“Don’t be afraid to be afraid.”
This is the final piece of wisdom that Hal Jordan imparts to John Stewart in the season finale of Lanterns as Earth’s first Green Lantern finally passes the torch to his true successor. (No offense to the former gym teacher athletic director, Guy Gardner.) And the line also serves as the show’s thesis statement, encapsulating John’s spiritual journey across the season. That journey comes to an end in “Dirt and Stars,” as John finally accepts the responsibility of the power ring—this time, on his own terms.
Ten years before this moment, John had to pry that same ring from Hal’s bruised and bloodied fingers amid the ruins of the Rushville motel. Stewart ultimately left the alien weapon and its charging lantern with his would-be bosses, the Guardians, out of guilt and shame for what he’d done to get them. This time around, John had to dig up Hal’s corpse to reacquire the ring, but he didn’t have to fight or compromise his morals to keep it. In an episode that features the return of Sinestro and the reveal of the true last Manhunter in Rushville, there’s no spectacular battle akin to the chaos of Episode 5. Instead, Lanterns concludes the season with an understated finale that eschews a standard, action-packed superhero finish by remaining rooted in its grounded storytelling.
“One of our sticking points from day one … is no clichés,” cocreator Tom King said at the Lanterns virtual press conference on Friday. “Avoid clichés like they’re the plague. And as someone who consumes a lot of superhero content, that can leak into that content and make it boring and can give you the superhero exhaustion that we’ve seen a thousand think pieces about.”
In many ways, “Dirt and Stars” is about catharsis. It’s about the release—and acceptance—of all the grief, anger, and fear that have plagued so many of the show’s primary characters for years. That’s especially true for John Stewart. Directed by Alik Sakharov and written by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and King, “Dirt and Stars” marks the end of a master class in character development, as Lanterns completes its season-long mission to launch Stewart on his superhero career with a quiet, emotional final chapter that brings his origin story full circle.
For much of the first half of the season, Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart was a stiff, serious man who’d spent his entire life following orders. That began with his parents, who decided before he could even walk that he would become the next Green Lantern and who sacrificed his childhood to better prepare him for a superhero destiny that they willed into existence. That rigid, regimented lifestyle carried over into John’s adulthood as he became a Marine and was then appointed to be Jordan’s replacement as Earth’s next space cop. Every step of the way, John dutifully followed a path that had been laid out for him by others. It wasn’t until he actually got the power ring that he realized he didn’t remember why—or if—he wanted it in the first place.
In “Dirt and Stars,” John discovers that Noah Macon is a Manhunter, a secret that got Hal killed when he discovered it himself. After Noah kidnaps John, takes the ring, and forces him to drive to the football stadium where Noah will soon star in his high school team’s state championship, they find themselves sitting in the parking lot, considering the tragic predicament of their new shared reality. Each knows the threat that they pose to each other. Noah assumes that John doesn’t believe Noah can overcome his programming, which he shares with a grandmother who committed genocides on alien worlds. Yet John sees his own life—and his own nature-versus-nurture experience—reflected in this dangerous, artificial teenager who’s been raised by humans to feel love.
“For a long time, I couldn’t tell where I started and where my programming ended,” John tells Noah. “The whole ‘What is me?’ thing. You know, how much of it is just training and repetition, and am I just doing it to please my parents? But then, you know, I decided that, actually, that’s all just a big fucking cop-out. Because if I can ask myself the question, then I can answer it for myself.”
The prospect of free will is a kind, encouraging possibility for John to share with Noah, who’s clearly struggling with what to do. But less encouraging are the thoughts of amassing power that Noah admits sometimes enter his mind as if they’ve always existed within him. He tells John, “If you could see the inside of my head, you’d never stop screaming.” That’s not exactly something you want to hear from anyone, let alone a Manhunter who claims to have killed Hal and who broke Sinestro out of space prison to forge a special lantern laced with fear to get revenge against the Guardians.
If Lanterns were like most superhero stories, it would build up to a violent showdown between John and Noah on the same football field where this saga started, right in front of the bleachers where Hal died. Yet Lanterns goes against its own superhero programming. According to cocreator and showrunner Chris Mundy, there was never any version of the season finale that was more action-oriented, because the writers knew that they wanted to maintain their focus on the more emotionally driven storytelling that they’d nurtured from the start.
“We barely even talked about it, because we all just knew this is what we were going for, that that [action] would have been distracting, that that would have been just incident instead of emotion,” Mundy said at the virtual press conference.
Instead of fighting Stewart, Noah gives the power ring back to John and asks the former Marine to mercy-kill him, just as John did to Noah’s grandmother. It’s a stunning development and a difficult position for John, who has to weigh the potential safety of the world against a threat that may never come to pass. And it’s with this choice about Noah’s fate that Stewart’s career as the Green Lantern begins in earnest.
It doesn’t take long for John to reveal his decision. He soon finds Sheriff Kerry Kane, who’s anxiously watching her son’s final high school game from an isolated vantage point below the bleachers. Following his conversation with Noah, John has figured out the truth behind Hal’s murder: It wasn’t Noah who killed him but Kerry, out of fear for her Manhunter son.
However, John approaches Kerry not with accusations but with understanding and grace. He recontextualizes his own traumatic childhood from his mother’s perspective, and he explains how in trying to make him fearless, she took on that fear herself. “My mother held her breath for my entire childhood,” John says at the end of his lengthy story to Kerry.
“Why are you telling me this?” Kerry asks in response.
“Because I think you know exactly how my mother felt,” John says. “You must’ve been so scared for Noah every single day. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I was you and I was scared somebody might discover what he was, but I do know that fear and love makes people scared, and scared people can do anything.”
Kerry confesses to killing Hal, and she also admits to having called John back to Rushville not just to investigate his former mentor’s death but ultimately to discover Noah’s secret. To tell her if she was raising a monster. And after explaining his predicament with Noah with full transparency, John reveals his decision to let the Manhunter live. “He’s scared of what he might do, but that bodes well because with the right guidance, you know, he could be the boy that you raised him to be,” John tells Kerry.
She replies: “And if he gives in to his worst instincts …”
“Well, then, the world’s gonna need somebody who can stop him,” John says, all but announcing his belated embrace of his destiny as the Green Lantern.
The scene has all the hallmarks of a classic murder mystery: the final twist, the unveiling of the killer, and the detective’s explanation of how they managed to work it all out. But it’s also more than just an archetypal conclusion, as the reveal is less about who killed Hal than it is about why Kerry—who was always a likely suspect—would murder someone she loved. Kelly Macdonald’s terrific, emotionally complex performance conveys Kerry’s fear, love, and guilt, all wrapped up in a terrible mistake, which elevates the scene and brings the show’s central mystery to a satisfying end. John spares Kerry the life-altering shame and consequences of turning herself in, and he assures her that Noah will be able to continue to live a normal life, which finally allows her to release her bated breath. By letting Kerry go and allowing a (mostly) innocent Manhunter to live, John is also showing what kind of superhero he wants to be. After years of following orders, even those he didn’t agree with, he’s chosen to navigate a moral gray area with no agenda but his own belief in what’s right.
Although John’s confrontations with Noah and Kerry serve as the finale’s dramatic conclusion, the season’s true ending arrives when the Halogram reemerges to set John off on his superhero journey. Hal’s sentient backup hadn’t appeared since John returned through the portal from the alien world early in the episode, even when John had beckoned him back for advice. The mentor let his trainee figure things out on his own. And though Hal lets John know he’s skeptical of the risk that he’s taking with Noah, Hal ultimately gives his successor the words the latter always wanted to hear the former say: “My gut tells me you’re gonna be better at this job than I ever was. You’re ready.”
Before John delivers his remixed, personalized Green Lantern oath to charge his ring with his unsanctioned lantern, which will forever extinguish the Halogram, Hal leaves John with one last playful trick. He coaxes John into repeating the final words Hal said to Kerry right before she killed him—“I love you”—just to set up his winking goodbye: “I love you too, Junior.”
As much as “Dirt and Stars” centers on the culmination of John’s Green Lantern origin story as he accepts the responsibility of the power ring, it’s also a touching, bittersweet end to Hal’s posthumous redemption arc. This younger, idealistic copy of Hal atones for many of the mistakes that his older, jaded self committed toward the end of his tragic life. When Sinestro tries to cut a deal with the Halogram—if the latter overpowers John, Sinestro will resurrect him with the ring—the Halogram doesn’t take the bait. Instead of making a selfish choice motivated by self-preservation, as 2016 Hal did to keep the ring, the Halogram resists the temptation. Rather than trying to cling to the power that’s slipping from his grasp, Hal bequeaths it to the next generation. The extra time the Halogram and John have had together as they’ve solved Hal’s murder has given them the space to make amends before moving on.
As with Noah’s Manhunter reveal, Lanterns could have gone in a much different direction—one that saw the Halogram siding with Sinestro to betray John and set up a rematch between the past and future Lanterns after their bloody brawl at the end of Episode 5. But the series creators stuck with a more human approach, which establishes a quieter yet more impactful and emotional connection between John and Hal than they could have demonstrated via the kind of massive CGI clash that so many superhero films employ.
“This is one of the reasons I love long-form storytelling and television versus a movie, because I feel like if we had to make a two-hour Lanterns movie about this meeting of John and Hal, you would have had to do that third-act, bombastic, amazing action set piece, and then you get like two or three minutes of coda after that,” Lindelof said at the press conference. He continued, “If you don’t have to do the big, bombastic action set piece, you have to ask yourself, ‘What is it in service of for a show that was always about these two guys?’ It was just very liberating to know that we could do something like this instead.”
“Dirt and Stars” captures so many of these beautiful grace notes as the likes of John, Hal, Noah, and Kerry reach the end of this decades-spanning story. Even Bernadette Stewart gets a moment, albeit a brief one, when her son returns home to his family as the world’s new Green Lantern to make all those terrifying years of sacrifice worth it. But for as much as these human elements work so well in the finale, the show’s superhero and DCU connections end up undercutting the kind of story this series wants to tell.
The distractions start with Sinestro. His brief appearance serves some important narrative needs for the finale, but he’s relegated to a bit part once again, and his limited usage seems like a waste of a strong characterization of the classic villain and a captivating performance by Ulrich Thomsen. Sinestro reveals that he’s forged a lantern that has visible traces of fear in it due to the fear-inducing toxins still swirling around in the air and water of this dying alien planet, which are represented by the yellowish-gold streaks amid the green. But Lanterns doesn’t linger too long on the specifics. Nor does it tease what this great power of fear will look like in practice. And after John and the Halogram leave Sinestro in chains at the forge, surrounded by fear-inducing water that he won’t be able to cross without help, Lanterns never bothers to explain his fate.
Sinestro’s story hints at a lot of Green Lantern lore, and these yellow streaks of fear redefine what this alien weapon could mean for John, yet the series defers any clearer takeaways in order to return to the main story on Earth. John could become a Yellow Lantern, as he does in the second volume of the comic series Green Lantern: Earth One, but Lanterns doesn’t establish whether such a concept even exists in this cinematic universe. If Lanterns were a totally self-contained project, these muddled world-building elements could all be better established within the series in a potential second season. But the show is part of the wider cinematic machine that is the evolving, ever-expanding DCU.
Those franchise ties are made abundantly clear when Guy Gardner returns toward the end of the finale for a cameo that comes off as more jarring than his appearance in Episode 6. Part of that dissonance stems from how grounded and human this episode aims to be—a desire that feels particularly at odds with Gardner’s rather unconvincing superhero landing and takeoff as Nathan Fillion enters and exits the screen on an obvious wire rig. But the intent behind the scene seems more about establishing how John and Guy will coexist in the shared cinematic universe than about serving this self-contained story. John explains to Guy exactly what the new status quo of their Green Lantern dynamic will be. “Think of me as an independent contractor,” John says. “No Guardians, no Corps. You take the stars; have fun. I’ll take the dirt. I’m completely confident we won’t get in each other’s way.”
Another symptom of this DCU-driven conflict: The next time Pierre’s John Stewart appears on-screen won’t be in a prospective Lanterns Season 2 but in 2027’s Man of Tomorrow, the sequel to James Gunn’s Superman. Lanterns ends its season with Stewart taking flight for the first time and soaring across a night sky that’s illuminated by Rushville’s unwanted Green Lantern signal. It’s a triumphant, well-earned moment after all of his trials during the eight-episode journey. But it’s also a shame that Stewart’s first extended appearance as a full-fledged Green Lantern will likely come in a movie that belongs to another superhero instead of the series that gave his superhero transformation meaning. It’ll now be up to Gunn, not the creators of Lanterns, to establish what Stewart’s Green Lantern will look like—and Gunn will have to tackle that task in a movie loaded with other heroes.
Although Lanterns struggles to cleanly incorporate Green Lantern lore and wider DCU connections as it wraps up the season, the series succeeds at what’s most important: finishing a story that was always more interested in John and Hal’s relationship than any of the fantastical elements surrounding it. There’s still no word on whether Lanterns will be back for a second season, despite the show’s strong reviews and viewership numbers. But with Noah Macon still alive, Sinestro’s fate undetermined, and all the cosmos to pull from (even if John is more interested in hanging out in the “dirt”), the first season of Lanterns should be just the beginning of John’s superhero story.
