabilities. That revelation pairs with the way the show has been building John’s fearlessness, the result of trauma that his father passed on to atone for a moment of human vulnerability. The series understands bravery as a refusal to acknowledge what makes us afraid, not an overcoming of it, and shows how men in particular destroy themselves as a result.
“The Jordan Boys” unfolds makes this point while still telling an entertaining sci-fi story. Not everything works; the Maggie subplot still hasn’t justified its existence and the “hat ceremony” story works only as a rejoinder to Hal and John’s paternal legacies, not as a plot point in its own right.
But everything else in the episode entertains, despite the heavy subject matter. Kelly Macdonald would not be the first actor who leaps to mind when casting the daughter of a Gotham criminal who becomes a no-nonsense small-town sheriff, but she threads the needle between warmth and openness and toughness (when needed). Seeing her response to the Hal-o-Gram should convince viewers that Kerry and Hal had a proper romance, something mentioned but not really proven in the previous episode.
Even better is the space-faring adventure that closes the episode. The planet itself looks a little underdeveloped, even for a landscape after an android genocide, but the concept of traveling across space and time to a mysterious purple factory on a strange island warms the hearts of anyone who loved part three of Twin Peaks: The Return. That’s especially true when Sinestro turned up, paying off hopes that he’d be more than a Hannibal Lecter surrogate. Ulrich Thomsen has certainly made an impression with his limited screen time, but can he sustain that level of menace in the finale?
