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I'll be recapping every episode of HBO's Lanterns, starting with tonight's series premiere — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I eat food off another man's grill...
Alan Sepinwall
As I said in my review on Friday, Lanterns is a show that often feels at war with itself, unsure how much it wants — and/or how much it can — embrace the whole Green Lantern aspect of a show about Hal Jordan and John Stewart, what exactly it wants its tone to be, and more. But it's also a show that often manages to be really entertaining in the middle of that internal struggle.
All those aspects are very much on display throughout the show's pilot episode. We get only the briefest of glimpses of Hal in costume, and slightly more of Hal using his powers. And when John has to use the ring to save himself when Hal sets him up for a car wreck, it happens off-camera. We get the tension and darkness of the opening sequence — a flashback to 1996 where John Stewart Sr. plays William Tell with the young John and his Marine pistol — in the same hour as Hal doing his version of John Mulaney's Salt and Pepper Diner routine by playing Melanie's "Brand New Key" over and over on a jukebox to provoke a Rushville, Nebraska townie into fighting him, just so Hal can get locked in jail and interrogate the prisoner that Kerry won't give him access to anyway. It's a lot of fun and games, including Hal enjoying the heck out of realizing that John slept with William Macon's wife — and then we end with a time jump to 2026, with the frozen corpse of one Hal Jordan in the Rushville stands.
It's a lot to process, and to figure out which pieces actually fit well together. Let's hit it.
The pilot over-explains a lot of things. We hear many, many times about the nature of John's position relative to Hal's: he has been chosen by the Guardians of the Universe to apprentice under Hal and to become his backup. Hal has been Green Lantern for a long, long time, takes deep pleasure in both the power and the celebrity, and assumes this kid is here to steal his job. He's reluctant to teach him anything, and enjoys messing with him, like the stunt with the car. The dialogue between the two characters is enough to get all of this across, yet John has to keep talking about it with other characters, just to be sure the audience didn't miss any of the previous references. It's annoying, and I wish TV and film executives would stop telling storytellers to assume their viewers are too distracted to understand what's happening.