Warning: This story contains major spoilers for Episode 8 of Lanterns.
It’s official: Now that Lanterns has ended its season, it’s cool to be a Green Lantern fan again.
Even John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), who previously refused the opportunity to wear the green power ring after a lifetime of training, has come to embrace the mantle. In Sunday’s season finale, John finally took up the ring and lantern, declaring that he will watch over Earth even though Sector 2814 already has a Green Lantern named Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion). John even wrote his own version of the Green Lantern oath to underline his unorthodox approach.
In brightest day, in darkest night, I’ll embrace my fear, I’ll do what’s right.
I choose this ring, I choose this fight in service to this lantern’s light.
The finale also answered the question the premiere left viewers with: Who killed Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and why?
Kelly Macdonald as Kerry Kane in ‘Lanterns’John Johnson/HBO Max
It was Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), who killed him to protect the secret that her son, Noah (Shea Pritchard), is part Manhunter.
As for John, Lanterns co-creator and co-showrunner Chris Mundy tells Gold Derby, “His path to the ring wasn’t a path that anyone had ever taken before. One, he interviewed for the job. The ring didn’t choose him, the Guardians did. Another is the relationship he is forging right now: ‘I’m down here, I’m part of this, but I’m also my own free agent as well.’ There’s something about oaths that are very much pledging allegiance to the main organization or state or whatever it is. It felt like, because of his independent path and independent reality, he could and should create his own. But at the same time, we stuck close to the original. The spirit of it is it wasn’t an overhaul. It was just like, we’re going to personalize it a little bit.”
John’s power ringHBO
The spirit of this is true to the DC Comics source material. In his very first appearance as a Green Lantern, Stewart refused to wear a mask, immediately asserting his independence from predecessor Hal Jordan. In the show, too, John and Hal have very different approaches to the ring. From its premiere episode, Lanterns has combined sci-fi superhero mythology with cop TV tropes, such as a contentious relationship between a cranky old veteran and a young upstart rookie. Now John is embodying another genre archetype, that of the independent investigator who works with police while also keeping his distance from the official force.
“There’s going to be a different kind of tension between him and his bosses,” Mundy says. “There’s always a tension between boss and employee on some level, but when it’s like, ‘I’m part of the company, but I’m not part of the company, so you can tell me this, but you can’t tell me that.’ I think they both have to be circling each other, which could lead to interesting things.”
The future looks bright for John Stewart. Lanterns Season 2 hasn’t been announced yet, but viewers will see Pierre’s hero again soon in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, the sequel to Superman. The 2025 film had established Guy as the current Green Lantern, which the Lanterns showrunners (who also include Damon Lindelof and Tom King) knew that they had to explain even as they were introducing Stewart into James Gunn’s DC Universe. The show’s title isn’t plural for nothing, and Green Lantern comics readers know there are often several ring bearers running around Earth at the same time.
Aaron Pierre as John Stewart and Nathan Fillian as Guy Gardner in ‘Lanterns’ John Johnson/HBO Max
“We knew we needed to land an explanation for why Guy is the current Green Lantern,” Mundy says. “So that was worked into our 2026 timeline. And then we really thought about John’s character and what he would want. We liked the idea that they could coexist, and we liked the idea that there would be a tension within it. It felt like a very natural landing place for us.”
Although John didn’t officially take up the responsibility of Green Lantern until the final minutes of the finale, viewers have already gotten a taste of how he’ll handle the job. We’ve seen him execute the Manhunter named Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan) to save her from a worse fate at the Guardians’ hands, but then he spared her Manhunter grandson Noah, who may have a headful of bad ideas but hasn’t acted on them yet.
Noah’s identity as a Manhunter is the secret that Kerry killed Hal to protect, and so far John’s keeping it. Despite his military background, he’s decided to eschew a pre-emptive strike and judge people on their actions rather than their potential.
Shea Pritchard as Noah in ‘Lanterns’John Johnson/HBO Max
“We talked so much, both in the writer’s room and then also on screen a bit, about nature versus nurture,” Mundy says. “What’s programming, and what do you have control over? Noah becomes the perfect test case of that because he’s a Manhunter, but he’s also part human. John’s going to gamble that programming isn’t everything, but he’s going to be there to keep people safe if he’s wrong.”
Mundy continues, “It felt like an evolution of what he learned from Hal, but also what he learned about himself through forgiving his mom and understanding his parents. In the conversation with Kerry, he’s like, ‘I didn’t realize how terrified my mom was that whole time when she was raising me.’ He’s starting to understand each of these characters through their own experience and not just his secondhand experience.”
Again, Lanterns Season 2 isn’t official, and, when asked, Mundy says future story ideas are only in the discussion stage right now. Still, this season ends by planting some seeds that could sprout down the line. There’s now a young Manhunter running around — and even more interestingly, Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) is still free from the Guardians’ prison and has started forging his own lanterns. He hasn’t yet produced a yellow ring, like he did in the comics when he founded a Sinestro Corps in opposition to the Green Lantern Corps, but that’s on the table now.
Ulrich Thomsen as Sinestro in ‘Lanterns’John Johnson/HBO Max
“You want as many things on the table as possible,” Mundy says. “With any season of television, you owe it to the people that watched it to end your story. If there’s not a satisfying ending to the journey that you put them on, then we’ve done a bad job. But there should also be little things that are out there. These people are in our world, so that if you catch back up to them one or two or three seasons later, it all feels organic to the thing that you built in the first place.”
After years of “Green Lantern” being used as a go-to pejorative by Ryan Reynolds to mock the flop 2011 movie in which he starred, Lanterns has managed to impress both with longtime Green Lantern comics fans and people who have never read a comic. For Mundy, that’s the show’s greatest accomplishment so far.
“I think I can speak for all of us in the writer’s room that we wanted the people like you that know and care about Green Lantern to feel like we care and we’re taking good care of it,” Mundy says. “But we also wanted people that don’t know comic book shows in general or Green Lantern in particular to be able to enter the show and enjoy the humanity of it. Those are two groups that don’t always watch the same shows. And the fact that people on both sides of that fence seem to like it makes me really happy.”