A review of this week's Lanterns, "Lights Out" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as my sexuality is fluid in space...
Alan Sepinwall
"Lights Out" brings the 2016 storyline to a close, with a multi-pronged battle involving Hal, John, Antaan and his people, Zoe, Macon's army, and even the rest of the town. The damage is extensive in property, and life. By the end of it, Zoe, Macon, Antaan, and many of the townsfolk are dead. Much of the town has been reduced to rubble. And John is so disillusioned with everything that's happened that he gives the ring back to Lianna, rejecting the destiny his parents have laid out for him since infancy.
It's not the end of the story of the season, obviously. We've already gotten a glimpse of present-day Rushville, where Hal is a corpsicle in the stands at the football field. We know from the Superman movie that Guy Gardner wound up with the ring that John refused to keep. And there are various other questions to resolve about the motivations of Hal and the Guardians, whether Billy and Noah are biologically related to Zoe (and what it means if they are), and more. But it's a pretty clean stopping point to this phase of the season(*).
(*) This is one of the areas where the True Detective influence feels most pronounced, since this is roughly the same point where the first and third seasons of that show primarily shifted the narrative from one time period to the next.
But if the stopping point is clean, "Lights Out" itself is fairly messy, and not just because so much of Rushville gets trashed in the crossfire.