Toward the end of the explosive fifth episode of Lanterns, Hal Jordan is lying underneath a pile of rubble, covered in dust, blood, and the broken pieces of his decimated motel room. He awakens from a daze to cling to his green ring of power as his former trainee, John Stewart, pries it from his fingers.
Just before John places the ring on his own finger, Hal looks up at his successor and weakly asks: “Was it worth it?”
John trained to become the Green Lantern for most of his life—yet when Hal asks him the question, John’s face is filled with something closer to shame than joy. Stewart doesn’t answer his former mentor before he leaves to walk through the ashes of Rushville. Instead, he delivers his response to one of his new Guardian bosses, Lianna.
“I spent a lot of my life imagining what it would feel like to wear this,” John says as he looks down at the ring on his hand. “Pride, gratitude, power? But then when I put it on … I just felt empty.”
“John,” Lianna replies with disappointment.
“Hal betrayed everything to keep this ring,” John continues. “His code, the oath, even himself, and it broke him. Probably doesn’t even remember why he wanted the damn thing. And neither do I.”
Episode 5, “Lights Out,” marks a seismic shift in the world of Lanterns. Directed by Geeta Vasant Patel and written by Justin Britt-Gibson, the fifth episode packs more action into its 51 minutes than the series featured in the entire first half of the season. By the end, Hal Jordan is no longer Earth’s Green Lantern. That job belongs to John Stewart—for all of about five minutes. The last living Manhunter is dead. Rushville is in ruins. And now, the Guardians need to find a new candidate to take the oath and become the sector’s next Green Lantern.
The first four episodes of Lanterns centered on the delicious rivalry between Jordan and Stewart, each of whom believed himself to be more deserving of the ring than the other. But it also focused on the mystery of the Manhunter in Rushville and the matter of what to do with them once their secret identity was revealed. All of those narrative threads culminate in an epic midseason climax that raises a host of new questions heading into the final three episodes of the season.
After Hal figured out at the conclusion of last week’s installment that the Manhunter was Zoe Macon, he quickly began setting up his endgame in Rushville. He starts by taking his partner and protégé off the game board, as he says to John, by crashing their rental (again) into a telephone pole and trapping John in the car as payback for deceiving him one too many times. But the great Green Lantern doesn’t anticipate that his would-be replacement would be thrust right back into the game by the very same person he’s looking to stop: Zoe.
“Lights Out” is the first episode of Lanterns to showcase just how powerful Zoe is, as well as how much control she exerts over all life in Rushville, Nebraska. The installment opens with Kerry Kane arriving in town nine years earlier as she flees from her home in Gotham City. She’s been chased across state lines by two men who have been sent to kill her after her father was caught snitching on their crew. Zoe calmly swoops in to save Kerry and offers her a new life in Rushville—along with a new, regrown pinky, after Kerry has to send her old one back to Gotham with the only surviving pursuer as proof of her supposed death.
Yet it’s not so much an act of heroism on Zoe’s part as it is a calculated measure to gain another follower who will forever be indebted to her and ready to protect the Manhunter from the enemies that will inevitably hunt her someday. It’s the same kind of tactic that Zoe later deploys with John Stewart when his life also hangs in the balance.
In an absolute whirlwind of events, John can’t escape the crashed rental car before it catches on fire—and Zoe watches him burn instead of saving him. The former Marine wakes up in the hospital looking about as crispy as Two-Face. And Zoe makes him an offer he can’t refuse: She’ll heal John of his burns and protect him, and in exchange, all he has to do is let Hal die and help get the Guardians off her trail. John accepts, and—after receiving a drop of Manhunter blood in his eye and a little flashback-inducing makeover via some fancy alien tech—he’s back to his old self in no time. However, Zoe doesn’t do anything to ensure that he holds up his end of the bargain.
While Zoe is busy putting her (rather flimsy) contingency plan in motion, Hal is off making deals of his own. The Green Lantern teams up with the alien Antaan, tricking him into believing that Will Macon is the Manhunter so that Antaan’s subsequent attack on the Macon ranch will buy him time to pursue Zoe himself. The smoke screen is a decent plan, yet it only adds to the loss of life in Rushville—and it does nothing to stop Zoe’s cruel scheme to drain Hal’s limited ring power by firing orbital strikes across town, just as Kerry warned Hal she would earlier in the episode.
Taking a little advice from his old mentor, Sinestro, Hal aims to capture the Manhunter as a trophy for the Guardians and disgrace John in the process, all in the hope that his Green Lantern bosses will let him keep the ring. But he’s so singularly focused on his agenda that he’s prepared to sacrifice innocent lives and nearly kill his trainee to achieve it.
Lanterns continues its bold, riveting portrayal of Hal as an aging superhero who’s unwilling to hang up the tights. The cocreators of the series have compared the veteran Green Lantern to superstar athletes like LeBron James who are confronting their approaching retirement or politicians who refuse to give up their position of power. And Episode 5 shows just how far Hal is willing to go to keep his ring. He still tries to save many Rushville civilians once Zoe begins her brazen attacks, yet their lives come second to his need to maintain the superhero life he’s led for decades.
Similarly, Zoe demonstrates not only how many people she’s willing to let die so that she can live but also just how much she’s prepared for this day of reckoning to arrive. The Manhunter has been protecting everyone in Rushville for years, ridding the community of all disease and sickness and performing miracles for some, such as Will Macon and Sheriff Kerry. And now she’s cashing in all those accumulated favors, weaponizing their debts and loyalty to stave off space cops and vengeful aliens.
Both Hal and Zoe nearly achieve their goals. Hal holds the Manhunter captive, but only for a few moments before she escapes again. And Zoe’s plan to drain the Green Lantern’s power ring all but succeeds. But John swoops in to prevent either of them from prolonging the inevitable.
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When Hal returns to his motel room to charge his depleted extraterrestrial jewelry, John is there waiting for him. The primal brawl that ensues is just about the sweatiest fight for a ring since Frodo and Gollum squared up in the fires of Mount Doom. It’s perhaps no surprise that Stewart overpowers his elder, but a well-placed orbital strike stops him from getting the ring. Hal shields them with what little energy remains in the ring, and it very well may be the last time he’ll ever use it.
After John leaves his former mentor behind in the rubble as bait for the Manhunter, he shoots Zoe in the head and then carves out her crystallized heart as proof of her death. With Hal’s ring and charging lantern in hand, John leaves to find Lianna and deliver everything that so many people and aliens in Rushville died for that day. And then he hands in his pink (green?) slip, quitting the job he had waited almost his whole life for, just minutes after finally getting it.
“Lights Out” is ultimately about choices—and, as John says to Lianna, “sins and consequences.” Hal chose to pursue the Manhunter and keep the ring at all costs. John played the role of a dutiful soldier for the Guardians, but he had to strip his mentor of his honor and kill someone he cared for to carry out their orders. Zoe’s genocidal acts against other planets finally caught up to her. Rushville paid the price for harboring a war criminal for so long. And the Guardians, who created the Manhunters and gave Jordan his ring, allowed it all to happen.
Amid all of the chaos of Episode 5, Lanterns leans further into the cosmic roots of its source material and the action that comes with it. At times, it still feels like the series is purposely limiting its extraterrestrial, fantastical, comic book elements in favor of preserving a grounded tone. The alien Antaan and his crew, along with the Manhunter, are all dead, and the series opted for the safer route of never revealing them in their authentic physical forms. They maintained their human appearances throughout, just as Lianna, portrayed by Laura Linney, continues to hide her blue alien skin behind her human disguise. (Even when the Guardian revealed her natural form to John’s mother in Episode 3, Lanterns avoided showing her face to the viewing audience and permitted only her back to appear on-screen.)
It’s no easy feat to blend such spectacular elements with realism, and it feels like Lanterns may still be searching for the delicate balance between the two seemingly opposing strains of storytelling. But the series has still constructed a strong narrative by shrewdly pacing its grounded drama and character work and delaying much of its action for a well-earned payoff in Episode 5. All of the mysteries and relationship tensions that Lanterns had developed in its 2016 timeline built up to a satisfying conclusion that paves the way for an exciting pivot in the season, as it can now turn back toward the central question it raised at the end of the series premiere: Who killed Hal Jordan? With John rejecting the ring, Lanterns has also just provided an explanation for how Guy Gardner—Earth’s Green Lantern in 2025’s Superman—could have gotten the job over Stewart. But where does that leave the former Marine and aspiring artist?
With three episodes left in the season, Lanterns still has plenty of ground left to cover in its 2026 timeline. And on the heels of a thrilling midseason climax, the series has established a compelling backstory in Rushville that can serve as a firm foundation for its unresolved mysteries.
