Last Sunday, HBO debuted their new series about DC Comics’ Green Lantern Corps, called simply Lanterns. I’m still not sure how I think about it.
The Green Lantern was a Golden Age superhero who got his powers from a magic ring that could create any object or energy through force of will, just as long as it was glowing and green. In the Silver Age (mid-50’s on) they re-imagined the hero as just one member of a Green Lantern Corps equipped by the Guardians of the Galaxy Universe with a high-tech gadget. Which matters because this show is largely about passing the baton. It stars Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights) and Aaron Pierre. Chandler plays the most famous Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, and Pierre is John Stewart, his trainee and potential replacement. In the comics, the depiction of Hal Jordan seems to oscillate between Tom Cruise-style fighter jock and dead-serious law enforcement man, whereas John Stewart is always dead-serious. In this show, they’re going mostly with Hal as the cocky ex-fighter pilot, although with enough savvy and experience to back it up. Meanwhile the pilot episode helps establish why John is so dead serious: He idolized Hal as a child, so his Dad decided to train his Green Lantern fearlessness by taking him to stand at the garage door and do the “William Tell act.”
Otherwise this show is low-key to a fault. Hal never wears his uniform, and rarely uses his ring for anything besides stupid stuff like conjuring a $20 bill for the jukebox. (Probably because the last time DC did a full four-color version of Green Lantern, it didn’t work so well.) The result makes the pilot episode play out like any small-town police procedural on TV, which seems like the idea. In 2016, Hal and John arrive in this one-street town where local law enforcement is investigating the murder of some men on the high school football field. Except, no one local knows who these people were. Hal wants to get involved because he suspects extraterrestrial activity. The sheriff disagrees. Everyone in town knows who Hal is and that aliens are real, but they don’t trust his motives. Eventually Hal finagles his way into interrogating the main suspect, and eventually the guy confesses, yes, he is an alien, and he has an explosive system fused to his skeleton that can take out the whole town. Hal puts a force bubble around him but the blast still blows out the back wall of the jail.
Which ends that part of the story. But ten years later, in 2026, the same sheriff calls John Stewart back to town and shows him the football field, where Hal Jordan’s body sits frozen in the snow, with a wound to his head, and no ring.
It is not clear if John has a ring in the present day, especially because this is the universe from the last Superman movie, where Earth’s Green Lantern was Guy Gardner (played by Nathan Fillon). And Fillon is shown in the upcoming episode previews.
So much like Alan Moore’s Watchmen, this series starts with the murder mystery of who killed a veteran hero. Speaking of Watchmen, the production of Lanterns includes Damon Lindelof, who helped produce the HBO Watchmen series that took place after Moore’s story, and was an interesting if often flawed experiment. It would also explain why Lanterns looks so much more like modern TV than a superhero movie. And while I don’t like that they made Hal an outright dick, most of this story is apparently going to be flashback, so we might find out why that is, and how John fits in to all of this. Lanterns seems like it will be worth checking out.