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A review of this week's Lanterns, "Bad Optics" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I'm a bit of a watch perv...
Alan Sepinwall
When I first heard about Lanterns, it was after James Gunn had already announced that Guy Gardner would be the Green Lantern in Superman. In the comics, Guy, Hal, and/or John have coexisted as Green Lanterns at the same time, but that only happened after decades of stories that stuck with a There Can Only Be One approach. We're just at the start of this attempt at a fictional DC universe, when that idea might be too confusing for non-fans. And once I saw Nathan Fillion in the movie play Guy in a manner akin to the most toxic of toxic males — a riff on the character's most popular incarnation, in the hilarious Justice League International comic from the mid-late Eighties — I tried to reconcile how that broad take would jibe with what looked to be a much more sober approach from this show.
"Bad Optics" reconciles a lot of this. We're now firmly in 2026, a decade after the fiasco in Rushville, and what appears to be roughly the same span since Guy — or, as he's dismissively referred to early in this episode, "the gym teacher" — got a ring from the Guardians. Guy is only Green Lantern by default, because Hal disgraced himself and the ring, and John refused to take it once he came to fully understand how the Guardians operate and how absolutely the ring's power can corrupt a man.